China stands poised to become the world’s largest economy as soon as 2016. Unprecedented numbers of the world’s population, driven by Asian economic growth, are being lifted out of poverty and into the middle class. And with this creation of a world-wide middle class, there is an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values: a truly global civilization.
A full 88% of the world’s population lives outside the West and is rising to Western living standards, and sharing Western aspirations. But while the world changes, our way of managing it has not and it must evolve. The Great Convergence outlines new policies and approaches that will be necessary to govern in an increasingly interconnected and complex environment. Multilateral institutions and world-wide governing organizations must be strengthened. National interests must be balanced against global interests. The United States and Europe must share power and China, India, Africa and the Islamic world must be integrated. And the world’s increasing consumption must be balanced against environmental sustainability.
About the Speaker
From 1971 to 2004 Kishore Mahbubani served in the Singapore Foreign Ministry, where he was Permanent Secretary from 1993 to 1998, served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), and in January 2001 and May 2002 served as President of the UN Security Council.
Mahbubani is the author of Can Asians Think?, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, and The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.
Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have listed him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, and in 2009 the Financial Times included him on their list of Top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. In 2010 and 2011 he was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.
Philippines Conference Room
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Stanford Law School.
About the Topic: For most of human history, a pitched battle was deemed a lawful way of settling an international dispute--a kind of trial, with a kind of verdict. Today the idea of settling disputes by deliberately staging battles sounds utterly lawless. Yet the striking truth is that the battle warfare of the past was in important ways more civilized than the warfare of the present; and it is well worth asking whether we can still learn anything from the old forms of war. Those forms were founded on a forgotten species of the law of war. Modern law of war is humanitarian law, dedicated to preserving lives. But our ancestors' law of war was law of victory, dedicated to answering two legal questions: How do we know who won? What rights is the victor entitled to claim? Those questions sound coldblooded today, but they laid the groundwork for a practice of limited warfare.
About the Speaker: James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and specializes in comparative law, criminal law, and legal history. He is the author of several prizewinning books, including Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, and The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War. He has published several notable articles, "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty" which was published in the 2004 volume of The Yale Law Journal. Professor Whitman received a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
CISAC Conference Room
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday urged Stanford students to become global citizens, working together beyond borders for peace, security and a common prosperity.
"You may come from the United States or Korea, Japan or elsewhere, Arab countries, but you're now part of a global family," Ban said to a crowded auditorium during his campus visit. "Therefore, it's very important to raise your capacity as global citizens. Only then, I think we can say, we're living in a very harmoniously prosperous world."
Despite a troubling tally of crises around the world, Ban was hopeful about the future, and said he gains inspiration from the younger generation.
"Everything my life has taught me points to the power of international solidarity to overcome any obstacle," he said.
Ban's speech, sponsored by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, kicked off a series of events celebrating the 30th anniversary of the center.
Ban was introduced by former Secretary of Defense William Perry, an FSI senior fellow, who lauded Ban for his work on women's rights, climate change, nuclear disarmament and gay rights.
Ban told the audience that the world was undergoing massive changes and outlined three ways to navigate the transition: sustainable development, empowering young people and women, and pursuing dignity and democracy.
"The level and degree of global change that we face today is far more profound than at any other period in my adult lifetime," he said.
"We have no time to lose," he added later.
California, he said, has led on clean air legislation, creating a cap-and-trade law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"I am convinced national and state action can spur progress in global negotiations, creating a virtuous cycle," he said.
Sustainable development, Ban said, goes hand in hand with creating peace. Noting the problems in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly Syria, he said a country cannot be developed if there is no peace and security.
"Syria is in a death spiral," he said. He cited the toll the conflict has taken on Syria's citizens and surrounding countries since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011. More than 60,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed. Hundreds of thousands more have been displaced.
Ban spoke at Stanford as a hostage crisis also unfolded in the region.
In retaliation for military action by France in the West African nation of Mali, Islamist extremists in Algeria took several hostages at an international gas field Thursday. News organizations reported that the kidnappers and some hostages were killed in a raid by the Algerian government.
Ban spoke of the efforts by the United Nations to counter terrorism in Mali, where Islamist rebels last year took control in the north in the chaos following a military coup that ousted the elected government of President Amadou Toumani Touré.
"We must continue to work for peace," Ban said. "Our hard work cannot be reversed, especially for women and young people."
With half the world's population under the age of 25, Ban said the international community must support and empower that group.
Ban also said that fighting for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities was important in advancing peace and prosperity around the world.
"I have learned to speak out for one essential reason," he said. "Lives and fundamental values are at stake."
