China's rapid growth and increasingly close integration with world markets is transforming Northeast and Southeast Asian regional production and trade. Southeast Asia's relatively resource-abundant economies are expected to lose comparative advantage in low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing activities while gaining comparative advantage in natural resource products. The latter shift will increase incentives to exploit and export the products of forestry, fisheries, and agriculture.

What are the implications for long-run growth and welfare, particularly in the poorest and least industrialized economies, including Indonesia and Vietnam? How will this trend interact with the other major phenomenon sweeping through Southeast Asia, i.e., decentralization? With reduced national authority and minimal local accountability, the potential for disastrous rates of resource exploitation is high. A race to liquidate natural resource assets, if sufficiently pronounced, could expose parts of the region to a new variant of the "natural resource curse" - the idea that resource-abundant economies grow more slowly than others.

Ian Coxhead is an economist and serves as director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His specialty is the economic development of Southeast Asia. His many publications on trade, development and the environment include The Open Economy and the Environment: Development, Trade and Resources in Asia (2003, with Sisira Jayasuriya). Prof. Coxhead's current research features the impacts of globalization, regional growth, and domestic policy reforms on the structures of production and employment, issues of poverty and the environment, and the exploitation of natural resources in Vietnam and the Philippines.

Since Vietnam, the US Army has focused an unprecedented degree of effort on capturing lessons learned in training and on the battlefield and communicating them to other affected units. The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), established after Operation URGENT FURY, is the prime example of the Army's efforts to institutionalize the process of learning during the Cold War. CALL continues to function and provide lessons learned in the current Global War on Terror, while other grassroots organizations have sprung up within the Army to target the learning needs of specific segments of the force. One such organization is CompanyCommand.com, an online professional forum of Army leaders dedicated to outstanding leadership at the small-unit level. This talk will discuss the evolution of organizational learning in the Army since Vietnam, and examine how organizations like CALL and CompanyCommand complement one other in the pursuit of excellence.

Captain Raymond A. Kimball is a native of Reading, Pennsylvania, and was commissioned through the United States Military Academy in 1995. After completing initial officer and flight training, he was assigned to the 1st Battalion (Attack), 10th Aviation Regiment, at Fort Drum, New York in November 1996. While assigned to the 10th Mountain Division, he served as an aeroscout platoon leader and logistics and support officer. In those positions, he participated in the full range of Army operations, from home station training to counter-drug operations along the Mexican border to peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In May of 2001, after completing further officer training, he reported to the 3rd Infantry Division, where he was assigned to the 3rd Squadron, 7th U.S. Cavalry. He took command of F Troop, 3-7 Cavalry in July of 2001. The troop consisted of 88 soldiers and $6 million in equipment and was responsible for all aspects of support and maintenance for the squadron's sixteen scout helicopters. In January of 2003, the troop deployed as part of 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, to Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. During combat operations the troop supported 870 flight hours over a period of twenty-one days while moving 700 kilometers through enemy territory without the loss of a single soldier. He gave up command of F Troop in June of 2003 and returned to the United States to begin graduate studies in history at Stanford. In addition to his coursework, he serves as a research assistant to the Preventive Defense Project in CISAC. For the past two years, he has also served as a Topic Lead and advisor to CompanyCommand.com. His next assignment will be as an Associate Professor of History at the United States Military Academy. His awards include the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, and the Humanitarian Service Medal. He is married to the former Mindy Hynds of Vacaville, California; they have one son, Daniel.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is a doctoral candidate at Yale University and a CISAC social science fellow. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled "Between the Storms: An International History of the Second Indochina War, 1968-1973," for which she did multiarchival research in Vietnam, the United States, and Europe. She has two upcoming chapters in volumes on the First and Third Indochina Wars, to be published by the presses at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, respectively. She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Association for Asian Studies, and she serves on the executive committee of the Vietnam Studies Group. She received an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard's government has strongly reaffirmed the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-US) alliance and his country's cultural ties to Europe. Critics have replied that these policies impede the development of Australian relations with Southeast Asia, especially now that the US is so unpopular in much of the region. How valid is the critique? And how will likely trends in Southeast Asia and the outcome of the American presidential election affect Australia's search for a balance between its proximity to Asia and its alliance with America? In addition to addressing these questions, Dr. Engel will argue that in making foreign policy, identity politics need not be sacrificed to or precluded by pragmatic interest. In Southeast Asian international relations, rhetoric and realism hardly rule each other out.

