Please join us on The Great Tohoku, Japan Disaster - Symposium Iand The Great Tohoku, Japan Disaster - Symposium II for two evenings devoted to an examination of and conversation about the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake in northern Honshu, Japan, and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear accident. In talks and panel discussions, experts from the School of Earth Sciences and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies will focus on what happened, the impacts of the events, and what the future holds for Japan and other earthquake- and tsunami-zone regions of the world.

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.