At the 4th Social Science Workshop held at Yonsei University in Seoul, Gi-Wook Shin, director of Asia-Pacific Research Center, discussed how the politics of ethnic nationalism have played out in various contexts including anti-colonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and, now, globalization. The video of his presentation is available (in Korean).

Tracy Quek from the U.S. Bureau at The Straits Times Singapore Newspaper discusses the "Divided Memories and Reconciliation Project," a three-year project to examine how the main players in North-east Asia - China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan - along with the United States, form their views of the past, or what the scholars call "historical memories."

In April 2005, fierce anti-Japanese protests broke out in China.

Triggered in part by Japan's approval of newly revised history textbooks which glossed over the Japanese wartime abuses of six decades ago, the demonstrations were the most provocative upsurge of anti-Japanese unrest China had seen in years.

It was not the first time problems of the historical sort had sparked trouble between the neighbours in North-East Asia.

But researchers at Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre hope that their work will damp down future outbursts and open a path to lasting reconciliation.

Led by director Gi-Wook Shin and co-director Daniel C. Sneider, researchers are completing an ambitious three-year project to examine how the main players in North-east Asia - China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan - along with the United States, form their views of the past, or what the scholars call "historical memories."

Entitled Divided Memories and Reconciliation, the project began in 2007 and is divided into three phases. The first stage involves comparing how shared historical events are depicted in history textbooks of the five societies, as history education plays a crucial role in shaping citizens' perspectives on the past.

The second stage, which began last year, looks at the treatment of the 1931-1951 wartime period in the films of China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the US.

In the third phase, researchers will survey elite opinion makers in China, Japan, South Korea and the US for their views on historical issues.

The study, said Mr Sneider, stems from the understanding that unresolved historical issues are drivers of regional tension, and continue to bedevil relations to this day.

"The past is very much part of the present. Unresolved problems of the past feed mistrust and suspicion," he told The Sunday Times. "History issues also feed rising nationalism that can undermine government efforts to repair damaged relations."

Despite growing economic and cultural ties, wounds inflicted in the time of war and colonialism still fuel anti-Japanese sentiment in China and South Korea. The outcome of China's civil war resonates today in tension between the mainland and Taiwan.

The goal was not to forge a common historical account for the region or reach a consensus on specific events, said Mr Sneider. He noted that such attempts by historians and government committees have had limited success.

Stanford University historian Peter Duus explained: "Writing a common history is not feasible politically because the teaching of history in East Asian countries is tied to building and strengthening national identity."

Instead, Stanford researchers felt it was more fruitful to "try to recognise and understand how each society has developed its own distinctive memory of the past, and how that has affected its national identity and relations with others", commented Prof Shin.

Prof Duus and Prof Shin were writing in separate chapters included in a soon-to-be-published edited volume on the textbook study. Parts of the book were seen by The Sunday Times.

To facilitate the textbook study, researchers translated into English the most widely circulated high school history textbooks used in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the U.S.

Focusing on the period from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1931 until the formal end of the Pacific War with the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951, the researchers selected eight historical issues for translation.

These included the Japanese capture and occupation of Nanjing, China in 1937 and the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945.

Researchers included the US in the textbook study because of its participation in the Pacific War, as well as its role in shaping post-war dynamics in the region.

Looking at the translated textbook excerpts side by side would allow people to compare how historical memory is shaped in the different school systems for the first time, said Mr. Sneider.

The team then brought together historians and textbook writers, including those from Japan and China, in a conference in February last year to analyse the treatment of history in thetextbooks, and their impact on regional relations.

The experts found that the region's history texts were far from objective.

"Textbooks have been written specifically to promote a sense of national identity, and the politics of nationalism invariably affects their writing," wrote Professor Shin.

Both Taiwan and mainland China textbooks, for example, play up the victory over colonialism and imperialism. But while "both agree the defeat of the Japanese army ended a century of humiliation and established China as an international power, the path to victory is described differently and so is the outcome," Professor Duus commented.

The deepest disagreements between the mainland and Taiwanese textbooks are about the nature and effectiveness of Chinese resistance to the Japanese. The Chinese texts played down the role of the Kuomintang, while the Taiwanese texts make scant mention of the Chinese Communist Party's guerilla bases.

Compared with the Taiwanese textbooks, the Chinese texts dwelled on the brutality of the Japanese military in more graphic detail.

American textbooks, in general, were better than the Asian textbooks at encouraging critical thought. "You have a debate over the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, or discussions of the events that led to Pearl Harbour, for example," Mr Sneider noted.

