On November 13-14, 2006, SPRIE and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) together with the School of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, co-sponsored "High Tech Regions 2.0: Sustainability and Reinvention," a workshop at Stanford University.

Scholars met during the two-day event to present research papers and discuss their work at the nine workshop sessions.

The central topic, explored in extensive discussions, was the sustainability of high tech regions, both here in the United States and around the world. Several sessions were devoted to case studies of regional high tech centers: Silicon Valley, Hsinchu (Taiwan), Daedeok (South Korea) and a number of cities in mainland China.

Other sessions investigated the role of government policy in the creation, survival and evolution of high tech regions, as well as the impact of innovation strategies on regional networks.

Select materials from the workshop will be made public in the future and will be available on the SPRIE web site.

Julie Veroff, a senior in the CDDRL Honors Program, has been named a Rhodes Scholar. She is one of 32 American men and women selected each year for this prestigious award, the oldest and best known for international study, which provides for two to three years of graduate study at the University of Oxford in England. Veroff plans to begin a M.Phil. program in development studies at Oxford next fall.

Veroff has done volunteer work on behalf of women's and refugees' rights in Nicaragua, Ghana, and Zambia through a United Nations partner organization focusing on refugee empowerment. At Stanford she is majoring in international relations, and will be working closely for the rest of this academic year with her advisor, CDDRL faculty affiliate James D. Fearon, on her honors thesis project, The Impact of Elections on Peace Durability and Quality of Democracy After Civil Wars. This fall Veroff had the opportunity to interview one of CDDRL's Stanford Summer Fellows in Democracy and Development, Luhiriri Byamungu, a human rights lawyer from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The CDDRL Honors Program offers students majoring in International Relations the opportunity to conduct an independent research project focused on issues of democracy, development, and the rule of law under CDDRL faculty guidance. Such a project requires a high degree of initiative and dedication, significant amounts of time and energy, and demonstrated skills in research and writing. Honors students present a formal defense of their theses in mid-May of their senior year.

Students interested in the CDDRL Honors Program should consult with prospective honors advisers in their junior year and plan to submit their honors thesis proposal in the spring quarter of that year. Choosing courses that provide academic background in an applicant's area of inquiry and demonstrating an ability to conduct independent research are prerequisites for the program, as are a 3.5 grade-point average and strong overall academic record. Required coursework includes INTNL REL199, an honors research seminar that focuses on democracy, development, and the rule of law in developing countries.

FSI convened its second annual international conference on November 16, bringing scholars from across the university together with visiting security experts, policymakers, members of the international community, and practitioners in the fields of political science, economics, law, business, and medicine. The theme of this year's conference was "A World at Risk," juxtaposing debate and discussion on hard security issues such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and failed states with problems presented by "softer" security threats such as pandemic diseases, energy shocks, natural disasters, and food security and the environment.

The conference opened with welcoming remarks from Stanford Provost John Etchemendy and FSI director Coit D. Blacker, who shared their perspectives on pressing global issues and their sense of how Stanford's mission of interdisciplinary research and teaching fits into a changing world. Rounding out the opening session were remarks from former secretary of defense William J. Perry and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and George Shultz. Secretary Perry analyzed how security threats have evolved in the 10 years since he was secretary of defense, while Secretary Christopher addressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and need for renewed diplomacy and Secretary Shultz discussed the opportunity and imperative for the United States to assume a global leadership role. The three secretaries' institutional knowledge and experience collectively established a rich context for discussion in the plenary and breakout sessions that followed.

The morning and afternoon plenary sessions offered scholarly analysis of two types of risk, with the morning session focusing on systemic issues - measuring risk, managing the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and controlling fissile materials - and the afternoon, on human security issues - improving the resiliency of critical infrastructure and managing energy shocks to oil, natural gas, and electricity markets. Plenary I was moderated by Coit D. Blacker, with Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Scott D. Sagan, and Siegfried S. Hecker as panelists; Plenary II was moderated by Michael A. McFaul, with Stephen E. Flynn and David G. Victor as panelists.

Drawing on Pate-Cornell's earlier discussion of statistical risk analysis, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, assured conference participants over lunch that unlike other issues being debated that day, the risk of a human influenza pandemic "is one; it is going to happen...the issue is what will it mean when it happens." His assessment showed how our global just-in-time economy makes our world extremely vulnerable to an influenza pandemic. This vulnerability, Osterholm argued, will need to be managed on a local level through family preparedness, community leadership, and business preparedness and continuity.

