Stanford University

Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

North Korea's Yongbyon Nuclear Complex: A presentation by Siegfried S. Hecker at the Korea Economic Institute

CISAC's Siegfried Hecker presented the findings of his recent trip to North Korea, where he was given a tour of a nuclear facility reportedly capable of enriching uranium. In his remarks he described two new nuclear facilities, a small light-water power reactor in early stages of construction, and a "modern, clean centrifuge plant" for uranium enrichment. Following his presentation he and Robert Carlin, a CISAC visiting professor, spoke about North Korean nuclear programs and the international reaction to North Korea's nuclear ambitions. This event occurred the day after North Korean military attacks on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong.

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Dr. Hecker's Nov. 23, 2010 Presentation at the Korea Economic Institute (C-Span video)




Korea Economic Institute

Siegfried S. Hecker

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-6468 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Research Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
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Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.

Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.

Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.

Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

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Robert Carlin

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C245 - Desk 2
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 736-0290
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Bob Carlin is a Visiting Scholar at CISAC. From both in and out of government, he has been following North Korea since 1974 and has made 25 trips there. He recently co-authored a lengthy paper to be published by the London International Institute of Strategic Studies, entitled "Politics, Economics and Security: Implications of North Korean Reform."

Carlin served as senior policy advisor at the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) from 2002-2006, leading numerous delegations to the North for talks and observing developments in-country during the long trips that entailed.

From 1989-2002, he was chief of the Northeast Asia Division in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, U.S. Department of State. During much of that period, he also served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Special Ambassador for talks with North Korea, and took part in all phases of US-DPRK negotiations from 1992-2000. From 1971-1989, Carlin was an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he received the Exceptional Analyst Award from the Director of Central Intelligence.

Carlin received his AM in East Asian regional studies from Harvard University in 1971 and his BA in political science from Claremont Men's College.

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Conferences

Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea

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Northeast Asian countries share a tumultuous history from the last century. But South Korea stands alone in that it has launched a comprehensive national investigation to take a more balanced look at its tortuous modern history and finally give voice to the many thousands of people who perished in state-sponsored political killings but whose stories have long been silenced.

In the past several years, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has led an effort to dig into this grim hidden history. It has confirmed dozens of mass political killings during the Korean War—summary executions of leftists and supposed sympathizers, including women and children, who were shot and dumped into makeshift trenches, mine shafts or the sea. Grave by mass grave, investigators and victims' families have unearthed the skeletons and buried truths. No longer shackled by the repression of free speech, victims of the Communist witch-hunts by the post-war military governments in Seoul also began speaking out. The Commission investigated their cases and concluded that state interrogators used torture to extract false confessions from the victims. Its findings led courts to reopen the cases, reverse the old convictions and clear the victims' names, sometimes posthumously. But the Commission's work has also reawakened the painful memories and stoked political controversy in South Korea. It exposed the deep-running ideological divide, reminding South Koreans of the long shadow the Korean War still casts over their society.

Mr. Sang-Hun Choe, whose Pulitzer-winning journalism identified and helped spur the desire of South Koreans to revisit their recent history, has written extensively about the Commission's investigations.

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Sang-Hun Choe

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C333
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-6459 (650) 723-6530
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2010-2011 Fellow in Korean Studies
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A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Mr. Choe, has written extensively on United States-Korea relations for the international news media, including the Associated Press and The International Herald Tribune, the international version of The New York Times, where he currently serves as a correspondent. While at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Mr. Choe will analyze the perspective of U.S. experts focusing on issues concerning South Korea's government, media, and society.

Sang-Hun Choe 2010-2011 Fellow in Korean Studies, APARC Speaker
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series

No More Flying Geese: A New Pattern for Asian Regionalism

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For years, Japanese economists and public officials described regional development in East Asia as a unitary thing, something akin to a flock of flying geese -- with Japan as the lead goose, transferring capital and technology to its slower neighbors. But times have changed. For one thing, China is now the biggest bird in East Asia. So what has happened to the traditional "flying geese" pattern of development, and how has this impacted Japan?