In contrast with Chinese and US textbooks, the tone in Japanese textbooks is "muted, neutral, bland", Prof Duus wrote. While they make no effort to conceal the brutality of Japanese forces towards occupied peoples, they do not give students much of an analytical construct to understand events, observed Mr. Sneider.

What the study made obvious was that the problem was not just with the Japanese historytextbooks, even though they have received most of the criticism. Experts point out that the textbooks which whitewashed wartime abuses are used in less than 2 per cent of Japanese schools.

"This is a problem for everybody," said Mr Sneider. "We are all participants in creating a divided, and to some degree, implicitly distorted understanding of the past."

The edited volume on the textbook study - which includes discussions from the February 2008 conference, and translated textbook excerpts - will be out next year. A teaching supplement based on the textbook study has been prepared for use by high school teachers in the US.

Mr Sneider said researchers hoped their work would show that "we need to take a dispassionate, comparative approach to history that recognises there is no single historical truth that everybody has to subscribe to".

He added: "There is room for discussion which can hopefully lead to reconciliation."

Berkeley and Stanford - Climate change could increase the likelihood of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa by over 50 percent within the next two decades, according to a new study led by a team of researchers at University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, New York University and Harvard University, and published in today's (Monday, Nov. 23) online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study provides the first quantitative evidence linking climate change and the risk of civil conflict. It concludes by urging accelerated support by African governments and foreign aid donors for new and/or expanded policies to assist with African adaptation to climate change.

"Despite recent high-level statements suggesting that climate change could worsen the risk of civil conflict, until now we had little quantitative evidence linking the two," said Marshall Burke, the study's lead author,  a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and research associate at the Program on Food Security and the Environment. "Unfortunately, our study finds that climate change could increase the risk of African civil war by over 50 percent in 2030 relative to 1990, with huge potential costs to human livelihoods."

"We were definitely surprised that the linkages between temperature and recent conflict were so strong," said Edward Miguel, professor of economics at UC Berkeley and faculty director of UC Berkeley's Center for Evaluation for Global Action. "But the result makes sense. The large majority of the poor in most African countries depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and their crops are quite sensitive to small changes in temperature.  So when temperatures rise, the livelihoods of many in Africa suffer greatly, and the disadvantaged become more likely to take up arms."

Understanding the causes and consequences of civil strife in much of the African continent has been a major focus of the social sciences for decades, said Miguel, given the monumental suffering has resulted from it.

In the study, the researchers first combined historical data on civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa with rainfall and temperature records across the continent. They found that between 1980 and 2002, civil wars were significantly more likely in warmer-than-average years, with a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature in a given year raising the incidence of conflict across the continent by nearly 50 percent.

Building on this historical relationship between temperature and conflict, the researchers then used projections of future temperature and precipitation change to quantify future changes in the likelihood of African civil war. Based on climate projections from 20 global climate models, the researchers found that the incidence of African civil war could increase 55 percent by 2030, resulting in an additional 390,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars.

All climate models project rising temperatures in coming decades, said David Lobell, study co-author and an assistant professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford and center fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment.

"On average, the models suggest that temperatures over the African continent will increase by a little over 1 degree Celsius by 2030," he added. "Given the strong historical relationship between temperature rise and conflict, this expected future rise in temperature is enough to cause big increases in the likelihood of conflict."

To confirm that this projection was not the result of large effects in just a few countries or due to overreliance on a particular climate model, the researchers recalculated future conflict projections using alternate data.  "No matter what we tried - different historical climate data, different climate model projections, different subsets of the conflict data - we still found the same basic result," said Lobell.

It's easy to think of climate change as a long way off, said the researchers, but their study shows how sensitive many human systems are to small increases in temperature, and how fast the negative impacts of climate change could be felt.

"Our findings provide strong impetus to ramp up investments in African adaptation to climate change, for instance by developing crop varieties less sensitive to extreme heat and promoting insurance plans to help protect farmers from adverse effects of the hotter climate," said Burke.

Applying findings from this study could prove useful to policy makers at the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December in determining both the speed and magnitude of response to climate change, the authors said.

"If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering," said Burke.

November 9, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For most, the historic event has come to symbolize the end of the Cold War, but for the Germans living there then and now, 1989 represents a turning point in an era that continues to shape their culture. Modern European historian and Stanford history professor James J. Sheehan and Amir Eshel, a Stanford professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, reflect on the consequences of this important anniversary through their distinct research perspectives. Professor Eshel is Director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research focuses include German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. Professor Sheehan has written widely on the history of Germany, including the relationship between aesthetic ideas, cultural institutions, and museum architecture in nineteenth century Germany. His most recent book, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, considers problems in European international history.

Which facets of Cold War history do you find most compelling?

