David Yang is a pre-doctoral fellow in CDDRL's Democracy in Taiwan program. He is finishing a cross-country comparative study entitled The Social Basis of the Third Wave: Class, Development, and the Making of the Democratic State in East Asia. He looks in particular at late authoritarian Taiwan and contemporary Singapore. Mr. Yang is interested in the social basis of pro-democratic opposition movements and the political implications of various developmental strategies - corporatist versus pluralist, for example. Before entering the doctoral program at Princeton, David Yang completed an MBA in Economics and International Business at NYU, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science at Brown.

Political Science has very few "accepted truths." One of the most prominent is the claim that countries endowed with natural resources, particularly mineral wealth, are doomed to suffer from poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weak states, and authoritarian regimes - often referred to as the "resource curse." This claim, however, is not without its critics. In recent years, a few scholars have contended that the resource curse is essentially a myth. Rather, the main culprit is the absence of viable political, economic, and social institutions, such as secure property rights and an effective bureaucracy. Yet, their emphasis on the importance of strong institutions is entirely consistent with the conventional wisdom that they are challenging. The main point of departure between these two bodies of literature is whether weak institutions are endogenous to resource wealth, and thus, inevitable in mineral rich states, or exogenous, and thus, can account for the variation in performance across these states. The experience of the Soviet successor states, which consist of both mineral rich and mineral poor countries, provides a unique opportunity to assess the relationship between mineral wealth and institutional capacity, and, in doing so, to consider whether there is in fact a resource curse.

About the speaker:

Pauline Jones Luong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1998 and was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1998-1999 and 2001-2002. Her primary research interests include: the rise and impact on emerging institutions; identity and conflict; and the political economy of market reform. Her area of focus is the former Soviet Union, particularly the Russian Federation and the newly independent Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). She has published a number of articles and books. Her books include Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and an edited volume entitled The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Cornell University Press, 2003)

Barak Hoffman recently defended his doctoral dissertation at UCLA. His dissertation focused on identifying the determinants of political accountability at the local level in sub-Saharan Africa, using Tanzania and Zambia as cases, where he did extensive fieldwork as a Fulbright Scholar. At CDDRL, he intends to expand the focus to include Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda to also take into account cases where ethnic tensions are potential sources of instability. Barak Hoffman completed his BA at Brandeis, majoring in Economics, and has an MA in Economics from the Broad School of Management at Michigan State.

The speaker, Macartan Humphreys, is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.

The respondent, David Patel, is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Paul Arthur is professor of politics and course director of the graduate program in peace and conflict studies at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He has been a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development.

He has published widely on the Northern Ireland conflict. He wrote Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Problem and Memory, Forgiveness, and Conflict: Trust-building in Northern Ireland. His latest work focuses on what he calls the "consequences of peace" in post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes.

Professor Arthur has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. He is the Irish Fulbright in residence at Stanford this winter-spring.

Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Western Institute of Irish Studies, and the Irish Studies Foundation.

The talk will explore and explain the emergence of alternative sets of winners and losers within the working class in three cases of sweeping industrial and market liberalization.

Sebastian Etchementdi is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department. of Political Science at University of California at Berkeley working with Ruth and David Collier.

This talk will focus on Koizumi Kikues Manchu Girl (Manshû no shôjo, 1936), a nonfiction work which depicts the author's attempts to "educate" her Manchu maid Li Guiyu in colonial Manchuria. Through the women's conversations on cultural differences between Japanese and Manchu, the text reveals how the colonial project, and in particular cultural assimilation, was promoted and expanded in the domestic sphere. Koizumi's evocation of the tropes of family and motherhood in relation to Guiyu also recasts colonial relations in gendered and familial terms and reflects on the specific roles made available to Japanese and Manchu women within empire.

Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

In this talk, Professor Camacho will examine indigenous forms of collaboration in Japan's empire in the Pacific, from 1914-1945. Emphasis will be placed on the roles of Chamorro interpreters and police assistants during the Japanese wartime occupation of the Mariana Islands. Rather than view collaboration as a sign of moral failure or victory, as has been the case with most studies of collaboration, Camacho will treat collaboration as a category of analysis that can shed light on the conflicting, multiple and sometimes complementary modes of indigenous agency. The goal is to situate collaboration as an idea worth thinking about in terms of its methodological and theoretical contributions to and implications for the study of colonialism and resistance.

Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

Japan is at the forefront of the trend in developed nations to have an increasing proportion of the population represented by the elderly. By 2030, people over 65 years of age are expected to reach 30 % of Japan's population. Despite the significance of this demographic group, remarkably little is known about how the elderly adjust to the social changes that they experience with aging. The focus of this talk is on the issue of change as it impacts on the aging individual and how this change is discursively interpreted and negotiated. Recorded informal conversations of elderly Japanese women both with peers and with younger acquaintances will be used to illustrate the speaker's continuing adjustment of her established persona, identity and attitudes in recognition of the changing reality associated with age.

Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

Ambassador Sen was born on 9 April 1944. After graduating from college he joined the Indian Foreign Service in July 1966. From May 1968 to July 1984, Sen served in Indian missions and posts in Moscow, San Francisco, Dhaka and in the Ministry of External Affairs. He also served as secretary to the Atomic Energy Commission of India.

From July 1984 to December 1985, Sen served as the joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. He was thereafter joint secretary to the prime minister of India from January 1986 to July 1991 where he was responsible for foreign affairs, defense, and science and technology.

Mr. Sen was ambassador to Mexico from September 1991 to August 1992; ambassador to the Russian Federation from October 1992 to October 1998; ambassador to Germany from October 1998 to May 2002; and high commissioner to the United Kingdom from May 2002 to April 2004. He assumed charge as ambassador of India to the United States of America in August 2004.

The Ambassador participated in summit meetings in the United Nations, Commonwealth, Non-Aligned Movement, Six Nation Five Continent Peace Initiative, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, IAEA, G-15 and other forums and also in over 160 bilateral summit meetings. He had several assignments as special envoy of the prime minister of India for meetings with foreign government representatives and heads of state.

The Ambassador's visit is co-sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Freeman Spogli Institute and the Stanford Center for International Development at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.