The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies is proud to announce its major international conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” (May 18-19, 2011, Jerusalem).  This conference – co-sponsored and hosted by the Center’s project partner, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute – is designed to engage global, profound, and heretofore considered intractible problems of divided societies, as well as today’s crises events of the Arab world in the greater Middle East and North Africa.  With US, European, and NATO command forces engaged in the region, The Europe Center recognizes shared concern across the transatlantic community, and brings its Stanford senior research affiliates as well as international partner scholars to illuminate the immediate as well as long-term points of contention, and prospects for meaningful peace and reconciliation.

The Europe Center’s conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” includes
sessions on the following critical subjects:

• In Search of What Democracy Is and Should Be: Contemporary Challenges to democratic ideas/formations
• Institutional Forms of Contemporary Democracies: Translating Democratic Theory into Practice
• The Challenge of Managing Diversity in Contemporary Democracies
• Civil Societies and Democratic Quality and Efficacy
• Democracy and Development
• Democratic Transitions and Recessions: The International Dimension 

The participants include leading scholars and policy analysts:

• Dan Banik, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo
• Bashir Bashir, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
• Nancy Bermeo, Nuffield College, Oxford University
• Naomi Chazan, Hebrew University, Academic College of Tel Aviv Yafo
• Amir Eshel, Stanford University, The Europe Center, FSI
• Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University FSI
• Ruth Gavison, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
• Amal Jamal, Tel Aviv University
• Michael Karayanni, The Sacher Institute, Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University
• Jeffrey Kopstein, University of Toronto
• Stephen Krasner, Stanford University FSI
• Leonardo Morlino, University of Florence
• Gabriel Motzkin, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, University of Jerusalem
• Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Stanford University FSI
• Ramzi Suleiman, University of Haifa
• Laurence Whitehead, Nuffield College, Oxford University

The Europe Center’s conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” is co-developed by Michael Karayanni and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, and co-sponsored by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.  The conference is one of The Europe Center’s international partner projects run within the Center’s larger and multi-year program on “Reconciliation".

This project is conceived to address subjects of contention, and potentially reconciliation, in divided societies.  The multi-year collaborative project is designed to develop, in successive stages, a full range of programming including international workshops, publications, and scholar exchange.  Sponsored work will benefit scholarly, policy-oriented, and cultural relations.  We especially seek to support the work of colleagues from a wide range of fields including the humanities, social sciences, law, business, and education.  

Further information on The Europe Center’s multi-year program on “Reconciliation” may be found here.

Platts Coal Trader International
Vol. 11, Issue 67, Pages 5-6

Australia faces serious challenges over the next 20 years in maintaining its hard-won place as a leading coal exporting country and capturing new market share, according to a research paper published by Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development April 5.

Following earlier papers on China, Indonesia and South Africa's coal industries, the latest PESD paper, entitled Australia's Black Coal Industry: Past Achievements and Future Challenges, has been written by coal industry expert Bart Lucarelli.

The paper sketches the development of Australia's export coal industry, from its shaky start in the aftermath of the Second World War amid a glut of cheap oil, to the "phenomenal success story" of today.  The renaissance of Australia's coal industry was assisted by the discovery of vast deposits of high-quality coking coal and thermal coal in Queensland's Bowen Basin and the

Hunter Valley of New South Wales respectively, along with new mining technologies and the economic expansions of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Lucarelli said.

During the Australian coal industry's competitive phase - 1987 to 2003 - export coal prices were relatively stable, but the growth rate of Australia's coal industry slowed as Indonesia became a significant coal exporter.  Since 2003, Australia's coal industry has been in a "volatile price phase," as export coking and thermal coal prices have soared to record highs with the entry of China and latterly India into the international seaborne market, while weather events have affected supplies from coal exporting countries.

Looking to the next 20 years, Lucarelli forecasts serious challenges to the preeminence of Australia's export coal industry in the shape of infrastructure constraints, regulatory risks and under-investment in railways and ports by government-owned companies.  "The most pressing and immediate technical challenge to the black coal industry of Australia is the shortage of rail and port infrastructure to support its further growth," said Lucarelli in the research paper.

‘Chronic infrastructure shortages' Governments in Queensland and New South Wales have proposed projects for expanding their rail and port networks to support a significant increase in Australian coal exports, which are forecast to grow to 540 million mt by 2020 from 240 million mt in 2010.  "Part of the reason that chronic infrastructure shortages are likely to persist has to do with the type of technology being implemented - large rail and fixed land port systems," Lucarelli explained.  Large port and rail projects are required for economies of scale, but involve long lead times, high upfront costs and complex regulatory clearances. 

"A second reason for the chronic shortage of infrastructure has been the reliance on state-owned entities to make the necessary investments in the rail and port systems," Lucarelli said. Government-owned rail and port companies tend to be less nimble and entrepreneurial in their decision-making than the private sector, though some port and rail companies have been privatized recently - most notably Queenslandbased rail company QR National and the port of Brisbane.  Regulatory uncertainty stemming from the Australian government's stop-start policy on curbing carbon emissions and its proposed Mineral Resource Rent Tax on coal-mining profits are additional factors clouding the expansion of Australia's coal industry.  "Potential coal mining projects most at risk due to regulatory uncertainty are the massive new steam coal projects planned for the Galilee, Gunnedah and Surat basins," Lucarelli said.  Illustrating the potential for expansion within Australia's coal industry, Lucarelli said that if only two of the advancedstage projects in the Surat Basin in Queensland started production on schedule, they could add 110 million mt/year of thermal coal exports by 2015.  This is almost as much thermal coal as Australia exported for the whole of 2008, at 115 million mt. 

 

"The challenges Seoul faces in the coming years will be how to balance its military alliance with the United States and its economic partnership with China," suggested Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Stanford Korean Studies Program, in a recent interview with the Korea Times. Shin suggested the idea for involving universities more in regional diplomacy discussions, and he briefly described his new research project which explores an alternative approach for South Korean diplomacy.