JS: A great deal of work has been done on the origins of the Cold War, but I am more interested in two other questions: Why did it last so long? and Why did it end when (and how) it did? The Cold War could have ended (along with a great deal else) if there had been a military conflict between the superpowers. And while there were some close calls, this did not happen. Instead, there were a number of proxy wars that created a great deal of damage in their immediate environments, but did not lead to a U.S.-Soviet war. Why not? In large measure, I think, because both sides created and sustained a stable order in Europe, the one part of the world where their land armies faced one another.

The Cold War ended, and ended peacefully, when Gorbachev decided to allow this European order to collapse. He based this decision on an extraordinary miscalculation: that the Soviet regime could survive in a new Europe, taking advantage of Western Europe's economic resources and dynamism without abandoning the Communist Party's leading role in the state. By the time it was clear that would not happen, it was too late to go back. The Cold War ended the way most wars end, with the defeat of one side, a largely peaceful defeat to be sure, but a defeat nonetheless.

AE: I am fascinated by those cases in which people living under totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe stood up against their oppressors, often knowing that their own political actions were bound to fail. The cases of the 1953 uprising in the GDR, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring will always inspire us and force us to acknowledge that even in situations that seem to exclude human agency, individuals and groups can exercise their ability to act and their wish to live freely.

Why is it valuable to examine how both the rise and fall of the Wall impacted culture in Germany and even throughout Europe?

JS: Obviously the Wall shaped East German culture and, to some extent, continues to do so. I am less convinced that the Wall was of central importance for the West. Many West Germans tended to forget about the East, the possibilities of unification seemed remote, the attractions of Western Europe much more compelling. A major impact of the Wall's fall on both Germanies was to reveal how far they had grown apart.Many West Germans tended to forget about the East, the possibilities of unification seemed remote, the attractions of Western Europe much more compelling. A major impact of the Wall's fall on both Germanies was to reveal how far they had grown apart.

AE: It’s valuable because the building of the Wall was not only the result of the communist regime’s will to stop the flight of its own people to the West but also the result of the West’s inability to effectively counter what is now universally acknowledged as an unbearable crime. The Wall is a lesson in the history of tyranny but also in the inability to face up to tyrants. The mistakes of those who allowed the Wall to be built may be repeated in the future. Learning what happened before, during and after the building of the Wall in 1961 may help us avoid the emergence of similar repressive artifacts in the future.

The fall of the Wall, on the other hand, gives us many lessons regarding the ability of political actors – on both sides of the East-West divide – to overcome, by way of decisive actions, decades-long tyranny.

How do you approach such a far-reaching era of history in a research project?

JS: It is important to see the end of the Cold War in the light of long-range trends, especially changes in global economic institutions. At the same time, we should try to understand the human impact of these events. In her recent book on 1989, Mary Elise Sarotte describes how East Germans fleeing to the West in the fall of 1989 threw away their Eastern currencies as they reached the border. It seems to me that this episode captures the intersection of deep structural transformations and immediate human experience. Money, including the physical appearance of East German coins, the "welcome money" given to East German arrivals in the West, and of course, the 1-1 exchange of East for West Marks, had an extraordinary symbolic and practical significance for this story.

AE: I study the ways in which literature and the arts reflect on the past. In the case of postwar German literature, the past consists of the two totalitarian regimes that dominated Germany in the twentieth century: Nazism and Communism. It is to a significant extent by way of revisiting the past, I believe, that cultures and socio-political institutions evolve. In telling and retelling what occurred in Europe during the twentieth century, postwar German literature (one of my main subjects of interest) made a substantial contribution to the creation of the modern, progressive Germany we know today.

Could you describe examples of how the Wall, and what it represented, influenced German cultural and aesthetic works created during its existence?

JS: East Germany had a vibrant literary culture and produced a great many novels that reflect the experience of the Wall. I especially admire Christa Wolf's Divided Heaven. Her career illustrates both the accomplishments and the limitations of culture in a society like the GDR. Since 1989, there has been a great deal of work reflecting on the meaning of the Wall. I just read Uwe Tellkamp's novel, Der Turm, which is set in and around Dresden in the late 1980s. It is a remarkable book in many ways, a sprawling family saga as well as a sharp political portrait of the regime's last days.

AE: The Wall played a crucial role in the writing of such significant writers as Christa Wolf (of the former GDR) and Peter Schneider (of the Federal Republic of Germany). In novels such as Divided Heaven (1963), Wolf gave us a lasting image of life in the shadow of the Wall. In The Wall Jumper, Schneider made the absurdity of an edifice such as the Wall painfully tangible. Yet, a novel like Ian McEwan’s The Innocent makes it clear that the Wall and the division of Germany also left a significant mark on European literature as such. In recent years, films like "The Lives of Others" began exploring the meaning of the East-West divide and the lasting impact of European totalitarian regimes on the lives of individuals and societies.

