Gregory Poling will begin with a multimedia presentation highlighting the most important aspects of the South China Sea disputes, including the competing legal claims, recent clashes, and the oil, fisheries, and trade interests that help feed the conflict. He will then examine recent actions by the various claimants and the motivations behind them, including the Philippines' recent decision to take China's claims to a UN arbitration tribunal. He will show why commentators have been too quick to dismiss Manila's case. During the Q&A he will field questions on any aspect of the disputes, including what they imply for Asia and US-Asian relations.

Gregory Poling’s work at CSIS includes managing projects focused on US foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific, especially in Southeast Asia. In addition to the South China Sea, his research interests include democratization in Southeast Asia and Asian multilateralism. Before joining CSIS he lived and worked in China as an English language teacher. He has an MA in international affairs from American University, earned his BA in history and philosophy at Saint Mary's College of Maryland, and has studied at Fudan University in Shanghai.

This special panel will address the challenges facing Egypt's transition today.

Dr. Maha Abdelrahman will speak on the historical roots of post-Mubarak politics by 
examining two main features of the decade long of protests since 2000.

Dr. Amr Adly will speak on how Egypt's economic crisis interacts with the shaping of the new political sphere, and whether this can be framed as Egypt's failed transition to democracy or transition to failed democracy. He will argue that the country was put on the trajectory of a conservative democratic order which indeed has been instilled but the only problem is that it is quite dysfunctional.

Ahmed Salah will discuss  the position of revolutionary groups toward Morsi's Regime and how and why it devolved.

Prof. Robert Springborg will present on "The Muslim Brotherhood and the Military: The Mongoose and the Cobra Revisited".

Prof. Joel Beinin will present on "Workers, Trade Unions, and Egypt's Political Future".

 

The panel is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

For years former diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani has closely studied the changing relationship between Asia and the United States and its consequences in works like Can Asians Think? and The New Asian Hemisphere. In The Great Convergence, his new book, he assesses East and West at a remarkable turning point in world history and reaches an incredible conclusion.

China stands poised to become the world’s largest economy as soon as 2016. Unprecedented numbers of the world’s population, driven by Asian economic growth, are being lifted out of poverty and into the middle class. And with this creation of a world-wide middle class, there is an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values: a truly global civilization.  

A full 88% of the world’s population lives outside the West and is rising to Western living standards, and sharing Western aspirations. But while the world changes, our way of managing it has not and it must evolve. The Great Convergence outlines new policies and approaches that will be necessary to govern in an increasingly interconnected and complex environment. Multilateral institutions and world-wide governing organizations must be strengthened. National interests must be balanced against global interests. The United States and Europe must share power and China, India, Africa and the Islamic world must be integrated. And the world’s increasing consumption must be balanced against environmental sustainability.

About the Speaker

From 1971 to 2004 Kishore Mahbubani served in the Singapore Foreign Ministry, where he was Permanent Secretary from 1993 to 1998, served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), and in January 2001 and May 2002 served as President of the UN Security Council.

Mahbubani is the author of Can Asians Think?, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, and The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have listed him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, and in 2009 the Financial Times included him on their list of Top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. In 2010 and 2011 he was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Stanford Law School.

About the Topic: For most of human history, a pitched battle was deemed a lawful way of settling an international dispute--a kind of trial, with a kind of verdict. Today the idea of settling disputes by deliberately staging battles sounds utterly lawless.  Yet the striking truth is that the battle warfare of the past was in important ways more civilized than the warfare of the present; and it is well worth asking whether we can still learn anything from the old forms of war.  Those forms were founded on a forgotten species of the law of war.  Modern law of war is humanitarian law, dedicated to preserving lives.  But our ancestors' law of war was law of victory, dedicated to answering two legal questions:  How do we know who won? What rights is the victor entitled to claim?  Those questions sound coldblooded today, but they laid the groundwork for a practice of limited warfare. 

About the Speaker: James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and specializes in comparative law, criminal law, and legal history.  He is the author of several prizewinning books, including Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, and The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War.  He has published several notable articles, "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty" which was published in the 2004 volume of The Yale Law Journal.  Professor Whitman received a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. 

