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.
A central focus for the research efforts of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is an ongoing exploration of simultaneous trends toward regional integration and rising nationalism in Northeast Asia.
The increasing sectarian conflict in Iraq and the rise of Islamist parties like Hamas and Hezbollah have put American efforts to democratize the Middle East on hold and raised doubts among experts and policy makers about whether democracy is compatible with the Muslim faith. But in a campus appearance yesterday afternoon, former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim offered an ardent defense of democracy in the Muslim world, telling a standing-room-only crowd in Bechtel Conference Center that "men and women are born free, even in the Islamic construct."
Alternating between serious and sporting through his two-hour speech, Ibrahim broached many of the issues aggravating relations between Islam and the West, including gender relations, American foreign policy, cultural assimilation in Europe and Pope Benedict XVI's recent comments about Islam. However, he was most outspoken regarding his home country - he was a political prisoner in Malaysia for over four years - and rejected the race - and religious-based affirmative action policies that benefit the Malay majority there.
Returning repeatedly to the topic of Muslim democracy, Ibrahim drew from historical references and personal experiences, citing the democratic regimes of Indonesia and Iran of 1950s.
"There was no debate then whether democracy was compatible with Islam," he said. "Fifty years later, we have our leaders in the Muslim world telling us we're not ready."
The fundamental nature of democracy and human rights is universal, Ibrahim emphasized, adding that problems begin with cultural miscommunication.
"We have to debunk and reject the notion, held by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that to support democracy and freedom is to support America, "he said. "And it is important for Americans to realize democracy is a value cherished as much by Muslims as it is by Americans."
"Misperceptions are unfortunate," he added, elaborating on his impressions of American culture. "This is a country full of contradictions. The level of sophistication and intellectual flavor is unparalleled. So why must people be so prejudiced? Why is misunderstanding so pervasive? To say that Muslims are entirely anti-America is wrong."
Ibrahim offered scathing criticism of his fellow Muslims for violent reactions to both the publication of caricatures of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005 and to the more recent comment by Pope Benedict XVI referring to elements of Islam as "evil and inhuman." The cartoon spawned riots killing 139 in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan, while the Pope's remarks fueled a maelstrom of controversy, including the firebombing of Catholic churches throughout the Middle East and the shooting death of a nun in Somalia.
"There is a right to disagree but no one has the right to cause destruction or destroy life," he said. "No one has the right to call for the banning of newspapers."
Acknowledging that his comments were not necessarily indicative of Islamic public opinion, he said, "This view may not be shared by all Muslims, but I am prepared to confront them."
Ibrahim's penchant for speaking his mind and sticking to his principles has dogged the leader through a career of controversy. As a young Malaysian activist in the 1970s, he was arrested during a student protest and spent 20 months in a detention camp. Following a meteoric political ascent, he was named Deputy Prime Minister in 1993, and many expected that he was Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammad's chosen successor.
But their relationship turned sour, and in Sept. 1998 Ibrahim was stripped of party membership and incarcerated under charges of corruption and sodomy. The charges were eventually overturned and he was released in Sept. 2004.
Regarding Malaysian politics today, Ibrahim expressed distaste toward his nation's system of bumiputera - a system of economic and social policies designed to favor ethnic Malays.
"I reject affirmative action based on race," he said. "Our policies should benefit the poor and the marginalized."
Finally, he described the need for engagement between the Islamic world and the West, criticizing the "extreme" foreign policy of the United States and its refusal to negotiate with regimes like Hamas.
"That policy is flawed," he said, adding that "to refuse to engage is a recipe for disaster."
Fitzgerald, a Stanford undergraduate, visited Malaysia in September 2006 as a member of the SEAF-supported Stanford Overseas Seminar in Singapore.
Can there be such a thing as a democratic coup? Critics of the September 2006 seizure of power in Thailand say "no." To them the overthrow of an elected government has set back democracy. Others, including many inside Thailand, support the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as having ended a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Thai democracy, in their view, has been corrected not capsized. Who is right, and what does it mean for democracy in Thailand and beyond? Prof. Ockey will set the stage by reviewing and assessing five different explanations for the September event. He will stress the diversity of motives and interests among the coup's supporters. Prof. Winichakul will then offer a particular interpretation. He will portray the coup as a move by the Thai monarchy and an army general close to the palace that bodes ill for the future of democracy. SEAF Director Don Emmerson will moderate the discussion.
