Co-sponsored by the German Studies Department and the German Consulate General, San Francisco

Over the past 25 years, the discussion surrounding the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust has developed into a meaningful topic of discourse in German politics, society and culture. Since the 1990s, there has been talk of a real "remembrance boom", which materialized in a flood of academic literature and autobiographies, television documentaries and feature films, as well as documentation centers, centers for eye witnesses, memorials and monuments. In the year 2005 - 60 years after the end of WWII in Europe - this collective process of commemoration presumably reached a climax: preceded by fifteen years of debate, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Berlin. However, the Memorial is still debated today. The history of its genesis is illustrative of the problematic nature of finding an appropriate form for the commemoration of the Holocaust. Many issues have led to the questioning of the traditional forms and functions of a memorial and the search for alternative strategies of commemoration. Dr. Pottek will introduce examples of contemporary commemorative art in order to demonstrate the breadth of artistic strategies for remembrance in Germany and to inspire a discussion about appropriate and less appropriate forms of commemorative art.

Dr. Marina Pottek studied history of art, German literature and Romanic literature at the University of Bochum and received her Ph.D. from the University of Bonn. Her main topics are modern European and American art, contemporary art, art and memory, conceptual art, and narrative art. Since 1998, Dr. Pottek has held a scientific assignment at the University of Bonn and has worked at the equal opportunity office (public relations manager, curator of an interdisciplinary exhibition on female scientists, coordinator for the mentoring programme for talented female scientists at the University of Bonn).

How have intersecting legacies of colonialism and militarization combined with recent forces of globalization to produce new kinds of social identities and movements for political change? How do activists in these social movements contest hegemonic national identities in favor of a multicultural Japan or a global human rights discourse? How do legacies of Japanese colonialism animate current systems of globalization?

The first round table, entitled "Identity Politics and its Social Movements" will bring together a group of scholars examining current identity politics of "ethnic minorities" such as Ainu, Burakumin, Okinawans, and Zainichi (resident Koreans), many of whom are affected by the legacies of colonialism.

The second round table, "Gender, Colonialism, and Militarism in Japan and Okinawa" will focus on groups affected by continuing militarism and globalization such as sex workers, children born of military personnel and those organizing against military occupation and its attendant gendered violence. The invited speakers for this round table are the Okinawan writer, journalist and anti-military activist--Chinin Ushii, Margo Okazawa-Rey, co-founder of the US-East Asian-Puerto Rico Women's Net Work Against US Militarism, and Ueno Chizuko, the renown and highly influential feminist scholar. Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellows Michele Mason and Setsu Shigematsu will participate and act as facilitators for this round table.

Symposium Schedule:

9:00 am ~ Opening Comments by Workshop Organizers

9:30 - 11:00 ~ Roundtable One:

Global Human Rights, Identity Politics and Social Movements

Aiuchi, Toshikazu (Otaru University of Commerce)

Befu, Harumi (Stanford University)

Davis, John (Michigan State University)

Mushanokoji, Kinhide (Osaka University of Economics and Law)

Tsutsui, Kiyoteru (facilitator)(Stanford University/Stony Brook University)

15 minute Break

12:30~ Open discussion with all workshop participants facilitated by Kiyo Tsutsui

12:30 - 2:00 ~ Lunch break (buffet lunch)

2:00 - 3:30 ~ Roundtable Two:

Gender, Colonialism and Militarism in Okinawa and Japan

Chinin, Ushii (Okinawan public intellectual, writer and journalist)

Miho Kim (to be confirmed)

Okazawa-Rey, Margo (Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University and

co-founder East Asia-US-Puerto Rico - Women's Network Against Militarism)

Ueno, Chizuko (Tokyo University)

Mason, Michele (Facilitator)(Stanford University)

Shigematsu, Setsu (Facilitator)(Stanford University)

15 minute Break

3:45 - 5:00 ~ Open discussion with all workshop participants facilitated by Michele Mason and Setsu Shigematsu

5:00 pm ~ Closing Comments by workshop organizers

Co-Sponsored by the Stanford Society of Fellows in Japanese Studies and the Center

for East Asian Studies

The United Nations Secretariat--the main part of the UN bureaucracy directly under the Secretary-General--has arguably changed or been challenged more than any other part of the UN system in recent years, with more and more mandates and rising expectations. Though much attention has been given to the reform of the Security Council, and though Washington has made UN 'management reform' a core pillar of its UN policy since the Oil-for-Food scandal, the UN Secretariat has nevertheless proved singularly impervious to even the common sense suggestions for improvement. In many ways, there is a greater gap today than at any time in the past between what the Secretariat does, what it's meant to do, and the capacity it has. Why has improvement been so difficult and what have been the recurrent mistakes of UN reform efforts? With the election of a new Secretary-General due in late 2006, can we think about the UN bureaucracy in a different and more practical way?

