Burma (Myanmar) has been under military rule since 1962. It is the least free country in Southeast Asia by the latest Freedom House ranking of political rights and civil liberties. The current junta's leader, Senior General Than Shwe, has made Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arguably the best known political prisoner in the world. In August-September 2007, following steep hikes in fuel prices, scores of protesters marched in silence and were dispersed or arrested. The protests spread beyond the capital and included at least one by Buddhist monks--a significant development in a largely Buddhist country. Meanwhile, delegates to a national convention convened by the regime completed guidelines for a future constitution. This step on a supposed road map to democracy was criticized by some observers as a ploy to institutionalize army control. Others treated the guidelines less skeptically on the grounds that even regime-favoring rules might be used to nudge the country toward reform, and were thus better than no rules at all.

How should outsiders respond to these conditions? With policies of isolation? Or of engagement? Which of the two logics is more powerful: that isolation will deprive the junta of needed support and thus help spark democratization? Or that engagement will expose the country to liberalization and thus incrementally undermine the regime? Is there a mixed logic worth implementing between these extremes? Or have the mounting protests inside Burma opened a crucial window of opportunity that replaces these alternatives with a radical new logic of carpe diem:that outsiders should actively intervene in support of the opposition and in favor of regime change now? Not to mention the junta's own rationale for retaining power: that military rule is preferable to any alternative.

Maureen Aung-Thwin, while working on Burma at the Open Society Institute (founded by financier/philanthropist George Soros), is an active member of the Asia Committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation, which oversees the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. She received a BA from Northwestern University and did graduate work at NYU.

Zarni, while researching democratic transition at Oxford, has been active in "Track II" negotiations with the Burmese junta. In 1995 he founded the Free Burma Coalition, which favored sanctions. Later his position evolved toward engagement. He edited Active Citizens under Political Wraps: Experiences from Myanmar/Burma and Vietnam (2006). He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Co-sponsored with the Asia Society Northern California and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC-Berkeley.

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, and the director of SAIS' International Development program. He is also chairman of the editorial board of a new magazine, The American Interest.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning political and economic development. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. It made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan, and Chile, and has been awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award in the Current Interest category, as well as the Premio Capri for the Italian edition. He is also the author of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002, and State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, (2004). His most recent book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy was published by Yale University Press in March 2006.

Francis Fukuyama was born on October 27, 1952, in Chicago. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

Dr. Fukuyama was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2005. He holds an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College and Doane College, and is a member of advisory boards for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Journal of Democracy, and The New America Foundation, and FINCA. As an NED board member, he is responsible for oversight of the Endowment's Middle East programs. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

On March 18, 1871, Taewongun (Grand Prince) who held real power when King Kojong (r. 1863-1907) assumed power at the age of 12, issued a historical order that was enforced nationwide: All Confucian private academies ever built, except for the forty-seven royal-chartered ones, were to be destroyed. To justify this unprecedented repression, Taewongun argued that the academies were "the fundamental causes for the decaying nation." During the period from 1865 to 1871, over 800 academies were abolished and these intermediate organizations largely disappeared from the central scene of the Korean history and politics. Taewongun's startling regulation of private academies was rather surprising. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Choson monarchs enthusiastically encouraged and sponsored the establishment of the academies on the ground that the academy growth would contribute to country's moral reform and state-building. Why did the dramatic change of governmental policy on the academies occur? How can we resolve this historical enigma? To answer these questions, Koo situates this historical drama in a broader -structural- sociological context involving political competition between the state and nascent civil society, in association with his aim of overcoming the current historical explanations emphasizing more imminent causes of the abolition, such as military and fiscal abuses of the academies.

Jeong-Woo Koo is a visiting scholar at the department of sociology, Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University in 2007. His interests include comparative-historical sociology, organizations, sociology of education, political sociology, quantitative method, and East-Asian studies. His dissertation explores a long term political competition between state and civil society in Choson Korea. He is currently working on two projects, one on the worldwide expansion of international human rights and its impact on nation-states (with John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez), and the other on the formation of regionalism in East Asia (with Gi-Wook Shin). His publications include "The Origins of the Public Sphere and Civil Society: Private Academies and Petitions in Korea, 1506-1800," Social Science History 31: 3 (Fall 2007), and "World Society and Human Rights: Worldwide Foundings of National Human Rights Institutions, 1978-2004," Korean Journal of Sociology 41: 3 (Spring 2007).