An Introduction to Sovereignty: A Case Study of Taiwan examines the key issue of sovereignty and provides an in-depth look at the unique status of Taiwan among the nations of the world.
The Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE), in collaboration with its more than seventy research affiliates in seven countries, continues to describe and analyze rising high technology regions across Asia.
The accession of Cyprus to the European Union (EU) in May of 2004 constitutes the most positive strategic development in the history of the island state since its independence in 1960. In the last two years, the Cypriot people have experienced watershed events, filled with frustrations, challenges but also opportunities. Cyprus' EU membership has extended the borders of the EU to the strategic corner of the Eastern Mediterranean and has brought the Middle East ever closer to Europe. It is hoped that Cyprus' EU membership can contribute to the expansion of peace, stability, security and prosperity in the area. Cyprus is situated at the crossroads of three continents and civilizations, where global political and economic interests, as well as international security concerns, converge. Together with its American ally and with the help of its European partners Cyprus aspires to play a positive role, and to act as a bridge of mutual understanding and the promotion of sustained and result oriented dialogue between its Middle Eastern neighbors and Europe. At the same time, Cyprus strives to achieve a just, permanent, functional and mutually acceptable solution to the Cyprus problem, an end of the Turkish military occupation, reunification and prosperity for all Cypriots within their common European home.
His Excellency Euripides L. Evriviades presented his credentials as the Ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus to the United States to President George W. Bush on 4 December 2003. He is also accredited as High Commissioner to Canada. Ambassador Evriviades served as Ambassador of Cyprus to the Netherlands from August 2000 to October 2003. Prior to his posting in The Hague, he served as the Ambassador to Israel from November 1997 until July 2000. Earlier in his career, Mr. Evriviades held positions at Cypriot embassies in Tripoli, Libya; Moscow, USSR/Russia; and Bonn, Germany.
CISAC Conference Room
After the end of the Cold War, the world's attention focused on the vast quantity of potentially unsecured nuclear material- weaponized and unweaponized- that resided in the former Soviet Union. The closed borders of the Soviet Union were thrown open and facilities containing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were no longer under the watchful eye of a ubiquitous KGB. Russian scientists possessing knowledge about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were able to visit or immigrate to any country of their choice, including rogue nations with active WMD programs.
In response, a number of nonproliferation programs were established by Western nations to help stem the emigration of Russian weapons scientists to countries of concern. The key question is whether these nonproliferation programs are achieving their objectives. To answer this question, we conducted a survey of 600 Russian scientists (physicists, chemists and biologists). The data indicate that U.S. and Western nonproliferation programs are indeed effective. The programs significantly reduce the likelihood that Russian scientists would consider working in rogue countries. The data further suggest that continuation of the Western assistance programs is necessary in order to prevent scientists from going rogue.
Biography
Dr. Deborah Yarsike Ball is a political-military analyst specializing in Russian affairs in the Nonproliferation, Arms Control and International Security Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has been a fellow at Harvard University's Center for Science and International Affairs, as well as Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control. Her work focuses on Russian civil-military relations, military doctrine and security issues, the prevention of theft of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear material from the former Soviet Union, as well as the safety and security of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Dr. Ball has conducted analysis of various regime's internal and external political and social behavior and their holistic use of the elements of power and influence.
Ball's publications include: "How Safe Is Russia's Nuclear Arsenal?" in Jane's Intelligence Review (December 1999) and "The Social Crisis of the Russian Military," in "Russia's Torn Safety Nets" (Ed. by Mark G. Field and Judyth L. Twigg, St. Martins, 2000), and "The State of Russian Science" in Post-Soviet Affairs, (July-Sept. 2002, with Theodore Gerber). Among her committee assignments, Dr. Ball is currently serving on a US National Academy of Sciences Committee tasked to assess the indigenization of US programs to prevent leakage of plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Russia.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japanese "nationalism" (if such a term is even applicable) depended less on imagined similarities among Japanese than it did on their contrived customary differences from foreign peoples such as the Ainu. The boundaries of the early modern Japanese realm were ethno-geographical, and Ainu identity and difference was critical in constructing the borders of Japan.
After 1799, the Tokugawa shogunate and, later, the Meiji state, undertook policies of deculturation and assimilation toward the Ainu, because the Meiji strategy toward state building relied less on difference than on myths of internal homogeneity. The Meiji state conscripted Ainu into the myth of Japanese homogeneity through assimilation; but earlier forms of Ainu autonomy and difference first had to be destroyed.