Overlapping breakout sessions followed the morning and afternoon plenary sessions, allowing for interaction and dialogue in smaller, less formal settings. FSI's five centers and two of FSI's programs sponsored sessions that drilled down into some of the issues discussed in the larger forum throughout the day, including:

• Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP): "Food Security and the Environment"
  Rosamond L. Naylor, Kenneth Cassman, and Scott Rozelle
• Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR): "Pandemics, Infectious Diseases, and Bioterrorism"
  Alan M. Garber, Michael Osterholm, Douglas K. Owens, and Lawrence M. Wein
• Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC): "Insurgencies, Failed States, and the Challenge of Governance"
  Jeremy M. Weinstein, Larry Diamond, and Stephen J. Stedman
• Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL): "Responding to a World at Risk: U.S. Efforts at Democracy Promotion in Russia, Iraq, and Iran"
  Michael A. McFaul, Abbas Milani, David S. Patel, and Kathryn Stoner
• Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE): "The European Union: Politics, Economics, Terrorism"
  Amir Eshel, Josef Joffe, Hugo Paemen, and James J. Sheehan
• Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD): "China's Rise: Implications for the World Economy and Energy Markets"
  Thomas C. Heller, Fred Hu, and Edgard Habib
• Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC): "Cross Currents: Nationalism and Regionalism in Northeast Asia"
  Daniel C. Sneider, Michael H. Armacost, Gi-Wook Shin, and Xiyu Yang

The conference concluded with a cocktail reception and dinner. Peter Bergen, CNN's counterterrorism analyst and the first Western journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, offered closing remarks on the successes and failures in the war on terrorism since 9/11.

It is tempting to dismiss President Bush's travel through Southeast Asia as aimless floating by a doubly lame duck. Getting things done will be harder without either the right to run for a third term in 2008 or the support of a legislative majority between now and then. But if that means having to work with others, at home and abroad, these new limits could be a virtuous necessity -- an opportunity to shed his administration's my-way-or-the-highway image and reverse the squandering of American legitimacy and leverage around the world.

Asia is a good place to begin rebalancing U.S. foreign policy because it is huge, it is dynamic -- and it is not Iraq. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that the president is attending in Vietnam this weekend includes leaders from 21 economies that jointly account for 56, 48, and 40 percent, respectively, of global GDP, trade and population. Since 1989, the forum's economies have grown 26 percent compared with 8 percent for the rest of the world. The Middle East looks trivial by comparison.

The Middle East also lacks a tradition of successful multilateral cooperation. But if the Arab League has accomplished little, Southeast Asia is an exemplar of regional harmony. Cynical observers may deride as mere "talk shops" the many overlapping frameworks that span or involve Southeast Asia. On its calendar of events in 2005 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations listed 612 meetings. But talking is better than fighting, and no two ASEAN members have made war on each other since the group was formed nearly 40 years ago.

Northeast Asia is another matter. There is no ANEAN -- no Association of Northeast Asian Nations. Mistrust among China, Japan and South Korea is still too deep. But North Korea's decision to rejoin the Six-Party Talks (among China, Japan, Russia, the two Koreas, and the United States) has revived the prospect that these conversations could evolve into a framework for broader security in Northeast Asia. Of the six, all but North Korea will attend the economic summit this weekend in Hanoi. On the sidelines of that event, President Bush and his delegation should discuss with these five counterparts a possible shared strategy on North Korea when the talks reconvene, probably in China later this year.

Another key goal for the president on this trip should be helping to revitalize APEC. The "Doha round" of global trade liberalization has run aground. Without a last-minute push, APEC's goals of "free trade" among advanced economies by 2010 and among developing ones by 2020 will not be met. Meanwhile, bilateral trade agreements among APEC members have proliferated. The result is a "noodle bowl" of inconsistent arrangements that may, on balance, divert as much trade as they create. There is, for example, no consistent definition of the "rules of origin" that determine which items benefit from lowered barriers and which do not. Without lowering the quality of all these many bilaterals to their lowest common denominator -- i.e., the least liberal arrangement any signatory will accept -- an effort should be made to link and standardize them so that trade flows are enlarged and not merely redirected.

This may seem like a non-starter. On Monday, the House of Representatives failed to approve permanent normal trade relations with Vietnam. And that was even before the newly elected and arguably more protectionist Democratic majority is seated in January. But progress can still be made in Vietnam.

An advantage of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit for the United States is that it includes both China and Taiwan, and excludes the repressive regime in Burma. But APEC's uniquely trans-Pacific character is a more important political reason for strengthening the grouping. While APEC has lagged, East Asian regionalism has boomed. That has been good for East Asia. But U.S. and East Asian interests alike could be hurt if the Pacific Ocean ends up being split between rival Chinese and American spheres of influence.

The risk of gridlocked government should not keep the United States from seeking to deepen Asia-Pacific economic and political cooperation. The Bush administration may be a lame duck. But even a healthy duck needs a tranquil pond.

Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum in the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He wrote this article for the Mercury News which was printed on Sunday, November 19, 2006. Reprinted with permission from the San Jose Mercury News.