Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Can Democracy Handle Ethnic War? Evidence from Southeast Asia

-
Flyer for a talk by Jacques Bertrand with his portrait

In the years following the 2011 general election in Myanmar, there were reasons to think that the country might be growing more democratic, and that dialogue between rulers and ethnic minorities might alleviate the latter's long-standing rebellions against the state.  Instead, in 2021, a military coup ended democratic reform, triggered mass opposition, and plunged Myanmar back into civil war.  In ostensibly democratic Indonesia and the Philippines, on the other hand, rebellions respectively by the Moros and the Acehnese transitioned to peace.  Could one conclude, from this and other evidence, that autocracy engenders and prolongs ethnic civil war, and that, in contrast, democracy alleviates or even resolves it?  Jacques Bertrand, in two recent books (noted in his bio below), challenges the notion that democracy necessarily fosters peaceful outcomes.  He stresses the importance of interactive process between the state and its opponents and argues for a dynamic and contingent understanding of democracy’s impact. Although democratic institutions and negotiations can help to resolve deep and enduring conflicts, he concludes, they can also be used and have been used, mainly by the state, to manipulate and undermine insurgent ethnic minority groups.

Bertrand 102422
Jacques Bertrand is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, where he also directs the Collaborative Master’s Specialization in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He both founded and headed the institute’s Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and is a co-founder of the university’s Postcor Lab, a research hub for the study of civil wars and war-to-peace transitions.

Professor Bertrand has worked for many years on issues of ethnic conflict, nationalism, and secessionism in Southeast Asia.  His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the United States Institute of Peace, and the International Development Research Centre.  His latest book, just published in July 2022 and co-authored with Ardeth Thawnghmung and Alexandre Pelletier, is Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar. His sole-authored Democracy and Nationalist Struggles in Southeast Asia: From Secessionist Mobilization to Conflict Resolution appeared in 2021.

Discussant:

Marciel 041922
Scot Marciel is Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, affiliated with the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Previously, he was a 2020-22 Visiting Scholar and Visiting Practitioner Fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC.  A retired diplomat, Mr. Marciel served as U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar from March 2016 through May 2020, leading a mission of 500 employees during the difficult Rohingya crisis and a challenging time for both Myanmar’s democratic transition and the United States-Myanmar relationship.  Prior to serving in Myanmar, Ambassador Marciel served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific at the State Department, where he oversaw U.S. relations with Southeast Asia.

Donald K. Emmerson

Via Zoom Webinar

Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2022-23
Seminars

Whither Southeast Asia?

-
Gita Wirjawan and text about his Oct 17, 2022 talk, "Whither Southeast Asia?"

What are Southeast Asia’s prospects?  How well equipped and prepared are its people to cope with current and future shocks from inside and outside their region?  With significant exceptions including the wars in Indochina after 1945 and the 1965-66 bloodshed in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s modern history since World War II has been relatively peaceful.  In recent times the region has had its share of turbulence.  Nevertheless, the multidimensional 2022 Global Peace Index ranks nine of the ten Southeast Asian states as more peaceful than the United States.  On the 2021 Democracy Index, four of the Southeast Asian ten are outright “authoritarian,” while the other six join the US in being “flawed democracies.”  What do these and related trends imply?  In addition to politics and geopolitics, visiting scholar Gita Wirjawan’s view of Southeast Asia’s future will touch upon socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental aspects as well.

Gita Wirjawan 101722
Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur and philanthropist and a 2022-23 visiting scholar at APARC.  Having established a successful investment business in Indonesia, the Ancora Group, he created the Ancora Foundation.  The foundation has endowed scholarships for Indonesians to attend Stanford and other high-ranked universities around the world and has funded the training of teachers at hundreds of Indonesian kindergartens serving underprivileged children.  Wirjawan’s public service has included positions as Indonesia’s minister of trade, chairman of its Investment Coordinating Board, and chair of a 159-nation WTO ministerial conference in 2012 that focused on easing global trade barriers.  He led his country’s national badminton association in 2012-16 when Indonesia won four gold medals in the sport at world championships including the Olympics.  He advises Indonesia’s School of Government and Public Policy (SGPP) and Yale’s School of Management, among other institutions.  At SGPP he hosts a public-policy podcast called endgame, to which an estimated 471 thousand people subscribe.  His degrees are from the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA), Baylor University (MBA), and the University of Texas at Austin (BSc).

