On January 27^th, the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford hosted a webinar on the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. The meeting was such a success that many participants asked for a follow up, allowing for more in depth conversations about the expected trajectory of these legislative proposals. On February 10th at 10 a.m. pacific, Daphne Keller, Joris van Hoboken en Guillermo Beltra will join the Cyber Policy Center for a follow up discussion. 

Few American diplomats can match the years of experience in multiple Southeast Asian countries that Ambassador Scot Marciel has accumulated during his career in the US Foreign Service. The book he is writing at Stanford will interpret the region and its relations with the United States historically and now. Policy questions from the manuscript that the webinar will address include: Can America’s relations with Thailand be reinvigorated, and if so, how? Why have US-Vietnam relations prospered, and with what prospects going forward? Realistically, what can be expected from relations between the US and Indonesia? How should the recent coup in Myanmar be understood and how does it challenge US foreign policy? More broadly, in the near term, what priority ends and means should inform US engagement with Southeast Asia? In exploring answers to these and other questions, Amb. Marciel will interact with a second distinguished speaker, Catharin Dalpino, who is uniquely well qualified to discuss these matters based on her extensive experience in US policymaking positions, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations related to Southeast Asia.

Scot Marciel is a career US Foreign Service Officer. He served as America’s Ambassador to Myanmar in 2016-2020 when thousands of ethnic Rohingya were killed, expelled, or emigrated from the country—a challenging time for its democratic transition and for US-Myanmar relations. Earlier assignments included tours as Ambassador to Indonesia, Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he worked as an editor of publications at the National Center for Export-Import Studies at Georgetown University. Ambassador Marciel’s more than 35 years of experience as a diplomat in Asia and around the world have also included assignments in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. His degrees are an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a BA in International Relations from the University of California, Davis.

Catharin Dalpino’s remarkable career has encompassed academe, government, and NGOs. At Georgetown University she taught Southeast Asian Studies and launched and led the university’s Thai Studies Program. Other institutions in which she has lectured, researched, administered, or advised include The Asia Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, George Washington University, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and has held positions at the World Bank and the United Nations in Geneva. The author of many articles and three books on US-Asian relations, she has testified on that topic before the Senate and the House of Representatives more than a dozen times. Her degrees are an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Barnard College.

Donald K. Emmerson, in addition to heading the Southeast Asia Program, is affiliated with Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and its Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Recent writings relevant to US-Southeast Asia relations include articles in December 2020 in The Diplomat and East Asia Forum and an edited volume, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (2020). Before moving to Stanford in 1999, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he headed its Center for Southeast Asian Studies.  He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Australian National University, among other institutions. His degrees are from Yale (PhD) and Princeton (BA).

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U.S. relations with China evolved into outright rivalry during the Trump administration. In this talk, Thomas Wright will look at whether this rivalry will continue and evolve during a Biden administration. To answer this question, he will look at the roots of strategic competition between the two countries and various strands of thinking within the Biden team. The most likely outcome is that the competition will evolve into a clash of governance systems and the emergence of two interdependent blocs where ideological differences become a significant driver of geopolitics. Cooperation is possible but it will be significantly shaped by conditions of rivalry.

Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He is the author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” which was published by Yale University Press in May 2017. His second book "Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order" will be published by St Martin's Press in 2021. Wright also works on U.S. foreign policy, great power competition, the European Union, Brexit, and economic interdependence.

Wright has a doctorate from Georgetown University, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University, and a bachelor's and master's from University College Dublin. He has also held a pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He was previously executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy.

 

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This event is part of the 2021 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, Biden’s America, Xi’s China: What’s Now & What’s Next?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.

 

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's winter webinar series "Asian Politics and Policy in a Time of Uncertainty."

In the 2010s, amid signs of rising illiberalism around the world, Indonesia seemed exceptional—an established democracy bucking the trend.  In 2019, however, at a conference in Canberra, experts on Indonesia from Australia, Asia, and the United States argued otherwise. Their variously skeptical views were recently published in a book alarmingly entitled Democracy in Indonesia: From Stagnation to Recession?  In this webinar, a co-editor of the volume will discuss its subtitle with an analyst of Indonesian politics who did not contribute to the book.

Panelists:

Eve Warburton is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include democratic representation, identity, and the political economy of policymaking in young democracies, with a focus on Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia. In addition to Democracy in Indonesia (2020), her work has appeared in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Democratization, Electoral Studies, Pacific Affairs, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and as chapters in several books. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Reclaiming What's Ours: The Business and Politics of Resource Nationalism in Indonesia. She received her doctorate in international studies from the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs in 2018.  Her master’s and undergraduate degrees are respectively from Columbia University and the University of Sydney.

Tom Pepinsky is Tisch University Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His fields are comparative politics and international political economy, with a focus on emerging markets and a special interest in Southeast Asia. His work on Indonesia includes, as co-editor, Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (2018). He has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics, among other venues, including an online platform, New Mandala: New Perspectives on Southeast Asia. He is an active co-founder of the Southeast Asia Research Group (seareg.org), which showcases new research by young scholars on Southeast Asian politics, and he serves on the steering committee of the Association for Analytical Learning on Islam and Muslim Societies (aalims.org).  His PhD in political science is from Yale University.

Southeast Asia Program Director Don Emmerson, who has also worked on Indonesia, will moderate the discussion.

A new administration and Congress provide a key opportunity to improve US cybersecurity and the governance of digital technologies. Yet the challenges appear daunting: viral disinformation, widespread privacy violations, algorithms biased by race, class and gender, ransomware running rampant, and unprecedented tech company scale and market dominance. Additionally, the US faces a persistent deficit in skilled cybersecurity workers, a lack of diversity in the field, and a public with wildly unequal broadband internet access.  Meanwhile, competition among governance regimes, specifically between the United States, Europe and China, has raised the stakes over whether democracies or authoritarian governments will set the rules for the internet. The policy choices made by the new administration will play a pivotal role in shaping our global future. On February 24 at 10am PST, join Kelly Born and Marietje Schaake of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, Michael Daniel of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Group, and Karen Kornbluh for the German Marshall Fund to discuss cyber policy priorities for the new administration.

 

 

We provide a counterpoint to recent political developments, including the storming of the US Capitol, using novel evidence on 95,314 extreme right-wing supporters and Nazi collaborators in France, which experienced intense polarization in the 1930s and 1940s. We show how democratic values can be undermined by exogenous networks of influential individuals, including heroes. Heroes are specially positioned to widen the `Overton Window’ and legitimize views previously considered deeply repugnant. Social networks of individuals sharing such an identity can transmit and reinforce this influence, leading to escalating commitments that entrench political positions and make debiasing more difficult. However, heroes can also use their legitimacy to strengthen democracy. A link to our Vox Column is here, and to the working paper is here. 

Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.

Saum’s  research focuses upon understanding the effectiveness of organizations and innovations that societies have developed to address the problems of violence and other political risks, and to seek new lessons for fostering peace and development. His research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in political economy from the American Political Science Association and his co-authored research on heroes was awarded the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. In 2020, Jha was also honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellows Program.

For more information, please visit his website: https://saumitra.people.stanford.edu/

 

Co-sponsored by the Global Populisms Project.