The workshop, co-hosted by PESD and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, examines the success of the Chinese rural electrification program.
Beijing, China
North Korea and the United States have been mired in enmity for over half a century. Such a relationship of mutual antagonism has affected the process by which each produces knowledge about the other: the knowledge so produced has reinforced the enmity.
This workshop attempts to problematize the reality of enmity and to raise questions about the almost hegemonic status of the mutually reinforcing hostility. To achieve the goal, it follows a dual track. First, it asks authors to investigate the social and discursive practices that reproduce and hegemonize North Korea's identity. Second, it asks each author to examine concrete and specific social realities of North Korea as a way to challenge the conventional narrative that overlooks or erases variegated historical realities and that privileges a particular conceptualization of a national identity over multiple alternatives.
This program is open to the public and participation in sections of the program is allowed.
Philippines Conference Room
Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) since 2001, all at Stanford University. In May 2024, Shin also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC. He served as director of APARC for two decades (2005-2025). As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.
In Summer 2023, Shin launched the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), which is a new research initiative committed to addressing emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in Asia. Across four research themes– “Talent Flows and Development,” “Nationalism and Racism,” “U.S.-Asia Relations,” and “Democratic Crisis and Reform”–the lab brings scholars and students to produce interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, policy-relevant, and comparative studies and publications. Shin’s latest book, The Four Talent Giants, a comparative study of talent strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India to be published by Stanford University Press in the summer of 2025, is an outcome of SNAPL.
Shin is also the author/editor of twenty-seven books and numerous articles. His books include The Four Talent Giants: National Strategies for Human Resource Development Across Japan, Australia, China, and India (2025); Korean Democracy in Crisis: The Threat of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization (2022); The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021); Superficial Korea (2017); Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War (2016); Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea (2015); Criminality, Collaboration, and Reconciliation: Europe and Asia Confronts the Memory of World War II (2014); New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (2014); History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (2011); South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (2011); One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era (2010); Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007); and Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (2006). Due to the wide popularity of his publications, many have been translated and distributed to Korean audiences. His articles have appeared in academic and policy journals, including American Journal of Sociology, World Development, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Education, International Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs.
Shin is not only the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, but also continues to actively raise funds for Korean/Asian studies at Stanford. He gives frequent lectures and seminars on topics ranging from Korean nationalism and politics to Korea's foreign relations, historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia, and talent strategies. He serves on councils and advisory boards in the United States and South Korea and promotes policy dialogue between the two allies. He regularly writes op-eds and gives interviews to the media in both Korean and English.
Before joining Stanford in 2001, Shin taught at the University of Iowa (1991-94) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2001). After receiving his BA from Yonsei University in Korea, he was awarded his MA and PhD from the University of Washington in 1991.
APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Hong Kal is a postdoctoral Korean research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center. She received her B.A. and M.F.A. from Seoul National University in Korea and M.A. and Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art and Architecture from State University of New York, Binghamton in 2003. Her dissertation, "The Presence of the Past: Exhibitions, Memories, and National Identities in Colonial and Postcolonial Japan and Korea," examined the politics of culture in the two countries and their intertwined historical relations across twentieth century. Her research has concentrated on the formation of colonial modernity and national identity in colonial expositions in Korea and the visual representation of historical memories of the past--colonialism and war--in independence, peace and war museums in contemporary Korea and Japan. She was the recipient of the Japan Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship (2001-02).
APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
Y2E2 Room 375
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305-4205
Peter Vitousek has been on the faculty at Stanford University since 1984. His research interests include: evaluating the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and how they are altered by human activity; understanding how the interaction of land and culture contributed to the sustainability of Hawaiian agriculture and society before European contact; and working to make fertilizer applications more efficient and less environmentally damaging (especially in rapidly growing economies). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the 2010 Japan Prize. He is director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources and co-director of the First Nations Futures Institute.
This meeting will focus on the intersection of two crucial challenges for the organization of energy infrastructures in the developing world. First, for nearly two decades most major developing countries have struggled to introduce market forces in their electric power systems. In every case, that effort has proceeded more slowly than reformers originally hoped; the outcomes have been hybrids that are far from the efficiency and organization of the "ideal" textbook model for a market-based power system. Second, growing concern about global climate change has put the spotlight on the need to build an international regulatory regime that includes strong incentives for key developing countries to control their emissions of greenhouse gases. In most of those countries, the power sector is the largest single source of emissions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol included mechanisms that would reward developing nations that cut emissions, but so far those systems have functioned far short of their imagined potential. A growing chorus of analysts and policy makers are expressing dissatisfaction with those existing mechanisms and clamoring for alternatives.