Donald K. Emmerson

Via Zoom Webinar

Gita Wirjawan

0
Visiting Scholar at APARC, 2022-24
Gita_Wirjawan.jpg

Gita Wirjawan joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as a visiting scholar for the 2022-23 and 2023-2024 academic years. In the 2024-25 year, he is a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy. Wirjawan is the chairman and founder of Ancora Group and Ancora Foundation, as well as the host of the podcast "Endgame." While at APARC, he researched the directionality of nation-building in Southeast Asia and sustainability and sustainable development in the U.S. and Southeast Asia.

Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
2022-23 Visiting Scholar, APARC
Seminars

Book Talk: The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe with Tommaso Pavone

Tommaso Pavone

The European Union is often depicted as a cradle of judicial activism and a polity built by courts. Tommaso Pavone shows how this judge-centric narrative conceals a crucial arena for political action. Beneath the radar, Europe’s political development unfolded as a struggle between judges who resisted European law and lawyers who pushed them to embrace change. Under the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist courts, these “Euro-lawyers” sought clients willing to break state laws conflicting with European law, lobbied national judges to uphold European rules, and propelled them to submit noncompliance cases to the European Union’s supreme court - the European Court of Justice - by ghostwriting their referrals.

By shadowing lawyers who encourage deliberate law-breaking and mobilize courts against their own governments, The Ghostwriters overturns the conventional wisdom regarding the judicial construction of Europe and illuminates how the politics of lawyers can profoundly impact institutional change and transnational governance.

Tommaso Pavone
Tommaso Pavone is Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona and Visiting Researcher at the ARENA Center at the University of Oslo. His research interests span comparative politics, law and society, and judicial politics, tracing how lawyers and courts impact processes of political development, social change, and rule of law enforcement in the European Union (EU). His new book with Cambridge University Press – The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics Behind the Judicial Construction of Europe – reconstructs how entrepreneurial lawyers promoted the development of the EU by encouraging clients to break non-compliant state laws and mobilizing national courts against their own governments.

The book has been praised as “the most important book on European legal integration in decades” and a “stunning achievement” (in reviews by Mark Pollack and Charles Epp) and won four prizes from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Law and Society Association (LSA), and the European Union Studies Association (EUSA). Pavone’s broader research agenda has produced seventeen scholarly publications, including in leading peer-reviewed journals like the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Law & Society Review, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Law & Courts. It has also been covered in high-profile outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. Pavone holds a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by December 1, 2022.

Anna Grzymała-Busse
Tommaso Pavone, University of Arizona
Seminars

SPICE Webinar: “Baseball’s Bridge to the Pacific: Celebrating the Legacy of Japanese American Baseball”

-

Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/OuqgZCnXyo4 

When the U.S. government incarcerated over 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II (most of whom were U.S. citizens), Japanese Americans struggled to find a sense of normalcy behind the barbed wire. For some, this was achieved by playing baseball. 

Using baseball as a lens to explore the history of Japanese Americans and the U.S.–Japan relationship, this webinar offers K–12 educators a virtual tour of “Baseball’s Bridge to the Pacific,” a special exhibit currently on display at Dodger Stadium. The tour will be led by Kerry Yo Nakagawa, the founder and director of the Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP). The exhibit celebrates the 150th anniversary of U.S.–Japan diplomacy (1872–2022) and chronicles the introduction and development of baseball in Japan since the early 1870s. The exhibit’s photos, memorabilia, and artifacts offer a unique glimpse into key milestones of Japanese and Japanese Americans in baseball over the past 150 years. 

Join Nakagawa as he brings the legacy of Japanese Americans and baseball to life, live from Dodger Stadium! Attendees will receive a PDF of free curriculum materials on teaching about baseball and Japanese American incarceration, developed by SPICE and NBRP for high school and community college teachers.

This webinar is sponsored by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP), the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), and the USC U.S.-China Institute.

Kerry Yo Nakagawa is the author of "Through a Diamond: 100 Years of Japanese American Baseball." He is the founder and director of the non-profit Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP) and curator of “Diamonds in the Rough: Japanese Americans in Baseball,” an exhibition that was displayed at the Japanese American National Museum in 2000. He is also a consultant to the prestigious Baseball Hall of Fame tour entitled “Baseball in America” and an independent producer/filmmaker, actor, researcher, and writer.
portrait of a man
Naomi Funahashi

Online via Zoom.