Dr. David Engel's responsibilities at the Australian Embassy in Washington include policies toward Southeast Asia. He has directed the Indonesia section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2001-03) in Canberra, served in Jakarta (1998-2001) and Phnom Penh (1993-95), and worked on Australia's relations with Vietnam and Laos as well. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1989.

This is the Forum's 1st seminar of the 2004-2005 Academic Year

Journalism in Southeast Asia is triply constrained. In a given country, the regime in power may impose censorship or induce self-censorship. Outraged by an article, headline, or photograph, a threatening mob can achieve the same result. Concern for the bottom line may pressure commercial media to avoid "serious" analyses in favor of "lighter" stories with ostensibly greater reader, listener, or viewer appeal. Violence and sex may be featured for the same material reason. What is it like to work under such constraints? What strategies are available to journalists for defeating or deflecting them? How do the news environments in Indonesia and Thailand differ in these respects? What about the prejudices and preferences of journalists themselves? How do all these limits, incentives, and propensities go into the making of the news in Southeast Asia? Yuli Ismartono is uniquely suited to answer these questions. As a correspondent for TEMPO, she covered wars in Cambodia and Sri Lanka, drugs in the Golden Triangle, the student uprising in Burma, the Soviet exit from Afghanistan, Russian elections, the first Gulf War, and events in Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and, of course, Indonesia. For five years while TEMPO was banned, she worked in television and corporate public relations while writing for The Indonesian Observer. Her current responsibilities as executive editor include managing TEMPOInteraktif (online news).

Widely regarded as a classic text of modern Vietnamese literature, Vu Trong Phung's The Storm (1936) is also the only colonial-era novel that features a leading member of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) as its main character. As a result, the novel provides rare insight into popular Vietnamese attitudes of the day toward communism and local communist activists. This issue merits attention because studies of early Vietnamese communism tend to approach the movement from the inside exclusively (by examining the institutional development of the Party and the lives and ideas of its leaders) while more or less ignoring perceptions of it from without. It is also important because the Party has long fostered a suspiciously monochromatic image of itself over time as an entity that is invariably modern, scientifically oriented, morally virtuous, socially based in the lower classes and deeply nationalistic. The process whereby this cluster of vaguely Stalinist attributes came to embody the transhistorical nature of the Party dovetailed with the consolidation of communist control over state power in northern Vietnam after 1954. Vu Trong Phung's The Storm, however, calls into question the historical continuity of the Party's character and reputation by presenting a pre-Stalinized portrait of the Vietnamese communist leadership. The recovery of this image is significant because of the likelihood that it reflected a widely held view of the movement during the late colonial era and because it is consistent with a fragmentary body of historical evidence about the nature of the ICP during its formative stage of development. Finally, a consideration of recent debates over the novel will reveal the limited extent to which the Party has been prepared, during the reform era, to tolerate the spread of unorthodox narratives of its origins and historical development. Peter Zinoman is associate professor of history and Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book - The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) - was awarded the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association in 2,002. He is currently working on a study of the writer Vu Trong Phung and the emergence of modernist movements in inter-war Vietnam. His most recent publication - Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Trong Phung (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) - is a translation of a vernacular-language satire of colonial society in Vietnam published originally in 1936.

Over the last two years in Southeast Asia, acts of terror done in the name of Islam have divided analysts into two broad camps. Academic specialists on Islam in Southeast Asia have tended to emphasize the moderation of the vast majority of Muslims in the region and the local roots of so-called jihadist violence there. While not denying the moderation of most Muslims, Western journalists and officials have relied more on intelligence reports and detainee confessions to situate Southeast Asian jihadists within a global terrorist network organized and inspired by Al Qaeda. Compared with Western journalists and officials, scholars have also tended to portray Islam as a basically tolerant religion and to seek nonreligious explanations and motivations for seemingly Islamist violence. If the scholars have had faith in explanatory contexts--distinctively local, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and political--their counterparts in media and policy circles have been more inclined to showcase conspiratorial texts: interrogation transcripts, recordings of clandestine conversations, and the selectively Koranic rhetoric of militant Islamists urging global jihad. Which of these contrasting perspectives is superior, analytically and as a basis for counter-terror policy? Are the perpetrators of apparently Islamist terror in Southeast Asia thinking and acting locally? Or globally? Is there a demonstrably Al Qaeda network in the region? If so, what sort of a structure is it? How does it operate? Can a "war" against it succeed? If not, what might be a better approach? Zachary Abuza is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Simmons College. His most recent book is Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001). Foreign-affairs journals that have published his work include Asian Survey and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He has spoken on Southeast Asian subjects before Congress, at the State Department, on Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour," and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Time, among other media. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1998. In 1995-96 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Hanoi.