Burma (Myanmar) has been under military rule since 1962. It is the least free country in Southeast Asia by the latest Freedom House ranking of political rights and civil liberties. The current junta's leader, Senior General Than Shwe, has made Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arguably the best known political prisoner in the world. In August-September 2007, following steep hikes in fuel prices, scores of protesters marched in silence and were dispersed or arrested. The protests spread beyond the capital and included at least one by Buddhist monks--a significant development in a largely Buddhist country. Meanwhile, delegates to a national convention convened by the regime completed guidelines for a future constitution. This step on a supposed road map to democracy was criticized by some observers as a ploy to institutionalize army control. Others treated the guidelines less skeptically on the grounds that even regime-favoring rules might be used to nudge the country toward reform, and were thus better than no rules at all.

How should outsiders respond to these conditions? With policies of isolation? Or of engagement? Which of the two logics is more powerful: that isolation will deprive the junta of needed support and thus help spark democratization? Or that engagement will expose the country to liberalization and thus incrementally undermine the regime? Is there a mixed logic worth implementing between these extremes? Or have the mounting protests inside Burma opened a crucial window of opportunity that replaces these alternatives with a radical new logic of carpe diem:that outsiders should actively intervene in support of the opposition and in favor of regime change now? Not to mention the junta's own rationale for retaining power: that military rule is preferable to any alternative.

Maureen Aung-Thwin, while working on Burma at the Open Society Institute (founded by financier/philanthropist George Soros), is an active member of the Asia Committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation, which oversees the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. She received a BA from Northwestern University and did graduate work at NYU.

Zarni, while researching democratic transition at Oxford, has been active in "Track II" negotiations with the Burmese junta. In 1995 he founded the Free Burma Coalition, which favored sanctions. Later his position evolved toward engagement. He edited Active Citizens under Political Wraps: Experiences from Myanmar/Burma and Vietnam (2006). He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Co-sponsored with the Asia Society Northern California and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC-Berkeley.

Vietnam has become the newest "Asian tiger." The US played a leading role in negotiating Vietnam's January 2007 entry into the World Trade Organization and the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement. Requirements in these treaties have accelerated the pace of economic and legal policy reforms in Vietnam. Combined with other initiatives, the reforms are giving rise to the domestic institutions, economic policies, governing procedures, and rule of law needed to grow a market economy, facilitate the fledgling private sector, and rationalize the state sector. US foreign assistance has been intensively involved in this effort. The effects of these changes have been felt in faster growth, increased trade, more foreign and domestic investment, and continued poverty alleviation. Within this context, the seminar can address an especially difficult and complex question: How might these reforms, and the changes they have foster, affect the political development of the country?

Steve Parker recently returned from nearly six years in Vietnam, where he served as the project manager for the STAR-Vietnam Project--the first major USAID-funded technical assistance program in post-war Vietnam. In that context he worked with the prime minister's office in Hanoi to help more than forty government agencies make the changes needed for Vietnam to implement the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) and accede to the World Trade Organization. His latest writing is a "Report on the 5-Year Impact of the BTA on Vietnam's Trade, Investment and Economic Structure." Previously he worked as an economic specialist for the US government and the Asia Foundation, and was posted to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Japan with USAID, the Asian Development Bank, and the Harvard Institute for International Development.

Co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for International Development.

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, and the director of SAIS' International Development program. He is also chairman of the editorial board of a new magazine, The American Interest.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning political and economic development. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. It made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan, and Chile, and has been awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award in the Current Interest category, as well as the Premio Capri for the Italian edition. He is also the author of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002, and State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, (2004). His most recent book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy was published by Yale University Press in March 2006.

Francis Fukuyama was born on October 27, 1952, in Chicago. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

Dr. Fukuyama was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2005. He holds an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College and Doane College, and is a member of advisory boards for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Journal of Democracy, and The New America Foundation, and FINCA. As an NED board member, he is responsible for oversight of the Endowment's Middle East programs. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.