Ban told the students to harness a spirit of hope as they confront the challenges of the world.
For him, he said, that spirit was sparked by a visit to California decades ago. He reflected on an eight-day visit to the state in 1962, when he stayed with a family, the Pattersons, in Novato on a trip sponsored by the Red Cross.
"In many ways, I still carry the same energy and enthusiasm and sense of wonder that I did when I first landed on Miss Patterson's doorstep half a century ago," he said.
"I came back knowing what I wanted to do with my life and for my country," he said.
Ban said he still keeps in touch with his host, his "American mom," 95-year-old Libba Patterson, who was in the audience and stood to applause.
"It was here in California," he reflected to the students, "that I first felt I could grab the stars from the sky."
CISAC Conference Room
By drawing on several cases around the world, this book illuminates the role of crowdsourcing in policy-making. From crowdsourced constitution reform in Iceland and participatory budgeting in Canada, to open innovation for services and crowdsourced federal strategy process in the United States, the book analyzes the impact of crowdsourcing on citizen agency in the public sphere. It also serves as a handbook with practical advice for successful crowdsourcing in a variety of public domains.
The book describes the evolution of crowdsourcing in its multitude of forms from innovation challenges to crowd funding. Crowdsourcing is situated in the toolkit to deploy Open Government practices. The book summarizes the best practices for crowdsourcing and outlines the benefits and challenges of open policy-making processes.
The most heated historical debates in post-Communist Poland have been provoked by two books, Neighbors from 2000 and Fear from 2008. The author of these books, Jan T. Gross, challenged the Poles’ view of themselves as solely innocent victims of German Nazism, showing that anti-Semitism could and did lead Poles to kill Jews, both during and after the war. In her presentation, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa scrutinizes the Polish reactions to these books, analyses the rhetoric in Gross’ writings and discusses his role as “mnemonic actor” in Poland. She points out that the case of Gross raises the general question of the role of historical scholarship in society.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She leads the international research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” financed by the EU. Her research focus is nationalism, collective memory, myth and symbols in Central and Eastern Europe as well cultural integration in Europe. She publishes extensively on these subjects. She recently contributed to and edited two collections of essays entitled Cultural Transformations after Communism. Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Painful Pasts and Useful Memories. Remembering and Forgetting in Europe (2012).
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Building 200 (History Corner)
Room 307
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Lund, Sweden. Her research interest include nationalism, collective memory, myth and symbols in Central and Eastern Europe (with focus on Poland, Belarus and Ukraine) as well cultural integration in Europe. She has been involved in and coordinated a number of research projects on these issues. Currently she leads a large international research network called “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” financed by the EU (COST-programme) and the research project “Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern European Cities”. She is also Lund University’s coordinator for International Research Training Group (Greifswald – Lund – Tartu) “Baltic Borderlands”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Professor Törnquist-Plewa's publications include monographs The Wheel of Polish Fortune : Myths in Polish Collective Consciousness during the First Years of Solidarity, (1992) and Belarus: Language and Nationalism in Borderlands (in Swedish), (2001) and a number of articles and book chapters, the most recent one "Coming to Terms with anti-Semitism in Poland", European Cultural Memory Post-89, 2013 inv.30 in European Studies Series, Amsterdam: Rodopi. She contributed to and edited 14 collections of essays, the recent entitled Cultural Transformations after Communism. Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Painful Pasts and Useful Memories. Remembering and Forgetting in Europe, (2012).
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C235
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, a Professor of History and (by courtesy) of German Studies, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and (by courtesy) of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Norman formerly served as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division, the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program, the Convener of the European Forum (predecessor to The Europe Center), Chair of the History Department, and the Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Norman earned his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 1972 and before returning to join the faculty in 1988, he was a professor of history at Boston University and a fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He also held the visiting Catherine Wasserman Davis Chair of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1996), the Richard W. Lyman Award for outstanding faculty volunteer service (1995), and the Dean's Teaching Award from Stanford University for 1991-92 and 2002-3.
Norman is interested in modern Eastern European and Russian history and his research focuses on Soviet policies and actions in Europe after World War II and on genocide and ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. His published monographs on these topics include The History of the "Proletariat": The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870–1887 (1979, Columbia University Press), Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (1983, Harvard University Press), The Russians in Germany: The History of The Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (1995, Harvard University Press), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe (1998, Westview Press), Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing In 20th Century Europe (2001, Harvard University Press), Stalin's Genocides (2010, Princeton University Press), and Genocide: A World History (2016, Oxford University Press). Naimark’s latest book, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Harvard 2019), explores seven case studies that illuminate Soviet policy in Europe and European attempts to build new, independent countries after World War II.
