Stanford University

History

When We Began to "Think Globally": Radioactive Fallout, the Cold War, and the Making of a Global Environmental Problem, 1945-1963

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ABOUT THE TOPIC: The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is known as the first nuclear arms control agreement. One of its declared aims, however, is environmental, namely "to put an end to the contamination of man's environment by radioactive substances." At the beginning of the atomic age, however, few voiced concerns about the worldwide dispersion of radioactive fallout. How did we come to reappraise that contamination as a global problem requiring a global solution? I will argue that the problem of fallout was not only born global as a material fact, but also globalized as a social-epistemic process thanks to the Cold War, which transformed scientific knowledge, ethical outlooks, technological conditions, and political incentives by the time when the PTBT was concluded.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Toshihiro Higuchi (Ph.D. in History, Georgetown) is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the History of Science Department, University of Wisconsin—Madison. Higuchi held a postdoctoral fellowship at CISAC in 2011-12. He will move to the University of Kyoto in June 2014 as a research assistant professor. His current book project traces the science and politics of worldwide contamination by radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear-weapons testing as one of the first truly global environmental problems.

CISAC Conference Room

Toshihiro Higuchi ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Associate Lecturer, History of Science Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison Speaker
Seminars

Seoul-Tokyo Relations in Peril: Is a "Reset" Possible?

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Koret Distinguished Lecture Series: Lecture IV

From early 2012, South Korea-Japan relations worsened due to what many Koreans regard as a series of Japanese provocations involving historical and territorial disputes. Unfortunately, the neighbors failed to utilize the opportunity to improve the situation following leadership changes in both countries at the beginning of 2013. Today their bilateral relationship, long considered a cornerstone of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, appears to the worst since the normalization of diplomatic ties in 1965. Former Korean ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo will analyze the complicated structural reasons behind this downward spiral and explore whether differences over history can be addressed and an early diplomatic "reset" achieved.

Ambassador Shin has served various diplomatic positions during his thirty-five year career in foreign affairs, including service as ambassador to the State of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and to Japan from 2011 to 2013. He is currently a professor at the Korean National Diplomatic Academy and also a special research fellow at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Seoul National University.

The Koret Distinguished Lecture Series was established in 2013 with the generous support of the Koret Foundation. 

Philippines Conference Room

Shin Kak-soo former Korean Ambassador to Japan Speaker
Lectures
Koret Distinguished Lecture Series

U.S. Alliances in a Changing Asia

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With rising tensions over history and territory among Asian nations, China's rise as a regional power, and a so called rebalancing of the American role and presence our two most important alliances in the region will demand careful management in future years. What should we, and our partners in Japan and South Korea, be doing to assure that our alliances remain vibrant and relevant in this evolving regional context?

Ambassador Bosworth is a former career diplomat, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Tunisia. Most recently, he served as U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy for the Obama administration.

Philippines Conference Room

Stephen W. Bosworth

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Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BosworthLOGO1.jpg

Stephen W. Bosworth was a Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He was a Senior Fellow at The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He was also the Chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). From 2001-2013, he served as Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he then served as Dean Emeritus. He also served as the United States Ambassador to the Republic of Korea from 1997-2001.

From 1995-1997, Bosworth was the Executive Director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization [KEDO], an inter-governmental organization established by the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan to deal with North Korea. Before joining KEDO, he served seven years as President of the United States Japan Foundation, a private American grant-making institution. He also taught International Relations at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs from 1990 to 1994. In 1993, he was the Sol Linowitz Visiting Professor at Hamilton College. He co-authored several studies on public policy issues for the Carnegie Endowment and the Century Fund, and, in 2006, he co-authored a book entitled Chasing the Sun, Rethinking East Asian Policy. 

Ambassador Bosworth had an extensive career in the United States Foreign Service, including service as Ambassador to Tunisia from 1979-1981 and Ambassador to the Philippines from 1984-1987. He served in a number of senior positions in the Department of State, including Director of Policy Planning, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs. Most recently, from March 2009 through October 2011, he served as U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy for the Obama Administration. 

He was the recipient of many awards, including the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Diplomat of the Year Award in 1987, the Department of State’s Distinguished Service Award in 1976 and again in 1986, and the Department of Energy’s Distinguished Service Award in 1979. In 2005, the Government of Japan presented him with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star. 

Bosworth was a graduate of Dartmouth College where he was a member of the Board of Trustees from 1992 to 2002 and served as Board Chair from 1996 to 2000. He was married to the former Christine Holmes; they have two daughters and two sons.

Stephen W. Bosworth Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

2014 TEC Lectureship on Europe and the World with Adam Tooze, Yale University

The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University. On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917.  Tooze advances a powerful explanation of why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States and the Pacific. These lectures will present an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world today.

Titles and venues are listed below.


Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”
Recent events in Ukraine pose the question, is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? This lecture will address the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I. In light of current events the lecture will focus on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk - the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine - and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after. Returning to the period 1917-1923 suggests sobering conclusions about the stability of the order that we have taken for granted since 1991.

