Developing a Thesis
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center
School of Engineering
Stanford, CA
At Stanford University, Dr. Dasher has directed the US-Asia Technology Management Center since 1994, and he has been Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems since 1998. He holds Consulting Professor appointments at Stanford in the Departments of Electrical Engineering (technology management), Asian Languages and Cultures (Japanese business), and at the Asia-Pacific Research Center for his work with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He is also faculty adviser to student-run organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society and the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford.
From 2004, Dr. Dasher became the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving a term as a Board Director (理事) of Tohoku University . He continued as a member of the Management Council (経営協議会) until March 2010, and he now serves as Senior Advisor to the President (総長顧問) of Tohoku University. Dr. Dasher has been a member of the high-profile Program Committee of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) since 2007. He has served on the Multidisciplinary Assessment Committee of the C$500 million Canada Foundation for Innovation Leading Edge Fund in 2007 and again in 2010, and as a member of the Phase I and Phase II Review Panels of the C$200 million Canada Excellence Research Chairs Program in 2008 and again in 2010. He was a distinguished reviewer of the Hong Kong S.A.R. study on innovation in 2008–09, and since 2007 he has been a member of the Foresight Panel of the German Ministry of Education and Research. From 2001–03, Dr. Dasher was on the International Planning Committee advising the Japanese Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy in regard to the formation of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
As allowed by Stanford policy, Dr. Dasher maintains an active management consulting practice, through which he is an advisor to start-up companies and large firms in the U.S., Japan, and China. He has been a board director of Tokyo-based ZyCube Inc. since 2006, and he is founder and chairman of Pearl Executive Shuttle in Valdosta, Georgia, U.S.A. In the non-profit sector, he is a Board Director of the Japan Society of Northern California and the Keizai Society U.S. – Japan Business Forum, and he is an advisor to organizations such as the Chinese Information and Networking Association, the Silicon Valley – China Wireless Technology Association, and the International Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Science and Technology (iFEST). In 2010 he served as a consultant to The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) in regard to their establishment of a worldwide remote mentoring program for entrepreneurs. Dr. Dasher frequently gives speeches and seminars throughout Japan and Asia, as well as in the U.S. Recent appearances include the Nikkei Shimbun Business Innovation Forum, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, speaking tours of Japan co-sponsored by METI and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, and guest lectures at Chubu University, Kochi University of Technology, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and the University of Tokyo.
From 1990–93, Dr. Dasher was a board director of two privately-held Japanese companies in Tokyo, at which he developed new business in international licensing of media rights packages and other intellectual properties. From 1986–90, he was Director of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute advanced field schools in Japan and Korea, which provide full-time language and area training to U.S. and select Commonwealth country diplomats assigned to those countries. He received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University and, along with Prof. Elizabeth Closs Traugott, he is co-author of the often-cited book Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He received the Bachelor of Music degree in clarinet and orchestra conducting from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served on the faculty from 1978-85.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Daniel C. Sneider is a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford. His own research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea. Since 2017, he has been based partly in Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, where he is working on a diplomatic history of the creation and management of the U.S. security alliances with Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. Sneider contributes regularly to the leading Japanese publication Toyo Keizai as well as to the Nelson Report on Asia policy issues.
Sneider is the former Associate Director for Research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. At Shorenstein APARC, Sneider directed the center’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, a comparative study of the formation of wartime historical memory in East Asia. He is the co-author of a book on wartime memory and elite opinion, Divergent Memories, from Stanford University Press. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, of Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, from Routledge and of Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, from University of Washington Press.
Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. He is the co-editor of Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, distributed by Brookings Institution Press, 2007; of First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier, 2009; as well as of Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration, 2010. Sneider’s path-breaking study “The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under the Democratic Party of Japan” appeared in the July 2011 issue of Asia Policy. He has also contributed to other volumes, including “Strategic Abandonment: Alliance Relations in Northeast Asia in the Post-Iraq Era” in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options, Korea Economic Institute, 2008; “The History and Meaning of Denuclearization,” in William H. Overholt, editor, North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019; and “Evolution or new Doctrine? Japanese security policy in the era of collective self-defense,” in James D.J. Brown and Jeff Kingston, eds, Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, Routledge, December 2017.