Walter Hatch is an associate professor of government and the director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights at Colby College in Maine. He is the author of Asia's Flying Geese: How Regionalization Shapes Japan (Cornell UP, 2010), co-author of Asia in Japan's Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge UP, 1996), and the author and co-author of numerous articles on the politics and political economy of East Asia, especially Japan and China. He is now editing a book about NGOs and civil society in China, and working on his own new book about the way in which war memories continue to haunt international relations in East Asia. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2000.

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Walter Hatch Associate Professor of Government & Director, Oak Institute for Human Rights Speaker Colby College
Seminars

Hard Choices reviewed in the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs

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Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia, an acclaimed volume in the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center's three-part series on regionalism in Asia, was reviewed in the most recent issue of the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. Donald K. Emmerson, director of Shorenstein APARC's Southeast Asia Forum, is the editor of the volume. Reviewer Corrina Krome states, "I highly recommend the book, especially for its comprehensive references and indices, and for the inclusion of the 2007 ASEAN Charter . . ."
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Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Reparations, Restitution, and Transitional Justice

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Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.  

In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra.  He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut. 

He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: "Genocide: A Normative Account" (2010) and "Global Justice and Due Process" (2011). 

His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.  

He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.

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Larry May W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Speaker
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Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : The Right to Culture as a Human Right : Law in a Multicultural World

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Alison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights.  A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Law School.   She served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and as Vice-Chair of the Department of Political Science.  In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide).  Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford), which received the 2006 USC Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creativity in Research.  Her book co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets, Multicultural Jurisprudence:  Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense was published in 2009 (Hart) and featured in the California Bar Journal (February issue).  Another collection, Cultural Diversity and Law:  State Responses from Around the World, co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets and Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, was published in 2010 (Bruylant).  Cultural Law:  International, National, and Indigenous, co-authored with James Nafziger and Robert Paterson, was also published 2010 (Cambridge).  Two of her essays appeared in a special issue of Judicature on cross-cultural jurisprudence (March-April 2009) and another on this topic in The Judges' Journal of the American Bar Association (Spring, 2010).  Her current project is a study of the jurisprudence of names. 

Professor Renteln has collaborated with the United Nations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  She lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences.  She has often taught seminars on the rights of ethnic minorities for judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers. During the past few years she participated on panels on cross-cultural justice at the meetings of the American Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the North American South Asian Bar Association, the American Society of Trial Consultants, and others.  She served on several California civil rights commissions and the California committee of Human Rights Watch.  She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the American Society of International Law, the Law and Society Association, and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.

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Alison Renteln Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California Speaker
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Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : The Justification of Human Rights

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John Tasioulas joined the University of College London in January 2011 as the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence. He was previously a Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has also taught at the universities of Melbourne and Glasgow and has held visiting research posts at Melbourne and the Australian National University. His research grants include two Research Leave Awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2001 and 2004) and a British Academy Research Development Award (2008-2010) for a monograph-length project on the philosophy of human rights. He is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and serves on the editorial boards of the American Society of International Law Studies in International Legal Theory and the Journal of Applied Philosophy. He is the author of numerous published articles on the legal and moral philosophy of international law and is co-editor of The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Professor Tasioulas' research interests revolve around Socrates' question, 'How should one live?', and the attempt to draw out the moral, political and legal implications of an acceptable answer to it. One strand of this inquiry focuses on the philosophy of human rights. Professor Tasioulas is currently engaged in writing a monograph that develops a pluralistic, interest-based account of human rights, one that - among other things - seeks to provide us with the intellectual resources to respond to the familiar objection that human rights reflect merely Western values.

Professor Tasioulas also has on-going research interests in a number of other topics, including the nature of moral wrong-doing and the responses appropriate to it, the components of human well-being, the plurality of ethical values, as well as meta-ethical questions about the reality of moral values and the possibility of moral knowledge.

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John Tasioulas Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London Speaker
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Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Human Rights : Rhetoric or Reality?