 

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”
Having established itself in the 19th century as the financial center of the world, Europe's sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing trans-Atlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe but the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world. But, to this day there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of the disaster. Was it American leadership or a failure of cooperation that was to blame? This lecture will argue the case for a revised and historicized version of the hegemonic failure thesis. The absence presence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe's fate.

 

Friday, May 2, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center
Followed by a reeception, 5:30 pm - 6:15 pm
“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”
Until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. And yet the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed as they were by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, tended to ignore this evident fact, focusing instead on workers and business-men, politicians and soldiers. This lecture will illustrate how brining the peasantry back in has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the Bloodlands to the wider world.

    

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

 

April 30th and May 1st: Koret-Taube Conference Center in the Gunn–SIEPR Building (366 Galvez Street).

May 2nd: Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall (616 Serra Street).

Adam Tooze Barton M. Briggs Professor of History Speaker Yale University
Lectures
The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

Why Nuclear Weapons Became Unsustainable: Modernization Theory, International Norms, and the Environmental Roots of the Nuclear Taboo, 1958-1968

<i>The Act of Killing (Director's Cut)</i> Film Screening and Panel Discussion

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*This event is free and open to the public.*

 

PANELISTS

Don Emmerson - Director of the Southeast Asia Forum, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; Affiliated Scholar, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies; Affiliated Faculty, CDDRL

Erik Jensen - Professor of the Practice of Law, Stanford Law School; Senior Advisor for Governance and Law, The Asia Foundation; Senior Research Scholar, CDDRL; Director, Rule of Law Program, Stanford Law School

Norman Naimark - Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division; Professor of History

Diane H. Steinberg (Panel Chair) - Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Program on Human Rights, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)

 

 
The Act of Killing visits former Indonesian death squad killers who wreaked havoc in 1965 and 1966 in the aftermath of Indonesia's military coup and yet have never been held accountable for slaughtering between 200,000 to 2 million people in a genocide often forgotten.  The dramatic reenactments of the murders in the documentary catalyze an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar Congo from arrogance to regret as he confronts for the first time in his life the full implications of what he has done.
 
The Act of Killing is an award-winning documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer with co-director Christine Cynn and and an anonymous co-director from Indonesia. It is a Danish-British-Norwegian co-production, presented by Final Cut for Real in Denmark and produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen. It was recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

"Director Joshua Oppenheimer has made a documentary in which he interviews the leaders of Indonesian death squads, who were responsible, collectively, for the deaths of millions of Communists, leftists and ethnic Chinese in 1965 and 1966. But he doesn't just interview them. He has them re-enact their crimes and even invites them to write, perform and film skits dramatizing their murders." Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, 8/8/2013
 
"The Act of Killing is a bold reinvention of the documentary form, as well as an astounding illustration of man's infinite capacity for evil." Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald, 8/15/2013
 
After the screening of the  Director's Cut of The Act of Killing (160 minutes), there will be a thirty-minute panel discussion.
 
For more information regarding the film, please visit: http://theactofkilling.com/.
 
This event is presented and sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, CDDRL's Program on Human Rights, and the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education.

Cubberley Auditorium

Conferences

The 3rd Annual Hana-Stanford Conference on Korea for U.S. Secondary School Teachers

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The third annual Hana-Stanford Conference on Korea for U.S. Secondary School Teachers takes place this summer, from July 28 to 30, at Stanford. It will bring together secondary school educators from across the United States as well as a cadre of educators from Korea for intensive and lively sessions on a wide assortment of Korean studies-related topics ranging from U.S.-Korea relations to history, and religion to popular culture. In addition to scholarly lectures, the teachers will take part in curriculum workshops and receive numerous classroom resources developed by Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE).

During the conference, the Sejong Korean Scholars Program (SKSP), a distance-learning program on Korea, will also honor high school students for their exceptional performance in the SKSP program. The finalists will be chosen based on their final research papers, and their overall participation and performance in the online course. The SKSP honorees will be presenting their research essays at the conference. The SKSP program is generously supported by the Korea Foundation. 

For details of the application procedures for the teachers, please visit the SPICE website.

A video clip from the conference held in 2013 is available.

Paul Brest Hall West
555 Salvaterra Walk
Stanford University

Conferences
Hana-Stanford Conference on Korea for U.S. Secondary School Teachers

Chinese Military Aerospace and Maritime Development: Short-Range Tailwinds, Long-Range Headwinds

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By any measure, China’s economy and defense budget are second only to those of the United States. Yet tremendous uncertainties persist concerning China’s military development and national trajectory, and areas with greater information available often conflated misleadingly. Fortunately, larger dynamics elucidate both areas. Particularly since the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, China has made rapid progress in aerospace and maritime development, greatly facilitating its military modernization. The weapons and systems that China is developing and deploying fit well with Beijing’s geostrategic priorities. Here, distance matters greatly: after domestic stability and border control, Beijing worries most about its immediate periphery, where its unresolved disputes with neighbors and outstanding claims lie primarily in the maritime direction. Accordingly, while it would vastly prefer pressuring concessions to waging war, China is already capable of threatening potential opponents’ military forces should they intervene in crises over islands and maritime claims in the Yellow, East, and South China Seas and the waterspace and airspace around them. Far from mainland China, by contrast, it remains ill-prepared to protect its own forces from robust attack. Fortunately for Beijing, the non-traditional security focus of its distant operations makes conflict unlikely; remedying their vulnerabilities would be difficult and expensive. Despite these larger patterns, critical unknowns remain concerning China’s economic development, societal priorities, industrial efficiency, and innovation capability. Dr. Erickson will examine these and related issues to probe China’s development trajectory and future place in the international system. 