About the panelists:
Jim Ockey is the author of Making Democracy: Leadership, Class, Gender and Political Participation in Thailand (2004) and many articles on Thai politics. Before 2006 he taught at Canterbury University in New Zealand. His Ph.D is from Cornell University.
Thongchai Winichakul's publications include the prize-winning book, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (1994). In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. His Ph.D is from the University of Sydney
Philippines Conference Room
At Stanford, in addition to his work for the Southeast Asia Program and his affiliations with CDDRL and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Donald Emmerson has taught courses on Southeast Asia in East Asian Studies, International Policy Studies, and Political Science. He is active as an analyst of current policy issues involving Asia. In 2010 the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded him a two-year Research Associateship given to “top scholars from across the United States” who “have successfully bridged the gap between the academy and policy.”
Emmerson’s research interests include Southeast Asia-China-US relations, the South China Sea, and the future of ASEAN. His publications, authored or edited, span more than a dozen books and monographs and some 200 articles, chapters, and shorter pieces. Recent writings include The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (ed., 2020); “‘No Sole Control’ in the South China Sea,” in Asia Policy (2019); ASEAN @ 50, Southeast Asia @ Risk: What Should Be Done? (ed., 2018); “Singapore and Goliath?,” in Journal of Democracy (2018); “Mapping ASEAN’s Futures,” in Contemporary Southeast Asia (2017); and “ASEAN Between China and America: Is It Time to Try Horsing the Cow?,” in Trans-Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia (2017).
Earlier work includes “Sunnylands or Rancho Mirage? ASEAN and the South China Sea,” in YaleGlobal (2016); “The Spectrum of Comparisons: A Discussion,” in Pacific Affairs (2014); “Facts, Minds, and Formats: Scholarship and Political Change in Indonesia” in Indonesian Studies: The State of the Field (2013); “Is Indonesia Rising? It Depends” in Indonesia Rising (2012); “Southeast Asia: Minding the Gap between Democracy and Governance,” in Journal of Democracy (April 2012); “The Problem and Promise of Focality in World Affairs,” in Strategic Review (August 2011); An American Place at an Asian Table? Regionalism and Its Reasons (2011); Asian Regionalism and US Policy: The Case for Creative Adaptation (2010); “The Useful Diversity of ‘Islamism’” and “Islamism: Pros, Cons, and Contexts” in Islamism: Conflicting Perspectives on Political Islam (2009); “Crisis and Consensus: America and ASEAN in a New Global Context” in Refreshing U.S.-Thai Relations (2009); and Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (edited, 2008).
Prior to moving to Stanford in 1999, Emmerson was a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he won a campus-wide teaching award. That same year he helped monitor voting in Indonesia and East Timor for the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center. In the course of his career, he has taken part in numerous policy-related working groups focused on topics related to Southeast Asia; has testified before House and Senate committees on Asian affairs; and been a regular at gatherings such as the Asia Pacific Roundtable (Kuala Lumpur), the Bali Democracy Forum (Nusa Dua), and the Shangri-La Dialogue (Singapore). Places where he has held various visiting fellowships, including the Institute for Advanced Study and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Emmerson has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale and a BA in international affairs from Princeton. He is fluent in Indonesian, was fluent in French, and has lectured and written in both languages. He has lesser competence in Dutch, Javanese, and Russian. A former slam poet in English, he enjoys the spoken word and reads occasionally under a nom de plume with the Not Yet Dead Poets Society in Redwood City, CA. He and his wife Carolyn met in high school in Lebanon. They have two children. He was born in Tokyo, the son of U.S. Foreign Service Officer John K. Emmerson, who wrote the Japanese Thread among other books.
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Ehito Kimura is a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC for
2006-2007. He studied at Georgetown University (BSFS), Yale University
(MA), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD). He is currently on
leave from University of Hawaii-Manoa where he is assistant professor
of political science. Dr. Kimura is interested in nexus of Southeast
Asian politics and comparative political change.