Kerry Yo Nakagawa Founder and Director Nisei Baseball Research Project
Workshops

REDS Seminar: The Good Deep State: How the Global Patrimonial Wave Endangers our Future with Jeffrey Kopstein

Kopstein event image

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modernization.

This paper, co-authored with Stephen E. Hanson, identifies the patrimonial phenomenon and explores the contemporary global diffusion of patrimonial rule from its origins in postcommunist Russia, which in the 1990s faced precisely the same social challenges—shrinking “blue collar” industries, sharply increasing economic inequality, and weak, unresponsive democratic institutions—that would bedevil developed countries around the world in the 21st century.  From Russia, patrimonialism spread westward to the “near abroad,” the new EU member states, Israel, and ultimately to the erstwhile heartland of the rule of law: the UK and the US. Some signs indicate that reestablishing bureaucratic predictability and expertise may be much harder than demolishing it. In some respects, the task may be more daunting than the salvation of democracy itself.

Jeffrey Kopstein

Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history.  These interests are central topics in his co-authored book, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and his forthcoming edited volume: "Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust" (Cornell University Press 2023). His current book project is "The Good Deep State: How the Global Patrimonial Wave Endangers our Future."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 3, 2022.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

TEC logo
    
Hoover logo
    
CDDRL logo

This event is co-sponsored by  

CREEES logo

Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jeffrey Kopstein, University of California, Irvine
Seminars

REDS Seminar: Has the Russian Invasion Strengthened the Liberal World Order? with Lucan Way

Lucan Way

Over the last decade, responses to the crisis of democracy have been hampered by the fact that challenges to liberalism have often been subtle and ambiguous. All this changed on 24 February 2022. Two factors made Russia’s invasion a watershed moment in Europe’s battle for democracy: the stark moral clarity of Ukraine’s cause and the existential security threat presented by a newly aggressive Russia.  As a result, the West has responded in a far more unified manner than anyone expected.

Lucan Way
Way’s research focuses on global patterns of democracy and dictatorship.  His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation for the extraordinary durability of autocracies (China, Cuba, USSR) born of violent social revolution. Way’s solo-authored book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015), examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union.  Way argues that pluralism in the developing world often emerges out of authoritarian weakness: governments are too fragmented and states too weak to monopolize political control.  His first book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Way’s work on competitive authoritarianism has been cited thousands of times and helped stimulate new and wide-ranging research into the dynamics of hybrid democratic-authoritarian rule.

Way also has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Slavic Review, Studies in Comparative and International Development, World Politics, as well as in a number of area studies journals and edited volumes. His 2005 article in World Politics was awarded the Best Article Award in the “Comparative Democratization” section of the American Political Science Association in 2006. He is Co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine and is Co-Chair of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Democracy. He has held fellowships at Harvard University (Harvard Academy and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies), and the University of Notre Dame (Kellogg Fellowship).

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 27, 2022.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

TEC logo
    
Hoover logo
    
CDDRL logo

This event is co-sponsored by  

CREEES logo

Anna Grzymała-Busse
Lucan Way, University of Toronto
Seminars

Small Banks, Big Politics: The Cause and Consequences of Bank Proliferation in China

-
Adam Liu Poster

The Henan bank protest, the Evergrande crisis, and the ongoing local government debt issue in China all point to one thing: there’s something wrong with the country’s banking system. Beijing needs to better regulate the numerous small banks that are now intimately intertwined with much of China's economic challenges. 

They’re working on it, but there’s no easy solution.

Adam Y. Liu will tell us the origins of the dilemma, the increasing role of small banks in China and local development, and what tradeoffs China will likely have to make to prevent a run-away banking crisis.

Speaker

Adam Liu Headshot
Adam Y. Liu is assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His main research interests include Chinese politics and political economy. He is currently working on a book project that explores how central-local politics drove the formation, expansion, and operation of what he calls a "state-owned market" in China's banking sector. The project is based on his dissertation, which won the 2020 BRICS Economic Research Award. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral associate with the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale University. 