This meeting will offer diagnoses of what has gone wrong and what opportunities have nonetheless emerged. It will focus on practical solutions and look at the prospects for different technologies to meet growing demand for power while minimizing the ecological footprint of power generation. It will engage scholars who are studying the industrial organization of the electric power sector (and other infrastructures) in developing countries as well as those who study the effectiveness of international legal regimes. It will engage practitioners, including regulators and energy policy makers. Our aims are not only to focus on new theories that are emerging to explain the organization of the power sector and the design of meaningful international institutions, but also to identify practical implications for investors, regulators, and policy makers.
Presentations will include recent results from the research of Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. We will present the main findings from a comprehensive study of power market reform in five developing countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa). We will also show the results from a detailed analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions from two key states in India and three provinces in China--a study conducted jointly with the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. In addition, we will present new conclusions from ongoing work that focuses on strategies for engaging developing countries in the global climate regime. Among the topics considered will be the prospects for accelerating the introduction of natural gas into electric power systems--especially those in China and India where the present domination of coal leads to relatively high emissions.
Oksenberg Conference Room
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, many members of the media and the public became aware that further acts of terrorism against U.S. targets were possible, and that such attacks could involve chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Although accurate basic information about the effects of nuclear and radiological weapons is available, mainly through specialized sources, it is not widespread, and it can be difficult to separate from misinformation about the sources, characteristics, and effects of radioactivity. In short, there was a clear appetite for more and better information. At the same time, concerns exist on the part of scientists and first responders about how best to meet the public's need for information about these types of threats in order to avert panic and save lives--without simultaneously helping terrorist groups to stage more effective attacks.
This workshop is a step toward meeting these needs and concerns, bringing together local representatives of the media (newspaper, radio, and television); local first responders, including local representatives of federal and state agencies; scientists; and risk analysts for an informal, daylong meeting.
Bechtel Conference Center
In the context of the Iraq Wars, references to totalitarianism multiplied across the political, cultural, and intellectual spectrum. For every equation of Saddam with Hitler, another followed projecting the Nazi past onto the American present. While the end of the most recent war has led to the macabre discovery of the Iraqi killing fields, some German intellectuals have drawn the conclusion that American moral authority has come to an end. Current politics aside, the first question we hope to raise involves the legitimacy of this proliferation of the term totalitarianism, either directly or through rhetorical invocations of features of Europe in the thirties and forties: appeasement politics, firebombing, attacks on civilians. A conservative usage of the term might restrict it to the regimes of Hitler and Stalin; alternatively, it could be utilized as an analytical tool for multiple political phenomena of the late twentieth century (and beyond). We want to explore the consequences of these different strategies through a reflection on the term itself and its appropriation in various venues.
While these questions can and should be pursued with regard to many national histories, the German experience with totalitarianism in the twentieth century is particularly intriguing. The Weimar Republic witnessed the rise of both Communist and National Socialist movements, with revolutionary aspirations, in the wake of which, ultimately, two dictatorial political systems followed. To be sure, the two cases are not symmetrical; the GDR was unthinkable without Russian occupation and the Cold War. Nonetheless, large segments of the German population lent their support to both regimes, at times with enthusiasm and at times under duress. While the collapse of the Nazi regime led eventually (if not quickly) to a critical discourse on the past, a parallel scrutiny of the Communist era has not yet developed to the same extent. In light of the renewed totalitarianism discourse, a review of this past seems more urgent than ever. We are interested in examining the Communist experience in relationship to National Socialism, with regard to both similarities and differences, and in terms of philosophical, historical, and literary/cultural frameworks.
Fisher Conference Center
Arrillaga Alumni Center
Stanford University
This workshop will focus on the strategies used by the United States and European Union in promoting democracy and the rule of law in the developing world. Participants include Laurence Whitehead of Oxford University, Peter Eigen, Chairman of Transparency International, Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment of Democracy, as well as scholars from the CDDRL community.
Oksenberg Conference Room
This workshop was held as part of an ongoing study by IRADe and PESD to extend a general equilibrium model of the Indian economy to determine the impact of energy and agricultural policies on agricultural prices and production.
New Dehli, INDIA
Inaugural workshop of the joint IIM/A-Stanford study on electricity sector reforms in India.
Indian Institute of Management/Ahmedabad, INDIA
A workshop convened jointly by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and PESD
Oksenberg Conference Room