Commentators across the political spectrum have suggested that a profoundly confrontational clash between western and traditional cultures is taking place. Are modernity & religiosity in fundamental conflict? Are western values - equated with modernity and secularism - incompatible with orthodoxy? Are traditions - based in religion and emphasizing the importance of established practices - antithetical to "progress"? Is the conflict so profound that it has become our new "cold war"? Join our panelists to explore one of the more disturbing challenges facing our world today.

Jointly sponsored by the Stanford International Initiative and the Undergraduate Admissions Office.

The Stanford Association for International Development (SAID) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business International Development Club (GSB-ID) will be hosting its fourth annual conference. Each year, SAID and the GSB-ID collaborate to bring together relevant experts, academics, and practitioners from NGOs, government agencies and international institutions across the country to speak on critical issues in development. Drawing over 200 students, faculty and community members each year, the conference aims to promote and share knowledge about effective and innovative approaches to development and to inspire student interest in the field. This year, the conference will address approaches to education in developing countries, focusing in particular on the challenges to creating effective educational systems and funding allocation to different education priorities.

In the past, the conference has also included a lunchtime development fair with Bay Area-based NGOs to provide interested students with job, internship or volunteering opportunities, as well as real-life perspectives on working in international development. This year, the fair will be expanded to include not only NGOs but also development-related student groups on campus. Hopefully, this will be an opportunity for students looking for a way to get involved "closer to home" and to strengthen the ties among the growing development community at Stanford.

Speakers from USAID, World Bank, Global Fund for Children, the Hewlett Foundation, and more.

Sponsored by Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, ASSU, VPUE, ASSU Speakers Bureau, GSB Global Management Program, GSB Center for Global Business and Economy, Economics Dept., and the OSA.

Jeffrey R. Cooper is an SAIC Technical Fellow, Vice President for Technology, and Chief Science Officer of SAIC Strategies, Simulation & Training Business Unit at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He received his undergraduate and graduate education at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professorial Lecturer in Arms Control and Defense Analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition to long-standing focus on strategic analysis and military transformation, his core interest is using information to improve intelligence analysis, decision making, C2, and operational effectiveness in order to enhance U.S. national security. Cooper served in a range of senior government positions, including White House Staff and Assistant to the Secretary of Energy.

For the past several years, Cooper's focus has been largely on intelligence matters, with particular emphasis on analytic failures and methods to improve all-source analysis capabilities. Most recently, he chaired the Panel on Unexpected Threats for the DNI's Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR). Cooper was a Professional Staff Member of the Presidential Commission on Future Intelligence Capabilities (Silberman-Robb Commission) and has been actively involved in work on the Revolution in Intelligence Affairs and Intelligence Transformation. His monograph on "Curing Analytic Pathologies" will be published shortly by CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.

This talk addresses a set of intimately intertwined contradictions that characterize military-societal relations in present-day Japan: the contradiction between Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which forbids a standing army and the existence of its armed forces; the contradiction between the civilian prohibition of violence and the military's training for and potential demand of violent acts; and the dilemma of representing a profession that must negotiate between societal mores and the demands associated with military service. More specifically, Professor Frühstück will untangle the Self-Defense Forces' public relations strategies, ranging from comics to live firing exercises. She argues that these strategies are deeply embedded in Japanese culture and affecy various segments of the Japanese public in radically different ways.

Sabine Frühstück focuses her research on the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Her book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, is a history of sexual knowledge in Japan and the different uses made of that knowledge. Based on a wide variety of sources including military data on soldiers' health, sex education treatises for youth, and pronatalist and expansionist propaganda that fought frigidity in women and impotence in men, the book analyzes the techniques at work in conflicts and negotiations that aimed at the creation of a normative sexuality. Frühstück has co-edited Neue Geschichten der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien and Zentraleuropa 1700-2000 and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure.

Professor Park will address the changes that have occurred in the Chinese labor market over the past quarter century, focusing on the extent to which labor market reforms have successfully created a well-functioning market for labor with a high degree of labor mobility. Like other rapidly growing developing countries, China has experienced rapid structural change featuring a steady flow of labor from agriculture to industry, and from rural areas to urban areas. As a transition economy, China has shifted gradually from planned allocation of labor in state-sector jobs to a more open labor market. Although the large magnitudes of these changes are impressive, reform of the labor market has been halting, uneven, and difficult, with much additional reform still required. Prof. Park will look at several dimensions of the Chinese labor market: labor allocation, wage setting, regional differences, and ownership sectors. He will conclude by discussing the key policy challenges that lie ahead.

Albert Park is Associate Professor of Economics and Faculty Associate of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also a research affiliate at the Population Studies Center and chairs the faculty steering committee for Michigan's China Data Center. Dr. Park has been a visiting professor and researcher at Harvard University and Peking University, as well as other research institutions in China and Taiwan, and has served as a consultant for the World Bank on several projects analyzing economic development issues in China, including the Bank's current China Poverty Assessment project. Dr. Park earned a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Food Research Institute and Department of Economics at Stanford University in 1996. His research interests include economic development, economic transition, labor, applied microeconomics, and the Chinese economy. He is involved in numerous collaborative research activities in China, including several large survey projects to study labor market developments in urban areas, and rural education, health, and labor outcomes. He has published over thirty journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, and is the coeditor of a forthcoming volume titled Education and Reform in China. At Michigan, he teaches a graduate course on the microeconomics of development and an undergraduate course on the Chinese economy.

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

One of Japan's most effective leaders, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto has guided some of the most important developments in modern Japanese history, from improving trade and security relations with the United States to implementing crucial deregulation policies and administrative reforms. The regulatory reforms enacted during his term as prime minister - in the areas of administration, fiscal and economic structure, social security, and education - remain the most important items on the current Japanese political agenda.

In his first-ever Stanford address, Prime Minister Hashimoto will consider the changes under way in Japan with the candor and insight that only a former head of state can offer. The return to prominence of Hashimoto's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) - after a September 2005 landslide victory - only increases the timeliness of his perspective.

Ryutaro Hashimoto is an experienced policy expert. He served two years as prime minister of Japan and thirteen terms in the House of Representatives. He has held a number of important cabinet posts, including minister of finance and minister of international trade and industry. As prime minister, Hashimoto tackled such pressing domestic issues as administrative reform and deregulation. He also made significant gains on the diplomatic front, and through summit meetings with U.S. President Bill Clinton, reinforced the bilateral security arrangements on which the post-Cold War Japan-U.S. alliance is founded. Since leaving office in 1998, Prime Minister Hashimoto has served as senior adviser to Prime Minister Koizumi, senior advisor for Administrative Reform Promotion at the LDP headquarters, and Minister of State for Administrative Reform.