During the course of your work what kind of evidence have you encountered that illustrates how the Wall impacted the legacy of European Jews?

JS: East and West Germany dealt with the legacy of Nazism--and the meaning of the Holocaust--in quite different ways. East and West Germany dealt with the legacy of Nazism--and the meaning of the Holocaust--in quite different ways. In the GDR, Nazism was seen as a particularly toxic form of fascism, that is, an expression of capitalism's structural crisis. From this perspective, the racial dimensions of Nazism did not seem central: there was, for instance, very little about the Holocaust in the exhibitions on Nazism in the old East German museum of German History. Like the museum itself, this view of Nazism is now largely gone.

AE: The Jewish community of both the GDR and the Federal Republic was rather small when the Wall was built. While the Federal Republic accepted early on the German responsibility for Nazism, the GDR regarded itself as representing the legacy of the ‘better Germany’ that is of the German left. This has been as many scholars have since claimed, the foundational myth of the GDR. In the decades following the building of the Wall, the issue for German-Jewish relations was less the East-West divide and more finding ways to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust, acknowledging the crimes of the Nazis and developing a German-Jewish dialogue based on mutual respect and different memories. However, one of the most significant contemporary German-Jewish authors is Barbara Honigmann, who in her writing also reflects on what it meant for her and others like her to grow up and come to age as a Jew in the GDR.

From the perspective of your research, what do you feel are the most lasting implications of the Berlin Wall today?

JS: In the euphoric days after the fall of the Wall, many people underestimated the material and spiritual difficulties of unification. It is not surprising that, after 40 years apart, the two Germanies have only slowly grown together. Like parts of the American south after the Civil War, parts of the old GDR have a nostalgic view of the "good old days" before 1989. This has an impact on German culture, especially in Berlin. A more lasting implication is the Left Party, a somewhat improbable alliance of Western German leftwing Social Democrats and the former East German Party of Democratic Socialism.

AE: The Wall will always remain a symbol of tyranny. It will also continue to remind us what fantasies about a ‘perfect’ human society such as those that guided the Soviet Union and the GDR may end up producing: endless human misery and the creation of enclosed, repressive political systems.

Do you believe there’s still more to learn from this transformative period of history?

JS: Historians always believe there is more to learn. In the case of 1989, I think one lesson is how often history surprises us. No one expected the Wall to fall so suddenly and so peacefully, just as no one expected the Soviet Union to collapse with such speed. Nor has the post-Cold War world turned out quite the way many people expected.

AE: Absolutely. The learning about the nature and the challenges of totalitarian thought and totalitarian regimes has just begun. Contemporary totalitarian regimes across the globe such as Iran, Syria, Myanmar or North Korea make the study of the Wall and how we—those living in open societies may react to them—crucial for the freedom of millions who suffer by those regimes. The study of the Wall and of such regimes may also prove crucial for our survival given the fact that these regimes strive to acquire deadly military capacities.

J.P. Schnapper-Casteras, a recent CISAC fellow, argues in the Washington Post that despite the potential long-term benefits, only a few dozen Iraqis are able to study in the United States each year. By comparison, during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged 50,000 citizens over 30 years, producing more educated students and some of the most pro-Western and pro-democracy Soviet scholars and scientists.

IRBIL, Iraq -- Speaking at Cairo University in June, President Obama pledged to "expand exchange programs and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America." Nowhere is that change more urgently needed than in providing educational opportunities in Iraq.

Studying abroad has been a formative experience for the Iraqi leaders who have done it, and the experience can yield long-term benefits for economic development, public diplomacy, and the struggle for hearts and minds. Despite the enormous time and effort that have been invested in establishing long-term stability and democracy in Iraq, only a few dozen Iraqis are able to study in the United States each year. By comparison, consider that during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged 50,000 citizens over 30 years, producing more educated students and some of the most pro-Western and pro-democracy Soviet scholars and scientists.

Young men and women in Iraq are hungry for an opportunity to study in the United States. In August I visited Salahaddin University in northern Iraq, where numerous students approached me in 121-degree heat to talk at length about their dreams of studying in America. One father even offered to sell his home to fund his son's education in the States. Four years ago, during the height of the sectarian civil war in Iraq, a group of Iraqi undergraduates twice braved the treacherous roads from Iraq to Jordan to participate in a Stanford University exchange program that I was running.

