Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

Karl Eikenberry served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, working to stabilize the country and build a stronger foundation for democracy. In this interview with WUNC North Carolina Public Radion, Eikenberry says the challenge in Afghanistan is great as many question the validity of the intervention of American troops. Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, believes the humanities can provide an innovative approach to modern diplomacy.

Warning against the “dangers of excessive hubris,” former U.S. Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth emphasized the intricacies and complexity of creating American foreign policy and called for the government to exercise greater restraint and better understand the countries it engages with.

The veteran diplomat and visiting lecturer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies called for the United States to exercise greater self-restraint and better understand the history and current circumstances of countries it engages with. 

“The making of U.S. policy is inherently a very, very difficult enterprise,” said Bosworth, positioned at Stanford for winter quarter.

“The issues tend to be complex, and they frequently pose moral as well as political choices,” he said. “I found that perfection is usually the enemy of the good in the making of foreign policy and is, for the most part, unattainable.”

Foreign policy can be ambiguous and difficult at times; it is a process that can be compared to gardening because “you have to keep tending to it regularly,” Bosworth said, referencing former Secretary of State George Shultz’s well-known analogy.

Bosworth, who served for five decades in the U.S. government and for 12 years as dean of Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, delivered these thoughts in the first of three public seminars this quarter. He is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer in residence at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC).

He cautioned against America’s tendency to revert to military power when crisis occurs. “I believe that when at all possible, we need to choose diplomacy over force,” Bosworth asserted, “although it is sometimes true that diplomacy backed by potential force can be more effective.” 

Citing Afghanistan, Iraq and Southwest Asia, Bosworth noted these among other examples as situations of excessive power projected by the American foreign policy arm. In some cases, pride may have gotten the better of policymakers who sometimes “want to be seen as doers and solvers.”

Bosworth pointed out that the nature of our actions speaks loudly – both at home and abroad – thus sensitivity and sincerity are important in any international exchange.

Since the Vietnam War, American values and the push for democracy are not always well received by other countries. And there’s often good reason for that, he said.

“It is awkward for the U.S. to campaign for more democracy elsewhere when our own model seems to have increasing difficulty in producing reasonable solutions for our own problems,” he said.

Democracy is “not a cure-all” for every nation and this is reflected in the amended model adopted by countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and Burma. However, Bosworth said he remains confident that the American democratic system “will prevail and eventually work better than it seems to be working now.”

Bosworth will explore the challenges of maturing democracies in Japan and South Korea and negotiations and management of relations with North Korea in his two other Payne lectures. The Payne Lectureship brings prominent speakers to campus for their global reputation as visionary leaders, a practical grasp of a given field, and the capacity to articulate important perspectives on today’s global challenges.

Bosworth entered the Foreign Service in 1961, a difficult yet “exciting time to join the government,” he said.

“At the age of 21, I was the youngest person entering my class,” he said, “and of the 38 people, there were only two women…and were zero persons of color and only a handful who were not products of an Ivy League education.” The State Department of then is very different compared to the one that exists today; this signals positive, necessary change in the diplomatic corps.

Bosworth, having served three tours as a U.S. ambassador in South Korea (from 1997 to 2001); the Philippines (from 1984 to 1987); and Tunisia (from 1979 to 1981) and twice received the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award (in 1976 and 1986), has a long established career.

He brings great wisdom on foreign affairs given his extensive engagement as a practitioner and a writer, said former colleague and Shorenstein APARC distinguished fellow Michael H. Armacost.

“To say that Steve has had an extraordinarily distinguished career in the Foreign Service doesn't quite capture the range of his accomplishments, I can’t think of very many Foreign Service officers in this or any other generation that have left a footprint on big issues in three consecutive decades,” Armacost acknowledged. 

During his time at Stanford, Bosworth will hold seminars and mentor students who may be interested in pursuing a career in the Foreign Service, in addition to the two upcoming public talks.

A student seeking this very advice posed a question in the discussion portion following Bosworth’s talk.

Speaking to anyone considering a Foreign Service career, Bosworth said one must “think about it hard, and think again.” He said public service is a privilege, not so much a sacrifice as the typical notion holds. “It can be a great career as long as you have the right perspective on it,” he ended.

What if scientists engineer a virus that could help doctors design vaccines to prevent a global pandemic – but a blueprint of that very virus gets into the hands of terrorists who use it to build a biological weapon?

Should – and can – governments step in to mandate controls on such bioengineering? Or is it more effective to rely on the private sector to police itself and develop potentially life-saving biotechnologies without the shackles and bureaucracy of big government?

It’s a classic dual-use dilemma.

These are among the public policy questions Megan Palmer will tackle as an incoming More information on the Perry Fellowship. She intends to research the complex governance challenges accompanying increased access to biotechnology and how countries are directing their innovation and security strategies to favor centralized or distributed control of access to information and materials.