He is currently working on a book based on his dissertation examining
the politics of diversity in newly democratic states. His focus is on
Indonesia's recent transition to democracy and the factors influencing
changes in domestic territorial boundaries. He is also interested in
issues of ethnicity and identity, political economy, and regionalism.
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Paul Y. Chang is the Tong Yang, Korea Foundation, and Korea Stanford Alumni Association Senior Fellow at Shorenstein APARC; Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and Professor by courtesy in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Chang also serves as the Deputy Director of the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC and Co-Editor of The Journal of Korean Studies. Before joining Stanford, Chang served on the faculty at Harvard University, Yonsei University, and the Singapore Management University. His current work examines the diversification of family structures in South Korea.
Robert Davidson is assistant professor of Spanish and Catalan at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from Cornell and an MA from Queen's University at Kingston. His research interests include theories of space, architecture, and Spanish cinema. He is currently working on hotel culture. He will be speaking about the Hotel Colon in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and a hotel in Sarajevo during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.
Professor Davidson has published on different aspects of Castilian and Catalan avant-gardes, cultural theory, and film. He is currently completing two book projects: Jazz Age Barcelona and Hotel: From Détente to Detention.
Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
Professor Levi received his PhD in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Before coming to Stanford, he was an adjunct professor in the Conservatory of Theater Arts and Film at Purchase College, SUNY, where he taught film and media history and theory, as well as fundamentals of film-making. He also taught film studies at New York University and Hunter College, CUNY.
Levi has written essays on cinema and nationalism, psychoanalytic film theory, and experimental cinema, and he coedited Filosofska igracka (A Philosophical Toy), a selection of Annette Michelson's writings on film and modernist art. His book Disintegration in Frames, about aesthetics and politics in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema, is forthcoming.
Levi's teaching brings together his commitment to film as an art form with the study of cinema as a social and cultural phenomenon. His lectures and writing emphasize issues of film style and textual analysis, historical contextualization, and encounters between theory and practice of the moving image. Levi's courses include East European Cinema; Italian Cinema; Film Aesthetics: Editing; Practical Film Analysis; and Cinema/Ideology. He has also made short experimental films and instructional videos.
Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.
Annenberg Auditorium
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Cosponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Consulate General of France in San Francisco.
Alain Bauer is a French criminologist, a freemason, and a constitutionalist lawyer.
He has been Chancellor of the International Masonic Institute since 2003. Mr. Bauer is also the Director of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations and the National Institute for Higher Studies in Security, Director of Institute Alfred Fournier, and Director of Versant SA. He was the former Vice-President of the University of Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne from 1982-1989 and a board member of the Chancellor's Office of the University of Paris. Mr. Bauer was also the former Secretary General of the World Trade Center in Paris-La-Défense and a former member of the International Legal Commission of the World Trade Center Association.
Building 260 (Pigott Hall)
Room 113 (1st floor auditorium)
Rami Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune. He is an internationally syndicated journalist, author, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is currently a visiting fellow with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
Mr. Khouri will speak about the war in Lebanon this summer. He will provide an analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah war and discuss its fallout for Lebanese society and government, and its impact on the region's power dynamics. He will also comment on escalating violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and heightening tensions between the U.S. and political movements in the region, including Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
Building 420, Room 40
J. Clifford Wallace graduated from San Diego State University with honors and distinction in 1952. He graduated in 1955 from the School of Law, University of California at Berkeley. He was admitted to practice of law in 1955, and began specializing in the trial of civil matters. In October 1970 he was sworn in as United States District Judge for the Southern District of California. He was elevated in 1972 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and became Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit from February 1991 to March 1996. In April 1996, he took senior status April 1996.
Wallace is the author of 38 professional articles on the administration of justice around the world. He was assigned by the U.S. Chief Justice to prepare a study on the future of the judiciary and to make appropriate recommendations. He has also served as Senior Advisor on Legal Systems and Judicial Administration to The Asia Foundation. He has consulted with over 40 judiciaries worldwide, and helped to co. nceptualize the Conference of Chief Justices of Asia and the Pacific. Judge Wallace has lectured and taught courses in judicial administration in the United States and internationally.
This event is co-sponsored by Stanford International Law Society at the Stanford Law School.
Stanford Law School, Room 290
Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610