FSI Contact

Sallie Z. Lin
Jean C. Oi

Virtual event via Zoom

Adam Y. Liu
Seminars

North Korean Human Rights at a New Juncture: COVID, Regional Players, and South Korea-U.S. Cooperation

-

Experts from academia and the policy world will discuss the ongoing human rights crisis in North Korea, with a focus on the roles of the South Korean and United States governments in addressing this issue. The conference will also explore the human rights implications of North Korea’s response to the massive coronavirus outbreak in the country as well as China’s complicity in North Korea’s human rights abuses. Against this backdrop, the event will emphasize the role that the South Korean and United States special envoys for North Korean human rights can play in engaging the North Korean regime on human rights issues. This is especially important given that the Biden administration still has yet to fill the position of a Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights—a position mandated by the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.

Agenda

10:30 – 10:40 AM PT | Welcoming Remarks
Victor Cha, Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair, CSIS; Vice Dean and D.S. Song KF Professor of Government, Georgetown University
Gi-Wook Shin, Director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, Stanford University

10:40 – 11:50 AM PT | SESSION I : The Role of Congress and U.S. Government in North Korean Human Rights
Panelists:
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission; Ranking Member, Congressional-Executive Commission on China
Frank Wolf, Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom

Moderator:
Gi-Wook Shin, Director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, Stanford University

11:50 AM – 12:00 PM PT | Break

12:00 – 1:30 PM PT | SESSION II : The Role of Special Envoys in the North Korean Human Rights Issue
Panelists:
Ambassador Shin-wha Lee, Ambassador of International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights, Republic of Korea
Ambassador Robert King, Senior Adviser (non-resident), Korea Chair, CSIS; Former U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights

Moderator:
Victor Cha, Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair, CSIS; Vice Dean and D.S. Song KF Professor of Government, Georgetown University

This signature event will be co-hosted with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS)

Online-only

Seminars

The Rippling Effects of the U.S.-China Competition: Where Does South Korea Stand?

-
Portraits of Myung Hwan Yu and Gi-Wook Shin with text about Oct 18 webinar on the implications of US-China competition for South Korea

This event is part of APARC’s 2022 Fall webinar series, Asian Perspectives on the US-China Competition.

With rising Sino-U.S. tensions, South Korea has increasingly been in a difficult position to choose policy decisions that may tilt it towards one hegemon or the other. The new Yoon Administration signaled its strengthened alliance with the U.S. by attending the NATO summit and joining the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), but there are concerns that such actions run the risks of potential economic backlash from China. With increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, what diplomatic and economic options are left for South Korea? How does the domestic political environment such as the rise of anti-China sentiments and the return of pro-alliance conservatives back to power influence South Korea’s outlook on international affairs? Former South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan, in conversation with Professor Gi-Wook Shin, will discuss the South Korean perspective on the rising U.S.-China rivalry.

Myung Hwan Yu, former foreign minister of South Korea

 Myung Hwan Yu, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of South Korea, also served as Ambassador to Israel, Japan and Philippines, and as Minister of the Permanent Mission to UN. His experience extends across a broad range of issues in international relations including trade, security and nuclear negotiations with North Korea. After his retirement from the foreign ministry, Ambassador Yu was board chairman of the Sejong University in Seoul, visiting scholar in the Korea Program at APARC; and he is currently a senior advisor at Kim & Chang Law Office.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Gi-Wook Shin

Via Zoom: Register at https://bit.ly/3LjfeMW

Myung Hwan Yu <i>former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of South Korea</i>
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series
Korea Program

Research Assistant Spotlight: Kerstin Norris Examines Race and Racism in Asia with Gi-Wook Shin

Authors
Michael Breger
News Type
Q&As
Date
Paragraphs

Each summer, Stanford students assist APARC faculty on a variety of projects as research assistants (RAs). For Master’s in East Asian Studies candidate Kerstin Norris, working with Center and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin provided the opportunity to conduct literature reviews of the field of race studies and build her skills in a collaborative research environment.

Norris, who intends to pursue a doctoral degree in Sociology with a research emphasis on Korean Studies, described the experience of working closely with Stanford faculty and peer researchers as particularly valuable in designing her own research projects and giving her direction for her future dissertation.

In the following Q&A, Norris discusses her research assistantship experience this summer. The interview was slightly edited for length and clarity.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive research and commentary updates from our scholars

First, tell us a bit about yourself and your academic interests and extracurriculars. 
I am currently a master’s student within the Center for East Asian Studies and primarily focus on South Korea, militarism, labor, and migration. I am originally from Xenia, Ohio where not much happens. So, when I told my family I was interested in international studies as an undergraduate and later East Asia as a graduate student, I was always the odd man out. I knew that I was meant to leave my small town but was unsure what I was destined to do. At the Ohio State University, I found a love for international relations, political theory, and research with an interest in East Asia (I have Korean and Japanese pop and rock music to thank for that). I decided to apply to Stanford’s East Asian Studies master’s as a bridge for a PhD in Sociology in order to gain more knowledge.  