Iraqi officials understand the importance of enabling their students to study in the United States. Parliament has pledged $1 billion to fund the education of 50,000 Iraqi students overseas, and several Kurdish officials told me this summer that they would help finance new scholarships and exchanges. But they need help from the United States to make this possible.

President Obama and Congress should take three steps to expand educational exchanges with Iraq:

• Prioritize and facilitate visas for Iraqi students. Today, Iraqis must travel to Baghdad or neighboring countries, at great personal risk and cost, to apply for a visa. And there are too many sad stories of visas inexplicably delayed or otherwise gone awry. Washington should let students complete parts of their visa application at U.S. facilities outside Baghdad, in safer parts of the country.
• Collaborate with a broader coalition of American universities to reduce tuition for Iraqi students. The State Department also should partner with Iraqi nongovernmental organizations, social entrepreneurs and private colleges to meet the soaring demand for English-language instruction and to independently screen scholarship applicants.

With those two reforms, 200 more Iraqi students would immediately be ready to study in America, says Ahmed Dezaye, director of cultural relations for the Kurdistan Regional Government Ministry of Higher Education. While it may still be easier to recruit and process students from majority-Kurdish provinces than other, more volatile, areas, this would be a good start.

• Support the American University of Iraq, which has received less than $10 million from Washington though the government has spent billions on other projects. That university, in Sulaymaniyah, has already become one of a handful of liberal arts colleges in the region and attracted widespread student interest. With more funds, it could draw more American educators and students to safe parts of northern Iraq to teach English and other subjects as well as to learn about Iraqi history and culture.

Countless Iraqi students yearn for the chance to study a broad range of subjects in the United States and apply what they have learned back home. Ultimately, investing in education here can shape America's legacy in Iraq by giving young Iraqis new opportunities, perspectives -- and perhaps even some measure of hope.

The writer, a graduate of Stanford Law School and former fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, founded the Stanford-Iraq Student Exchange.

Jeremy M. Weinstein, an associate professor of political science, has been appointed Director for Democracy at the National Security Council (NSC). He will be responsible for democracy and governance-related issues and formulate broader U.S. government policies on global development.

"Jeremy brings a brilliant mind, inexhaustible energy, political savvy, and superb social science skills to his new position at the National Security Council," said Larry Diamond, director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). "In addition, his recent service on the Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs and his field research and experiments on governance in Africa should help him bring a creative approach to U.S. policies to advance democracy and improve governance around the world."

Weinstein's new position follows four other Stanford FSI appointments to the Obama administration. Political Science Professor Michael McFaul and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a former senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), also work at the NSC as special assistants to the President. McFaul heads Russian and Eurasian affairs and Sherwood-Randall is responsible for European affairs. Law Professor Mariano-Florentino Cuellar serves on the White House Domestic Policy Council in charge of directing criminal justice and immigration policy, and Paul Stockton, a former CISAC senior research scholar, is an assistant secretary of defense responsible for homeland defense and Americas' security affairs.

Weinstein, who is on leave from Stanford, is a faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. His academic research focuses on civil wars, ethnic politics, the political economy of development, democracy and Africa.

Political Science Professor Scott D. Sagan, CISAC co-director, said although Weinstein is one of the nation's leading scholars on African politics his interests and expertise are much broader. "Jeremy has written compelling studies of the causes of civil war and the roots of conflict resolution and democratic reform," he said. "He will bring important insights from social science and history to help Washington policy-makers address complex policy problems throughout the developing world."

FSI Director Coit D. "Chip" Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies, who served under former President Bill Clinton, said the Obama administration is fortunate to have someone of Weinstein's caliber. "Jeremy's intellectual drive, his field experience with conflict-ridden countries, and his passion for democracy and better governance will help strengthen U.S. relations with states in transition and improve prospects for political and economic advance."

In 2008, during Obama's campaign, Weinstein served as an advisor on development and democracy. He continued working during the transition as a member of the National Security Policy Working Group and the Foreign Assistance Agency Review Team.

Weinstein, 34, is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, which received the 2008 William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. His most recent book is Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action, published in 2009. He has also published articles in a variety of journals including Foreign Affairs, the American Political Science Review (APSR), the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Policy and the Journal of Democracy. Two articles in APSR, titled, "Handling and Manhandling Civilians in Civil War" and "Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision," received, respectively, the 2005 Sage Prize and 2007 Gregory Luebbert Award, and the 2008 Heinz Eulau Award and the 2008 Michael Wallerstein Award. In 2008, Weinstein also received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford.

Weinstein earned a bachelor's with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1997, and a master's and doctorate in political economy and government from Harvard University in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He is a native of Palo Alto, California.