“Developments in biotechnology have been heralded as fueling an industrial revolution in the life sciences with significant economic potential,” said Palmer, who received her PhD in bioengineering from MIT. “Yet biotechnology can both pose and mitigate key security concerns, such as bioweapons development vs. deterrence and preparedness.”

Megan Palmer

Joining Palmer as Perry Fellows are Karl Eikenberry and Brad Roberts.

Eikenberry is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who led the civilian surge directed by President Obama from 2009 to 2011. Roberts, until recently, was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

“Karl, Megan and Brad are an exceptional trio, with expertise ranging from counterinsurgency to nuclear weapons to biosecurity,” said Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. “We are delighted that they will be joining the CISAC community and enhancing our efforts to tackle the world's most important security challenges."

Policy Scholars

Perry fellows reside at CISAC for a year of policy-relevant research on international security issues. They join other distinguished scientists, social scientists and engineers who collaborate on security problems that cannot be solved within any single field of study. The fellowship was established to honor Perry, the 19^th U.S. secretary of defense and former CISAC co-director, and to recognize his leadership in the cause of peace.

Eikenberry will focus on foreign interventions and counterinsurgency doctrine, as well as U.S.-Asia Pacific strategy and the rise of China and the future of NATO. He will also write and talk about the state of the humanities and social sciences in the United States.

Eikenberry, who has master’s degrees from Harvard in East Asian Studies and Stanford in political science, has become a vocal advocate for the humanities, which are on the wane as students turn toward computer science, technology and engineering. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he also earned an interpreter’s certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office and has an advanced degree in Chinese history from Nanjing University in China.

Karl Eikenberry

Eikenberry wants students to know that his humanities and social sciences education underpinned a long and meaningful career as an Army officer, diplomat and scholar.

“The humanities and social sciences help us understand the complex historical, geographic, economic, social, cultural and political roots of conflict, and they enable us to better consider the consequences of our policy decisions,” he said.

Roberts intends to explore the question of how to balance efforts to sustain an effective deterrent for the 21^st century with efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.

“Each U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has emphasized the importance of adapting the U.S. nuclear deterrent away from Cold War requirements and toward the future,” Roberts said. “But what does that mean in practice?”

Perry was a tenacious Cold War proponent of nuclear weapons as deterrence. Today, he is a supporter of Global Zero – the movement for a world without nuclear weapons. But how to get there has been a point of contention fueling CISAC research for years.

“How do we balance the effort to sustain an effective deterrent for 21^st century purposes with the effort to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons, while encouraging others to join us in taking steps toward the elimination of nuclear weapons?” Roberts said.

Roberts, who first worked with Perry in 2008 when the former secretary of defense chaired the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, said the fellowship would provide him the opportunity to develop his thinking on the issue of nuclear strategy and write a “short book for a broad audience.”

Palmer, who was previously a CISAC affiliate while doing postdoctoral studies in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford, will assess how public sector investments and government regulations related to genetic engineering are legitimized in terms of their prospective economic benefits and national security tradeoffs.

“It’s the intersection of biology and technology and how one navigates public policy,” she said. “How do you think about the changing landscape of power and politics as it becomes increasingly easier to engineer biology? It poses all sorts of complex governance challenges.”

Teachers and Mentors

CISAC’s mission is also to teach and mentor the next generation of security scholars and the three fellows meet that mandate.

Eikenberry will co-lead CISAC’s annual undergraduate honors college in Washington, D.C., in which a dozen seniors meet with politicians, journalists, military analysts, lobbyists and experts from the leading private and government agencies in the nation’s capital. The former general will continue as a pre-major advisor for six undergraduates.

Brad Roberts

Roberts is also looking forward to getting back to an academic environment.

“The fellowship also enables me to return to a significant mentoring role with students, for which there was very little time in government,” he said.

Before joining the government in 2009, Roberts worked full-time at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Va., and served for 15 years as an adjunct professor in the graduate school of international studies at George Washington University. He has also mentored young analysts in the United States and abroad under the auspices of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“In the nuclear policy community, I am part of a bridging generation – not a founding cold warrior but also not of the generation that has no memory of the Cold War – and I am enthusiastic for the opportunity to work with younger scholars to build expertise needed for the future,” Roberts said 

Palmer directs policy-related activities at Synberc site, a synthetic biology research consortium of UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Stanford, Harvard and MIT. She is also a judge for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, where 200 undergraduate teams from around the world design and build living organisms over the course of a summer.

“Because biology is by nature globally distributed, it is critical to train the generation of practitioners to work together to develop best practices that can be diffused across organizations – and borders,” she said.

The counterinsurgency plan in Afghanistan hinged on the assumption that the U.S. military could protect the population, that foreign aid could make the Afghan government more accountable, and that the Karzai administration shared U.S. goals. In an article published by Foreign Affairs, Karl Eikenberry – the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC – explains why all three assumptions were "spectacularly incorrect."