Sneider’s writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. He is frequently cited in such publications.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent. His twice-weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective was syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the Mercury News. From 1990 to 1994, he was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Prior to that he was a correspondent in India, covering South and Southeast Asia. He also wrote widely on defense issues, including as a contributor and correspondent for Defense News, the national defense weekly.
Sneider has a BA in East Asian history from Columbia University and an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
This seminar will focus on Susanna Rabow-Edling's book project about three governor's wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska in the period 1829-1864. Dr. Rabow-Edling will explore how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them. The seminar will focus on one of these women, Anna Furuhjelm.
Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.
Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.
Audio Synopsis:
Dr. Rabow-Edling's talk traces the journeys of three women - Elizabeth, Margareta, and Anna - from mainland Russia to Sitka, the capital of Russian Alaska, as governors’ wives. The presentation draws upon the women's diaries and letters home to explore the experience of being a Russian governor's wife in Alaska, including what was expected of the women as wives and mothers, as representatives of the Russian empire, and as participants in the "civilizing mission" of Russian Alaska. Dr . Rabow-Edling also explores how the women, especially Anna, experienced the social and religious environment of the time.
Elizabeth, Margaret and Anna had more in common than being governors' wives. All three came from the Western periphery of the empire - Finland, and the Baltics - thus representing ethnic minorities. As Lutherans, they were also religious minorities. All three married Finnish governors. Each was young and newly married when they began their journey, and each gave birth to their first child en route to or upon arrival in Sitka.
While all three women were unprepared for the isolation of Sitka life, they adjusted differently to their new environment. Anna, the least confident, was overwhelmed by the harsh weather, the wilderness, and the native as well as Russian residents. She shunned a public role and took refuge in the sphere of home and family. Margareta was more self-confident, highly educated, and comfortable in Sitka society. However, her arrival was marred by the death of her firstborn son, which drove her in to a lonely depression. Elizabeth was brave, energetic, and curious, as well as less enthusiastic about religion and motherhood. Dr. Rabow-Edling describes how the women engaged differently with the Russian 'civilizing mission,' which was premised on the idea that only European women could civilize native women. She also describes how interactions with the local orthodox church could be difficult, as when Anna was prevented from distributing Bibles to convert the local people.
In conclusion, Dr. Rabow-Edling highlights the clash between the ideals of “true womanhood” prevalent at the time – emphasizing piety, purity and domestication - and the realities and demands of frontier life.
A discussion session following the presentation raised questions regarding the effects of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the differences in gender roles between mainland Russia and Alaska, why these three governors chose Lutheran wives, and why Russia appointed so many Finnish governors.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
616 Serra Street
Encina Hall C205-7
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.
Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.
Susanna is currently working on a book project about three governor’s wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska and lived there in the period between 1829 and 1864. She is interested in how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them.
Milan Svolik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2006.
His current research is in two main areas: i) the politics of authoritarian regimes and ii) the politics of democratic transitions and consolidation. His broader research interests are in comparative and international politics, particularly the political economy of institutions, formal political theory, and statistical methodology.
His research on the politics of authoritarian regimes consists of a series of papers that investigate power-sharing, institutions, leader survival, and accountability in authoritarian regimes. He has also collected original data on leadership change in authoritarian regimes and data on coups d'état across regime types. He is currently incorporating this research into a book manuscript, provisionally entitled The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
CO-SPONSORED BY COMPARATIVE POLITICS
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Susan Hyde is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University, where she is affiliated with the MacMillian Center and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, and has held fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Her research interests include international influences on domestic politics, elections in developing countries, international norm creation, election manipulation, and the use of natural and field experimental research methods. Her current research explores the effects of international democracy promotion efforts, and her research has been published in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Politics. She has recently completed a book entitled The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm. She has served as an international observer with several organizations for elections in Albania, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, and has worked for the Democracy Program at The Carter Center. She teaches courses on international organizations, democracy promotion, the global spread of elections, and the role of non-state actors in world politics.
CO-SPONSORED BY COMPARATIVE POLITICS
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Elias Muhanna is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University and the author of QifaNabki.com, a blog devoted to Lebanese political affairs. He has written extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several general-interest publications, including The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National, Mideast Monitor, World Politics Review, Bidoun, and Transition, and is regularly quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and Al-Jazeera International.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
From 2007 to 2010, a financial and economic crisis gripped the United States, Europe and the world. 7 million Americans lost their jobs, 10 million were pushed below the poverty line, thousands of families lost their homes, and many lost their savings. Somewhat lower numbers were reported from Europe, although the structural mechanisms behind the crisis were seemingly similar, eventually affecting not only the West, but the whole world. It is foreseen that the effects of the crisis will last for years, and it is still uncertain if a full recovery will be possible.