Why did you choose to work with Dr. Shin? 
I actually chose to attend Stanford in order to work with Dr. Shin. His work is globally renowned in East Asian studies and especially Korean studies. Before committing to Stanford, I had a Zoom call with Dr. Shin about the CEAS program and the university’s opportunities. I knew I wanted to become an academic, but the incredible competitiveness in the job market always made me apprehensive to go forward with that career route. The uncertainty about job prospects after graduation felt daunting, although I could not imagine doing anything else, given my love for teaching and research. However, after my call with Dr. Shin, I knew I had to give it a shot. He told me that it was possible for me to become a scholar if I wanted to and had the grit. He really inspired me, so it was natural for me to want to work under Dr. Shin as an RA. 

Can you describe the research assistantship?
Because we were in the beginning stages of a project, the job consisted primarily of conducting literature reviews of the field of race studies and searching for case studies for the job. After completing the literature reviews, my teammates and I had biweekly meetings in which we discussed the content we read and attempted to theorize our own understanding of race and racism within the Asian context. The next team will be doing far more empirical work and working closely with case studies. To those unfamiliar with academia, I might describe this research as an attempt to gain a greater understanding of how racism operates in an Asian context. A lot of scholarship concerning what race is and how it operates within the world is very Western-centric or applies a Black-White lens, so it is important to understand how it potentially manifests across the Asian continent.  

What did you learn over the course of your research assistantship and how do you think it will help you in your career? 
Given that I want to be a professor in Sociology and Korean studies, this research directly correlated to my future career. I had been an RA in the past, largely doing archival research and general literature reviews. However, this RA-ship was different in that it really challenged me to work within a team, become more familiar with a field I hadn’t studied, and build a project from ground zero. Because of the RA-ship, I will be better prepared to design my own research projects, most importantly my future dissertation.

What's next for you? 
In the fall, I will be doing an exchange quarter at Sungkyunkwan University where I will be taking Korean studies courses taught in Korean. I will then return to Stanford to write my master’s thesis and graduate. Hopefully, I will then apply to PhD programs!   

Any advice for Stanford students considering a summer RA position? 
For those considering a summer RA position, I would make sure that the research interests you and somewhat aligns with something you’d like to do in the future, even if it isn’t academia. I would also highly recommend working in an RA position with a team. Having done research alone and in a team setting, I recognize how much I gained from hearing others’ thoughts and debating concepts and theories. That was the most fruitful part of my summer experience.

Learn more about APARC’s summer research assistant internships and other training opportunities for Stanford undergraduate and graduate students >

Read More

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol waves a national flag during the celebration of the 77th National Liberation Day at Presidential House on August 15, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea.
Commentary

The Path Ahead for Yoon

How Korea’s New President Can Recover from His First 100 Days of Struggles.
The Path Ahead for Yoon
Jerome He
Q&As

Research Assistant Spotlight: Jerome He Examines Great Power Competition with Oriana Skylar Mastro

Political Science major Jerome He ‘24, spent the summer assisting APARC Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro. He leveraged the opportunity to expand his knowledge of Chinese security issues and refine his research acumen. We spoke with He about his experience as a research assistant and his time working for Dr. Mastro.
Research Assistant Spotlight: Jerome He Examines Great Power Competition with Oriana Skylar Mastro
Tongtong Zhang
Q&As

Predoctoral Fellow Spotlight: Tongtong Zhang Examines Channels for Public Deliberation in China

Political Scientist and APARC Predoctoral Fellow Tongtong Zhang explores how the Chinese Communist Party maintains control through various forms of political communication.
Predoctoral Fellow Spotlight: Tongtong Zhang Examines Channels for Public Deliberation in China
Hero Image
Kerstin Norris
All News button
1
Subtitle

MA in East Asian Studies candidate Kerstin Norris spent the summer assisting APARC and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin with his research on racial tensions in Asia. Looking to pursue a PhD in Sociology, Norris found tremendous value in a collaborative academic environment. We spoke with Norris about her experience as a research assistant and her time working with Dr. Shin.

Subscribe to International Relations