 

The views expressed by Dr. Erickson are his alone, and do not represent the policies or estimates of any organization with which he is affiliated.

 

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson is an Associate Professor in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a core founding member of the department’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI). He is an Associate in Research at Harvard University’s John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (2008-). Erickson also serves as an expert contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report (中国实时报), for which he has authored or coauthored 25 articles. In spring 2013, he deployed in the Pacific as a Regional Security Education Program scholar aboard USS Nimitz (CVN68), Carrier Strike Group 11.

Erickson received his Ph.D. and M.A. in international relations and comparative politics from Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a B.A. in history and political science. He has studied Mandarin in the Princeton in Beijing program at Beijing Normal University’s College of Chinese Language and Culture and Japanese language, politics, and economics in the year-long Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University.

Erickson’s research, which focuses on Asia-Pacific defense, international relations, technology, and resource issues, has been published widely in English- and Chinese-language edited volumes and in such peer-reviewed journals as China Quarterly, Asian Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Orbis, Asia Policy (forthcoming January 2014), and China Security; as well as in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, Joint Force Quarterly, China International Strategy Review (published in Chinese-language edition, forthcoming in English-language edition January 2014), and International and Strategic Studies Report (Center for International and Strategic Studies, Peking University). Erickson has also published annotated translations of several Chinese articles on maritime strategy. His publications are available at <www.andrewerickson.com> and <www.chinasignpost.com>.

This event is co-sponsored with CEAS and is part of the China under Xi Jinping series.

Philippines Conference Room

Andrew Erickson Associate in Research Speaker John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
Seminars
China under Xi Jinping

The Hana-Stanford Conference on Korea for U.S. Secondary School Teachers

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The Stanford Korean Studies Program (KSP) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), with support from Hana Financial Group, are offering a very exciting and intensive professional development opportunity for secondary school teachers: The Hana–Stanford Conference on Korea for U.S. Secondary School Teachers. This three-day summer conference will feature scholarly lectures and curricular presentations on topics such as Korean history, North Korea, inter-Korean relations, politics, economics, culture, and U.S.–Korean relations. We hope to bring together educators who are interested in incorporating Korean studies into their curricula and to provide a venue for them to learn and exchange ideas.

All conference meals and registration costs will be covered by the conference. For those who reside more than 50 miles from Stanford University, shared hotel accommodations and reasonable airfare expenses will be covered. Each teacher will be given a $300 stipend to cover incidental expenses and also receive an excellent selection of books and complimentary teaching materials about Korea. In addition, teachers can earn an optional 2 units of credit from Stanford Continuing Studies.

Space is limited to 30 teachers from secondary schools throughout the United States. Teachers from out of town are encouraged to arrive on July 27, 2014. To apply to attend the conference, please fill out the Applicant Registration Form and return it to the address below by February 7, 2014. We will notify you once your applicant registration form has been reviewed by the selection committee. 

For more information, please contact Sabrina Ishimatsu at sishi@stanford.edu.

Paul Brest Hall West
555 Salvatierra Walk
Stanford University

Conferences

How the Cold War Came to Afghanistan, 1945-1952

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ABOUT THE TOPIC: No country was as devastated by the Cold War as Afghanistan, yet the historical understanding of how the global conflict came to Kabul remains tentative, generally limited to studies that begin in the late 1970s.  Scholars have generally treated the American role in pre-invasion Afghanistan as minimal, or have seamlessly connected Kabul's half-turn toward Moscow in the mid-1950s with the 1979 invasion.  Extensive research, however, demonstrates the profound impact Americans had in mid-century Afghanistan.  Based on multinational research, this paper will explore how Americans helped to bring the Cold War to the mountain kingdom in the early 1950s.  While the Truman administration considered Afghanistan marginal and strategically indefensible, a fateful combination of local initiative, misperception, and ideology helped to add the kingdom to the roster of Cold War battlegrounds, where it would remain until the conflict's end.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Robert Rakove is a lecturer for the International Relations Program.  He studies the modern history of U.S. foreign relations, paying particular attention to the Cold War in the Third World.  He received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2008, and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World.  He is presently at work on a history of the U.S.-Afghan relationship in the decades before the Soviet invasion.

CISAC Conference Room

Robert Rakove Lecturer, Program in International Relations, Stanford; CISAC Affiliate Speaker
Robert Crews Associate Professor of History, Stanford; Director, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford Commentator
Seminars
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