Given that a variety of highly speculative practices put into place by the banking and finance sector during the "neoliberal“ decades between the early 1990s and 2007 allegedly played a role in triggering the crisis, the request for more down-to-earth and sustainable ways of dealing with money and finance has surfaced to international attention. Particularly in Europe, social banks were among the most successful financial institutions during the crisis years, with annual growth rates of up to 30%, factually doubling their assets between 2007-10. This unprecedented success was supposedly due to the fact that many European savers shifted their assets from mainstream banks to social banks, driven by the hope that the latter would handle their money in less abstract and egoistic, and more realistic and community oriented ways. In recent years, social banks have forged influential global networks such as the Global Alliance of Banking on Values and the International Association of Investors in the Social Economy, which pursue the ambitious strategy of reaching out to 1 billion people by 2020.
Given that, not least as a result of the crisis, increasing numbers of people are improving their financial literacy and are taking a growingly critical stance towards the mainstream international banking and finance sector as we knew it before the crisis, the seminar poses the questions of whether (and how) social banking and social finance may concretely contribute to improving the current financial system, and how they might help to restore confidence in capitalism by providing “best practice” examples in selected fields.
The seminar will try to provide some answers to these questions by examining the pros and cons of contemporary social finance and by outlining perspectives of structural complimentarity and cooperation between speculative and sustainable finance.
Audio Synopsis:
In his seminar, Professor Roland Benedikter argues that too little has been done to reform the banking and financial sectors in the wake of the recent crisis, then presents social banking and social finance as an alternative system. First, he argues that the widespread bank bailouts of the past few years have "saved the wrong system" and points out that many of the largest US banks, for example, have actually grown since the crisis despite calls by the Obama administration for these banks to downsize or break in to smaller pieces. He acknowledges that new measures initiated by both the Obama administration (establishing a consumer protection bureau; imposing limits on fees by financial intermediaries) and by European countries (banning high-risk transactions in Germany; reducing public liability for private bank bailouts) are steps in the right direction. He adds his own suggestions, including increased regulation, better international agreements on regulating capital flows, a fee on high-risk speculative transactions, and a preventative tax on banks to protect against future crises. Many of these reforms, however, have faced enormous opposition from the major players in the banking and finance sectors in Britain, the United States, and China. Progress seems to have stalled, with popular figures like Niall Ferguson, who once led calls for dramatic reform, now insisting that the system is too resistant to change, and that simpler goals such as a new hippocratic oath for the financial sector will suffice.
Benedikter then presents social banking and social finance as an answer to the seemingly intractable problems of the traditional system. He first describes the industry in terms of what it is not. Traditional banks, he argues, made three major mistakes leading up to the crisis: irresponsibility (loans that were too high, too much derivative investment); lack of transparency; and unsustainability (by participating in speculation and contributing to market bubbles). The current economy, he explains, is based on a tripolar system: a "real" economy of manufacturing and tangible goods; and two "side economies" of real estate and financial derivatives, which have steadily drawn capital away from the real economy since 1989. A breakdown of this unsustainable system was predicted by multiple think tanks before 2007, based partly on the frantic growth of the derivatives market (from $100 trillion to $516 trillion annually between 2001 and 2006 - for perspective, Benedikter cites the annual world GDP figure of approximately $50 trillion).
Social banks, on the other hand, invest 100% of their capital toward responsible, transparent, and sustainable ventures such as green technology and social initiatives. Banks emphasize knowing their customers, which requires them to operate on a smaller scale than traditional banks, and conversely customers know where their money is invested and can even participate in making investment decisions. These decisions are meant to take the potential social as well as financial return on an investment into account. Benedikter describes this as a "Triple Bottom Line" approach, emphasizing profit, people, and the planet.
A discussion period following the presentation addressed questions including: What are the mechanisms available to enforcing the triple bottom line approach in social banking and social finance? Are social banks guided by a common charter? What are the details of the proposed high-risk transaction fee? Why have some US social banks been successful while others have struggled?
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room