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Madeleine Rees qualified as a lawyer in 1990 and became a partner in a large law firm in the UK in 1994 specializing in discrimination law, particularly in the area of employment, and public and administrative law and she did work on behalf of both the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission mainly on developing strategies to establish rights under domestic law through the identification of test cases to be brought before the courts. Madeleine brought cases both to the European Court of Human Rights and The European Court in Luxembourg. She was cited as one of the leading lawyers in the field of discrimination in the Chambers directory of British lawyers. In 1998 she began working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as the gender expert and Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that capacity she worked extensively on the rule of law, gender and post conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights.

The Office in Bosnia was the first to take a case of rendition to Guantanamo before a court. The OHCHR office dealt extensively with the issue of trafficking and Madeleine was a member of the expert coordination group of the trafficking task force of the Stability Pact, thence the Alliance against Trafficking. From September 2006 to April 2010 she was the head of the Women`s rights and gender unit. For the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, focusing on using law to describe the different experiences of men and women, particularly post conflict. The aim was to better understand and interpret the concept of Security using human rights law as complementary to humanitarian law and how to make the human rights machinery more responsive and therefore more effective from a gender perspective.

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Madeleine Rees Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia; Former head of the Women`s Rights and Gender Unit, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Secretary General, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Speaker
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Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series: Contextualizing Transitional Justice in Brazil

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After graduation from Harvard College in 1984, Cavallaro spent several years working with Central American refugees on the U.S.-Mexico border and with rights groups in Chile challenging abuses by the Pinochet government. He studied at Boalt Hall (University of California at Berkeley School of Law), where he served on the California Law Review and was graduated with Order of the Coif Honors. Cavallaro clerked for the Hon. Dolores K. Sloviter, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1993-1994). In 1994, he opened a joint office for Human Rights Watch and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) in Rio de Janeiro, and served as director of the office, overseeing research, reporting and litigation against Brazil before the Inter-American system's human rights bodies. In 1999, he founded the Global Justice Center, now a leading Brazilian human Rights NGO, which he directed until arriving at HLS in 2002.

Professor Cavallaro's research interests include Human Rights Practice, Civil Society and Social Movements.

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James Cavallaro Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard University and Executive Director of the Human Rights Program Speaker
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On demographic change in East Asia: An interview with Karen Eggleston

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Over the past year, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) has engaged in leading-edge research on demographic change in East Asia. Karen Eggleston, director of the Asia Health Policy Program at Shorenstein APARC, discusses the recent book Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea, and the workshop on the economic, social, and political/security implications of demographic change in East Asia, held January 20-21 at Shorenstein APARC.

Across Northeast Asia, countries are facing the issue of an aging population, which causes socio-economic challenges that have policy implications. You explore this phenomenon in your forthcoming book Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea. When did aging begin to become an issue and what are some of the greatest factors that you address in the book?

Aging started at different times in the countries of East Asia. The country with the oldest life expectancy in the world and the oldest age structure of its population is Japan. It had a very short baby boom after the war and has had a steep decline in fertility. Mortality has also been falling around the world, and so this creates a change in the population. Japan is already at the fourth stage of demographic transition. South Korea is rapidly moving towards that and already has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Of course, neither of them have policies to reduce fertility; in fact, they are trying to encourage it. China, on the other hand, has long been trying to control fertility and is not as extreme in terms of the population age structure, but it is rapidly changing. China will be older in median age than the United States soon—this is not a trivial factor when you think in terms of the absolute size of the Chinese population.

One of the things that we wanted to study in this project is the premise that the demographic transition is a "problem." It is true that you need to think about and have policy responses to it. But it can also be seen as a sign of success, and as an opportunity. We wanted to reframe the issue and think about evidence on both sides. There is some research highlighted in the book, for example, that looks at the impact of population aging on economic growth, which is one of the first things that comes to many people's minds. For example, if you have a lot of elderly people, they are not in the work force and they need to be supported. It is true that this can be bad for economic growth, but there also are policy and individual responses that may moderate the effects. Our research is trying to highlight several different aspects of aging, including the question of opportunity. For example, there is more investment in individual children now and elderly persons' savings have actually contributed to economic growth. In some aspects, this has been a sign of resiliency for Japan where there are a lot of transfers to the working-age population.

