The profile of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong has changed in significant ways since Hong Kong's reunification with the People's Republic of China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the SARS outbreak of 2003. Several changes have also appears, the most striking of which is the influx of about 90,000 Indonesian domestic workers and the relative decrease in the number of Filipinas. Another change is the tenor and scope of the workers' activism.

Drawing from recent migrant worker protests (including the anti-WTO protests of December 2005,) Dr. Constable considers the increasingly global and transnational aspects of foreign domestic worker activism and the increased breadth of their networks and affiliations, as well as the implications of such activism in relation to newly generated and displaced meanings of citizenship and human rights within and beyond the context of the self-ascribed "Asian World City" of Hong Kong.

Nicole Constable received her MA and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose interests include the anthropology of work; ethnicity, nationalism, and history; gender, migration, and transnationalism; folklore; and ethnographic writing and power.

Her geographical areas of specialization are Hong Kong, China and the Philippines. She has conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong on constructions of Hakka Chinese Christian identity and on resistance and discipline among Filipina domestic workers.

Her current research involves Chinese and Filipino immigrants to the U.S. and U.S.-Asian correspondence marriages.

Martha Crenshaw is the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., where she has taught since 1974. She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. Her recent work includes the chapter on "Coercive Diplomacy and the Response to Terrorism," in The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (United States Institute of Peace Press), "Terrorism, Strategies, and Grand Strategies", in Attacking Terrorism (Georgetown University Press), and "Counterterrorism in Retrospect" in the July-August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs. She serves on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chairs the American Political Science Association Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism.

She has served on the Council of the APSA and is a former president and councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2004 ISPP awarded her its Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and in 2005 the Jeanne Knutson Award for service to the society. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Orbis, Political Psychology, Security Studies, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. For the next three years she will be a lead investigator with the new National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. She is also the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2005-2006. She serves on the Committee on Law and Justice and the Committee on Determining Basic Research Needs to Interrupt the Improvised Explosive Device Delivery Chain of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. Her current research focuses on why the U.S. is the target of terrorism and the distinction between "old" and "new" terrorism, as well as how campaigns of terrorism come to an end.

Thomas Carothers is a leading authority on democracy promotion and democratization worldwide as well as an expert on U.S. foreign policy generally. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project which analyzes the state of democracy in the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, international law, foreign aid, rule of law, and civil society development. He is the author or editor of six critically acclaimed books on democracy promotion as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. He is adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest and serves on the board of various organizations devoted to democracy promotion.Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

We know the terrorist threat: an atomic bomb exploding in downtown Manhattan, a roadside bomb in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Yet Congress, against the wishes of New York's Senator Schumer, voted down a bill that would have facilitated complete surveillance of radio activity, the sort of surveillance that might actually prevent the demise of NYC. The price tag was $100 million of initial funding and it would have cost $100 billion altogether--expensive then, but cheap after Iraq and Katrina. So where are we now? We have still have terrorist threats and still have limited protection.

In my talk I want to give an affordable solution: mathematical modeling, using an even more magical bullet: Reflexive Theory. If we talk about security and cooperation, we need one thing, as important as the frontal lobe: a model of the self! That is, we need Reflexive Theory.

My presentation will be an exciting journey through a contemporary approach to counter-terrorism, based on the work of the famous mathematical psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre.

Stefan E. Schmidt is CEO of the research company Phoenix Mathematical Systems Modeling, Inc.; he is also a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at New Mexico State University and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies. For the past five years, he has been working as Senior Research Scientist at the Physical Science Laboratory of New Mexico State University.

From fall 2004 to 2005, Schmidt was on a one-year professional leave from PSL to follow an invitation as visiting professor at the University of Technology in Dresden, Germany. Between 1995 and 2000, he has held research appointments at the University of California, Berkeley (1995-98), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (96/97), the Shannon Laboratory of AT&T (98/99), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999-2000).

Previously, after his PhD in 1987 at the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany, Schmidt was assistant professor until 1995 at ainz University, Germany (as Hochschulassistent, Habilitation 1993).

Schmidt's scientific research ranges from discrete mathematics to applications in information sciences and network analysis; his expertise covers geometric algebra, order theory, combinatorics, formal concept analysis and reflexive theory--applied to communication networks, agent modeling and systems of systems analysis. His recent work includes modeling and simulating terrorist recruitment via reflexive theory as well as border protection via reflexive control. As a real world application of his scientific methods, he is currently involved in a long-term research project on the stock market (as a market of markets).

Since the accession of ten new member states the European Union has launched a new effort to draw its neighbors, from Ukraine to Morocco, closer to the EU. This engagement goes beyond trade and aid to include participation in various internal EU policies and programs but stops short of offering full membership. Economic and political governance are high on the agenda. Bertin Martens will explain how this effort reinforces previous policies and could contribute to real change in the political and economic landscape around the EU.

Bertin Martens is Regional Economist for the Middle East & South Mediterranean in the European Commission's Directorate General for External Relations. He joined the European Commission in 1990 and has worked on various assignments in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe before. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Free University of Brussels and has been a Visiting Fellow at George Mason and Stanford universities. His academic research interests focus on institutional economics and governance.

In the days after 9/11, there was a widespread sentiment that suicidal terrorist attacks were irrational acts well beyond the bounds of quantitative risk assessment. Since then, terrorism risk models have been developed which are based on certain key theoretical principles that are validated by observational terrorism experience. These principles will be elaborated, and illustrated with examples from conflicts around the world.

Gordon Woo is a catastrophist, specializing on mathematical aspects of catastrophe risk modelling. He has developed a quantitative framework for modelling terrorism risk applied e. g. on the Olympic Games 2004 and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Prior to this, his main focus has been on natural and environmental hazards. He has twenty years of practical experience in consulting for commercial, industrial and government organizations on major public risk issues varying from the disposal of radioactive waste, to oil pollution, flight safety, to earthquake, windstorm and flood protection.

Dr. Woo graduated as the top mathematician of his year at Cambridge University. He completed his PhD in theoretical physics as a Kennedy Scholar at M.I.T., after which he was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. In July 2004, he was named by Risk & Treasury Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in finance.