The most heated historical debates in post-Communist Poland have been provoked by two books, Neighbors from 2000 and Fear from 2008. The author of these books, Jan T. Gross, challenged the Poles’ view of themselves as solely innocent victims of German Nazism, showing that anti-Semitism could and did lead Poles to kill Jews, both during and after the war. In her presentation, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa scrutinizes the Polish reactions to these books, analyses the rhetoric in Gross’ writings and discusses his role as “mnemonic actor” in Poland. She points out that the case of Gross raises the general question of the role of historical scholarship in society.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She leads the international research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” financed by the EU. Her research focus is nationalism, collective memory, myth and symbols in Central and Eastern Europe as well cultural integration in Europe. She publishes extensively on these subjects.  She recently contributed to and edited two collections of essays entitled Cultural Transformations after Communism. Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Painful Pasts and Useful Memories. Remembering and Forgetting in Europe (2012).

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

The road to the 18th Party Congress was contentious, leading to its delayed convocation. Nevertheless, the processes of generational turnover in China’s leadership at the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress extended patterns of formal politics that trace their roots to Deng Xiaoping’s political reforms of the 1980s, that advanced in the Jiang Zemin era in the 1990s, and that matured under outgoing General Secretary Hu Jintao in the 2000s.  As such, the transition in the party leadership at the 18th Congress marked another step forward in the institutionalization of Chinese leadership politics.

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Alice Lyman Miller is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and teaches in the Departments of History and Political Science at Stanford. She is also a senior lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 1999, Miller taught at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. from 1980–2000. From 1974–90, Miller worked in the Central Intelligence Agency as a senior analyst in Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics, and branch and division chief, supervising analysis on China, North Korea, Indochina, and Soviet policy in East Asia. Miller has lived and worked in Taiwan, Japan, and the PRC, and she speaks Mandarin Chinese.

Miller's research focuses on foreign policy and domestic politics issues in China and on the international relations of East Asia. She is editor and contributor to the Hoover Institution’s China Leadership Monitor, which has since 2001 offered online authoritative assessments of trends in Chinese leadership politics to American policymakers and the general public. Miller has published extensively on policy issues dealing with China, including several articles and book chapters, as well as two books: Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge (University of Washington Press, 1996), and, with Richard Wich, Becoming Asia: Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations Since World War II (Stanford University Press, 2011). She is currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled The Evolution of Chinese Grand Strategy, 1550–Present, that brings a historical perspective to bear on China's rise in the contemporary international order.

Miller graduated from Princeton University in 1966, receiving a B.A. in Oriental Studies. She earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University in 1969 and 1974.  Formerly H. Lyman Miller, she transitioned in 2006.

 

About the speakers:

Nicolas Berggruen 

Nicolas Berggruen is the Chairman of Berggruen Holdings, a private company, which is the direct investment vehicle of The Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Trust. Through the Nicolas Berggruen Institute on Governance, an independent, nonpartisan think tank, he encourages the study and design of systems of good governance suited for the 21st century. Mr. Berggruen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Nathan Gardels 

Nathan Gardels has been editor of New Perspectives Quarterly since it began publishing in 1985. He has served as editor of Global Viewpoint and Nobel Laureates Plus (services of LATimes Syndicate/Tribune Media) since 1989. Mr. Gardels has written widely for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Harper's, U.S. News & World Report and the New York Review of Books. He has also written for foreign publications. Since 1986, Gardels has been a Media Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos), and he has been a member of the Councilof Foreign Relations, as well as the Pacific Council, for many years.

  

Abstract:

From Winston Churchill at the end of World War II to Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy has been extolled as the best system of governance to have emerged out of the long experience of history. Today, such a confident assertion is far from self-evident. Democracy, in crisis across the West, must prove itself.

It is time, the authors argue, to take another look at democracy as we know it not just because of the sustained success of non-Western modernity, notably in the more authoritarian Asia of Singapore or China, but because the West itself has changed.

While China must lighten up, the authors quip, the US must tighten up. As the 21^st Century unfolds, both of these core systems of the global order must contend with the same reality: a genuinely multi-polar world where no single power dominates and in which societies themselves are becoming increasingly diverse.

To cope, the authors argue that both East and West can benefit by adapting each other’s best practices. The authors’ essential thesis is that a post-post Cold War world characterized by the interdependence of plural identities and the spread of information technology both requires and enables a new system of “intelligent governance” to meet its challenges. Greater complexity of diversity requires a calibration of institutions that balances the distributed, participatory power of social media with smart governing capacity at the systemic level for the common good and long-term sustainability. Getting that balance right by “devolving, involving and decision-division” will make the difference between dynamic and stalled societies.