Interestingly, wolf eradication offers one vantage point from which to view the process of Ainu deculturation and assimilation in the context of the colonization of Hokkaido and the creation of the modern myths that provided the foundation for Japan's ethnic nationalism. Ainu origin mythology held that the Ainu people were born from a union of a wolf and a goddess, and so when Ainu tracked and killed wolves and wild dogs under state bounty programs legitimized as "imperial grants," they committed mythological patricide, replacing their origin myths with Japanese ones that, over the course of the late Meiji period, served as the foundation of Japan's modern nation.
Japan Brown Bag Series
Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies
Philippines Conference Room
Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on Homeland Security
There is a serious but reparable vulnerability in the biometric identification system of the US-VISIT Program, which is our last line of defense for keeping terrorists off U.S. soil. A minor software modification that allows the watchlist rule to vary with image quality can increase detection from 53% to 73%. I have provided details to officials who oversee the US-VISIT operations, and this should be implemented as soon as possible. The use of more than 2 fingers for low-quality images can achieve a detection probability of 95%. Although switching from a 2-fingerprint to a 10-fingerprint system may be costly and disruptive, there is no excuse for a 10-billion dollar program to settle for performance below this level. Indeed, our results are not inconsistent with the warning in the November, 2002 NIST report that a 2-finger search was not sufficient for identification from a large watchlist. If slower 2-finger matching algorithms cannot approach 95% detection for poor-quality images, then the US-VISIT Program should be reconfigured with 10-fingerprint scanners as soon as possible.
Our recommendations hinge on the assumption that terrorist organizations as sophisticated as Al Qaeda will eventually attempt to defeat the US-VISIT system by employing terrorists with poor quality fingerprints.
A recurring theme in the sociology of education is that schooling produces citizenship or a sense of membership in the nation-state. Much of the literature on civic education explores this theme, either lamenting school failures in this arena or fearing that hyper-successful schools will create massive conformity. Different though these perspectives are they share the premise that schooling is designed to produce national citizens with the national heritage and the nation-state as the crucial and bounded referential standards. This premise is challenged by the development of the human rights movement and its more recent human rights education focus. Human rights has emerged as an influential discourse and this discourse is changing from a solely legal to a broader human rights education focus. Civic education, once the central curricular area for teaching national citizenship, now teaches global citizenship and incorporates a rights discourse that extend beyond national borders.
This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integrationbetween two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.
Should ethnonationalist wars be resolved by formally partitioning states? The answer can't be decided case by case, because two incentive problems imply that ad hoc partitions have effects that extend across cases.
First, if the implicit criterion for major power intervention in support of partition is some level of violence, this encourages violent movements seeking to mobilize cultural difference in order to claim statehood. The Wilsonian diagnosis is wrong. Perpetual civil peace cannot be had by properly sorting "true" nations into states, because nations are not born but made, partially in response to international incentives and major power policies.
Second, an international order in which major powers go around carving up lesser powers on an ad hoc basis would make all states significantly less secure. Ad hoc use of partition to solve civil wars would undermine a relatively stable implicit bargain among
the major powers in place since the 1950s - "If you don't seek to change interstate borders by force, neither will we." I argue that this norm has been valuable, functioning in some respects like an arms control agreement. It would be irresponsible to undermine it without a thought to what might replace it, as the advocates of ad hoc partition are effectively urging. If the major powers want to start redesigning "sovereign" states, they need a political and legal framework that mitigates these two incentive effects. The best feasible solutions may be:
(1) strengthening and making more precise international legal standards on human
(and perhaps group) rights;
(2) threatening to sanction states that do not observe these standards in regard to minorities, possibly including some forms of support for agents of the
oppressed group;
(3) holding to the norm of partition only by mutual consent, but providing carrots and sticks when the state in question refuses to abide by minimal standards of
nondiscrimination.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Tonya L. Putnam (J.D./Ph.D) is a Research Scholar at the Arnold A. Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. From 2007 to 2020 she was a member of the Political Science at Columbia University. Tonya’s work engages a variety of topics related to international relations and international law with emphasis on issues related to jurisdiction and jurisdictional overlaps in international regulatory and security matters. She is the author of Courts Without Borders: Law, Politics, and U.S. Extraterritoriality along with several articles in International Organization, International Security, and the Human Rights Review. She is also a member (inactive) of the California State Bar.