Ronald Lee at the University of California, Berkeley and Andrew Mason at the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i, who is participating in the January workshop, have been working on the concept of a "second demographic dividend." They find that as countries have an older age structure, there are more people that are saving. In the widely accepted "first demographic dividend," there are more people in the working-age part of the population—more people employed and more people contributing to the GDP. You get a boom contributing to growth. We know that this contributed to Japan and South Korea's earlier growth, and to China's in the 80s and part of the 90s, but only one or two percent of GDP. The question then is whether it is a problem that with aging you are losing that first demographic dividend. A second demographic dividend might arise because people who are preparing for a longer retirement life are saving more, and those savings are then invested in the economy and the investment drives economic growth.

Is there any correlation to demographic issues faced by the United States?

Interestingly, the aging issue is more pronounced in East Asia than in the United States for several reasons. We have a higher fertility rate than in Japan and South Korea, and many other countries in Europe as well. We also historically are much more open to immigration than most other countries, and this has led to a certain vitality in the population mix that has slowed the impact of demographic change. That said, of course, there are issues with having a lot of baby boomers. Sometimes, depending on the specific question or the specific area of policy, you find other factors that are much more important than aging. For example, the growth of healthcare spending has been in the news a lot lately. Although obviously there is an impact from having more elderly people, there are much bigger issues, such as what we are spending per person per age group and the growth of that spending. Just aging per se is not as big of an issue as people might think.

In late January, you will be holding the workshop Comparative Policy Responses to Demographic Change in East Asia: Defining a Research Agenda. What are the major issues you will explore in the conference? Who will be involved? Finally, what is the publication or research project that you will launch from this?

We had an Aging Asia conference in February 2009, co-sponsored with the Global Aging Program at the Stanford Center on Longevity. The outcome of this is the forthcoming volume, co-edited with Shripad Tuljapurkar of the Department of Biology at Stanford University. We started with a basic survey of the region and thought about the basic trends-demographic, social, and economic-and built upon that to figure out where the gaps are in the literature and where the interesting research questions are. That is where the January 2011 workshop comes in as the next step. We are bringing in some of the same and some different people to focus on three specific themes: economics, society, and politics/security. The upcoming event again focuses on East Asia and there will be a public component, but it is a smaller event and its main goal is to dig deeper into these themes to figure out an interesting research agenda on the policy responses to demographic transition.

We decided to focus again on East Asia, which is the research focus of a lot of our Shorenstein APARC faculty. Masahiko Aoki and Michael Armacost are going to chair sessions, and Gi-Wook Shin is going to kick it all off and talk about the social aspects of demographic change. Andrew Walder will be participating in that session as well. Thomas Fingar will be covering the political and security implications. All Shorenstein APARC faculty have been invited to participate and think about how this issue of demographic change—and particularly policy responses—might be related to their own areas of research. 

An illustration that I like to give when people ask about how demographic change is related to other things is from Andrew Walder when he was talking about China's transition in the 1980s. He received a question about whether or not there had been an impact from the One Child policy. He said that obviously there are many different impacts, but the one thing that he noted was that students in China now, especially if they are only children, are under a lot of career pressure. This has changed the space or the freedom for self-exploration. Why does this have broader implications? Young people see access to political power as one key for their careers and this changes their views about joining the Communist Party, which has big implications for China's political future. This is just one illustration of how we are trying to explore the broader implications of demographic change.

Finally, what is the outcome that you would most hope to achieve through Aging Asia and the upcoming demographic change workshop?

I think that the biggest hope would be to develop a much better understanding of what is going on with demographic change: what are the processes and how is society changing? What are the individual challenges that families are facing and what are they are doing about it? What is the broader social or even global perspective on how this is going to shape our future world? For me, I think about the world that my children are going to grow up in.

Through our research, I hope that we will impact not only the understanding of what has driven past developments, but create policy recommendations for each of the societies that were are examining—including our own—on the opportunities and the challenges related to changes in population. That hopefully will be useful as these different societies think about how to respond.

Our research on the economic, the social, and political/security aspects of demographic change is intended to be tangible for individuals and families as well as for broader national policy.

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