This lecture will describe North Korea as seen from the inside - its people, their aspirations and fears, and what it is like to live amongst them.

With frequent appearances on BBC discussing North Korea, Mr. Everard, former British Ambassador to North Korea, 2006-2008, brings extensive knowledge of North Korea, China and South America to APARC.  He served as British Ambassador to Uruguay in 2001-2005, and was head of the Political Section in Beijing 2000-2001.  He was responsible for political relations with the troubled states of West Africa and managed mutinational efforts to restore democracy to Bosnia, 1995-1998.  He became the youngest British Ambassador to Belarus in 1993.

During his fellowship at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Mr. Everard will hold seminars related to his research project on North Korean life and society and will be involved in various projects on Korea.  He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Asia Research Centre of London School of Economics.

Mr. Everard studied French, German and Chinese at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and studied Chinese history and economics at Bejing University. He holds an MA from Manchester Business School.

The Muslims of South Asia made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than the region’s Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were relatively less likely to use large-scale and long-living economic organizations, and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this paper also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families, and they were ill-suited to profit-seeking business. Whereas Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint family enterprises, Muslims tended to use ephemeral Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions. He has just completed a book, The Long Divergence (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2010), on the role that Islam played in the economic rise of the Middle East and, subsequently, in the institutional stagnation that accompanied the region's slip into a state of underdevelopment. Some of the archival work on which this book was based will be published, also in 2010, as a ten-volume bi-lingual set entitled Kadı Sicilleri. Among Kuran's earlier publications are Private Truths,(Harvard University Press, Işığında 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Ekonomik Yaşam / Economic Life in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul, as Reflected in Court Registers Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification 1995) and Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press, 2004), each translated into several languages, including Turkish.

Link to paper:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1656038

Abbas Kadhim is an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.  He also holds a Visiting Scholar status at Stanford University since 2005.  Between 2003 and 2005, he taught courses on Islamic theology and ethics at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

His recent publications include: "a Case of Partial Cooperation: the 1920 Revolution and Iraqi Sectarian Identities" (forthcoming); "Forging a Third Way: Sistani's Marja‘iyya between Quietism and Wilāyat al-Faqīh, in Iraq, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, edited by Ali Paya and John Esposito, Routledge,  July  2010;  "Widows' Doomsday: Women and War in the Poetry of Hassan al-Nassar," in Women and War in Muslim Countries, ed. Faegheh Shirazi, Austin: The University of Texas Press, June 2010; "Opting for the Lesser Evil: US Foreign Policy Toward Iraq, 1958-2008," in Bob Looney (ed.) Handbook of US Middle East Relations, London: Routledge, 2009; and Shi`i Perceptions of the Iraq Study Group, Strategic Insights, vol. VI, issue 2 (March 2007).

His book translations include Shi‘a Sects: A Translation with an Introduction and Notes, London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press (2007); Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, by Hamid Algar (Arabic Translation), Köln, Germany: Dar al-Jamal (2006); and Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives, by Anthony Giddens (Arabic Translation), with Dr. Hassan Nadhem, Beirut: (2003).

His current projects include editing the Routledge Handbook of Governance in the Middle East and North Africa, London: Routledge (forthcoming 2011) and finishing a manuscript on The 1920 Revolution and the Making of the Modern Iraqi State (under review).

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, effective July 2010.  He comes to Stanford from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy.  His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, and Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States.

Like many states around the country, the District of Columbia Board of Elections decided to allow military and civilians living abroad to vote (i.e. return voted ballots) over the Internet this November. However, unlike other Internet voting enthusiasts, the Board planned to conduct a pilot test prior to the actual election ­ after which they intended to allow overseas voters to return their voted ballots over the Internet. The test began around the end of September; by early October we learned that a team from the Univ. of Michigan, led by Prof. Alex Halderman, had succeeded in breaking into the test system. The first sign of the break-in was the playing of the Michigan fight song, which began 15 seconds after the voter viewed the vote confirmation page. Further very serious revelations quickly followed, including that the Michigan team could rig every cast vote.

In addition to reviewing the remarkable outcome of the DC Internet pilot, we will discuss ways in which Internet voting differs from e-commerce, analyze the threats to Internet voting, review key studies and reports, describe several elections and pilots held over the Internet, and reflect on the future of Internet voting.

Barbara Simons, an expert on electronic voting, is on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001. She also participated on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense's Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns. Simons co-chaired the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) study of statewide databases of registered voters. She recently co-authored the League of Women Voters report on election auditing. Simons and Doug Jones are co-authoring a book on voting machines.

Simons was President of ACM, the nation's oldest and largest educational and scientific society for computing professionals.

How will population aging impact the economies and social protection systems of Japan, South Korea, China, and India? This colloquium showcases research addressing that question by contributors to a new Shorenstein APARC book, Aging Asia, co-edited by Karen Eggleston and Shripad Tuljapurkar. Dr. Bloom discusses how aging of the baby boom generation, declines in fertility rates, and an increase in life expectancy imply several changes for the economies of the region. Notwithstanding the potential challenges, Bloom argues that population aging may have less of a negative effect on economic growth than some have predicted. Bloom will also discuss the longitudinal aging study in India.

David Bloom is Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at Harvard University, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Director of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging (funded by the National Institute of Aging). He is Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he serves as a member of three research programs: Labor Studies, Aging, and Health Economics. He co-chairs the Public Policy Committee of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Bloom received a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1976, an M.A. in Economics from Princeton University in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Economics and Demography from Princeton University in 1981.