Thant Myint-U is a visiting senior fellow at the International Peace Academy. He is also a senior advisor to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council and a Fellow of the Cambridge University Centre for History and Economics.

From 2000-2006 he worked in the United Nations Secretariat, first for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and then for the Department of Political Affairs (DPA). From 2004-5 he was Chief of DPA's Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political and in 2005-6 he was a Senior Political Officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In 2004 he was also a member of the Secretariat of the Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

Thant Myint-U has also served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, with UNTAC in Cambodia in 1992-3 and with UNPROFOR and UNMIBH in the former Yugoslavia from 1994-6. In 1994 he was the UN's senior spokesman in Sarajavo.

From 1994-1999 Thant Myint-U was a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where he researched and taught Asian and British imperial history. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1988, his master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1992 and his PhD in history from Cambridge University in 1996.

He is the author of several published and broadcast works, including two books: The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps: Remembering Burma's Past (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006 forthcoming).

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War. Mr. Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, he flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests. Mr. Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.

Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Mr. Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.

Event Synopsis:

In this presentation Mr. Hitchens presents a "balance sheet" from point of view of those, like him, who advocated regime change in Iraq and hoped that it would have positive effects in Saudi Arabia and Iran as well. He presents areas where progress has not materialized, such as attempts to revive Iraq's badly damaged oil industry. However, he points out political progress made by Kurds in the north of Iraq, and growing pressure on the regimes of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Attempts to "dry up the swamp" where terrorism breeds have not eliminated but have isolated Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He urges the international community to "make friends" with moderate forces in Muslim countries which reject terrorism, and to pursue policies that continue to isolate extremist groups.

 A discussion period following the talk raised such questions as: Is there a secular democratic alternative to Hamas? In light of difficulties encountered in establishing democratic governance in Iraq, shouldn't there be a reassessment of the belief system that led to the Iraqi operation? What evidence can be found that Iraq was on the verge of collapse prior to the recent military intervention? How do the happenings in the Middle East translate into a policy regarding North Korea, which is vocal about acquiring weapons of mass destruction? With Saddam Hussein gone, can Iraq remain one country? Is there a risk that intervention in places like Iraq has a galvanizing effect on other enemy groups?

For nearly twenty years, an array of mainly Western governments, NGOs, and international organizations including the UN have tried to promote democracy in Burma using sanctions and diplomacy. The net result has been an ever more entrenched military dictatorship, a looming humanitarian crisis, and a possible resumption of armed conflict. How are we to think about this failure in international policy? Thant Myint-U will identify at the core of this external impotence a singularly ahistorical analysis of Burma, its 44-year-old dictatorship, and its even longer-running civil wars. He will also ask: Could things have been handled differently? What does Burmese history tell us about what is and is not possible today? And what are the prospects for constructive change?

Thant Myint-U is a senior visiting fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York City. In 1994-99 he was a fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge University where he taught Indian and colonial history. He has also served for many years in the United Nations, first in three different peacekeeping operations (in Cambodia and ex-Yugoslavia) and then at the United Nations Secretariat in New York. In 2004-05 he was in charge of policy planning in the UN's Department of Political Affairs. He has written two books on Burma: and The River of Lost Footsteps (2006) and The Making of Modern Burma (2000). He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and completed a PhD in modern history at Cambridge in 1996.

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

David Hafemeister is a Science Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (2005-6). He is also Professor (emeritus) of Physics at California Polytechnic State University. He spent a dozen years in Washington as Professional Staff Member, Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Governmental Affairs (1990-93 on arms control treaties at the end of the Cold War), Science Advisor to Senator John Glenn (1975-77), Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Benson and Deputy-Under Secretary Nye (1977-78), Visiting Scientist in the State Department's Office of Nuclear Proliferation Policy (1979), the Office of Strategic Nuclear Policy (1987) and Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences (2000-02). He also held appointments at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and the Lawrence-Berkeley, Argonne and Los Alamos national laboratories. He was Chair of the APS Forum on Physics and Society (1985-6) and the APS Panel on Public Affairs (1996-7). He has written/edited ten books and 140 articles and was awarded the APS Szilard award in 1996.