More than two decades after the cold war ended elsewhere, it continues undiminished on the Korean Peninsula. The division of the Korean nation into competing North and South Korean states and the destructive war that followed gave rise to one of the great, and still unresolved, tragedies of the twentieth century.

Published for the first time in English, Peacemaker is the memoir of Lim Dong-won, former South Korean unification minister and architect of Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine policy toward North Korea. Lim will present a talk at Stanford in conjunction with the book’s U.S. release, highlighting major themes from it and discussing them within the context of recent developments on the peninsula.

As both witness and participant, Peacemaker traces the process of twenty years of diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, from the earliest rounds of inter-Korean talks through the historic inter-Korean summit of June 2000 and beyond. It offers a fascinating inside look into the recent history of North-South Korea relations and provides important lessons for policymakers and citizens who seek to understand and resolve the tragic—and increasingly dangerous—situation on the Korean Peninsula.

About the Speaker

Following a thirty-year career in the South Korean military, Lim Dong-won’s government service began with his tenure as ROK ambassador to Nigeria and then Australia; under the Roh Tae-woo administration, he served as chancellor of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security and director of arms control planning. During the Kim Dae-jung administration Lim held numerous key national-level posts, including head of the National Intelligence Service and minister of unification. He currently is chairman of the Korea Peace Forum and the Hankyoreh Foundation for Reunification and Culture.

This event is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.

Over the last hundred years, the cigarette has become a pillar of consumer life in China and many parts of the world. In 2010, the Chinese tobacco industry produced over two trillion cigarettes, generating over U.S. $90 billion in taxes and profits. Over 300 million Chinese citizens now use cigarettes every day, and tobacco kills 90 times more people each year than HIV/AIDS in China.

How has the cigarette become so integrated into the fabric of everyday life across the People’s Republic of China?

The importance of answering this question is unmistakable, but very little historical research and writing has examined China’s cigarette industry from the mid-20th century to the present. To get to the heart of this question, historians, health policy specialists, sociologists, anthropologists, business scholars, and other experts will meet Mar. 26 and 27 at the new Stanford Center at Peking University for a conference organized by the Asia Health Policy Program. They will examine connections intricately woven over the past 60 years between marketing and cigarette gifting, production and consumer demand, government policy and economic profit, and many other dimensions of China’s cigarette culture.

Abstract:

Nunn's paper examines the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, he and Nancy Qian exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuationsin U.S. wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Their estimates show that an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. The results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.

Speaker Bio: 

Professor Nunn was born in Canada, where he received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005.  In 2009, Professor Nunn was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and grant recepient.

Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in economic history, economic development, political economy and international trade. One stream of Nunn’s research focuses on the long-term impact that historic events can have on current economic development. In “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to its Current Underdevelopment”, published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2007, Nunn develops a game-theoretic model showing how the slave trade and colonial rule could have had permanent long-term effects on economic performance. In “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008), Nunn documents the long-term adverse economic effects of Africa’s slave trades. His current research continues to examine the specific channels through which the slave trade affects current development within Africa. In "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa" (American Economic Review, forthcoming), coauthored with Leonard Wantchekon, he empirically documents how the slave trade engendered a culture of mistrust amongst the descendants of those heavily threatened by the slave trade.

A second stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the importance of hold-up and incomplete contracting in international trade. He has published research showing that a country’s ability to enforce written contracts is a key determinant of comparative advantage (“Relationship-Specificity, Incomplete Contracts and the Pattern of Trade,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007). Other work, coauthored with Daniel Trefler, examines the relationship between the cross-industry structure of a country's tariffs and its long-term economic growth (“The Structure of Tariffs and Long-Term Growth,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2010). The study identifies growth-promoting benefits of a tariff structure focused in skill-intensive industries. It also shows how and why governments that succumb to political influence and rent-seeking are unable to focus tariffs in these key industries.