Manana Aslamazyan, a media and television expert who has worked with Russian journalists for more than 15 years, is Executive Director of Internews Europe based in Paris.

Aslamazyan and Alexei K. Simonov launched Russia's first freedom of speech organization in 1991, the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF). In 1992, Aslamazyan began to work with Internews Network to organize events for newly formed independent TV stations around the former Soviet Union. She became its first foreign staff person and by 1994, was managing the Russian operation, which in 1997 registered as a fully independent Russian non-commercial organization. In 2006, in response to changing legislation and its increased focus on training, Internews Russia re-organized as the Educated Media Foundation (EMF).

As director, Aslamazyan led Internews Russia/EMF in the creation of numerous innovative and ambitious projects. Aslamazyan's constant drive to respond to the changing needs of Russian media led to the launch of Internews Russia/EMF's month-long Journalism School, the News Factory newsroom automation project, and the Russian-American Media Entrepreneurship Dialogue. Internews Russia/EMF was forced to shut down in 2007 following a raid on its Moscow headquarters and filing of criminal charges against EMF and Aslamazyan that were widely seen as politically motivated. In 2008, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that the charges against Aslamayan had no legal basis.

Aslamazyan has served as an expert to the Russian Duma Committee on Information Policy, and from 2000 to 2004, she was one of three representatives of civil society on the influential Federal Competition Commission of Ministry of Press, TV Broadcasting and Mass Media. She is a board member of the prestigious Academy of Russian Television and served for three years as a Vice-President of the National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters (NAT).

Aslamazyan serves on the boards of several Russian nonprofit organizations, Internews Network, and Internews International, which unites local Internews organizations around the world.

Co-sponsored by CREES and Internews Network

Dr. Yan will discuss the economic modernization policies of the current CCP leadership.  What achievements have been made since Deng Xiaoping instituted economic reforms nearly 30 years ago?  What short and long term development goals have been set for the future?

Dr. Shuhan Yan is a Senior Advisor to CPC Chairman Hu Jintao and Dean of the Department of Scientific Socialism Studies of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,  also known as the Central Party School (CCPS, or the School), the highest institution to train officials of the Communist Party of China.

Despite early talk of being able to “decouple” itself from the U.S. financial crisis and accompanying credit crunch, the damage has spread to Asia. Collapsing export markets, currency instability and stock market collapses are plaguing all of Asia, not least China, Japan and South Korea. At the same time, China and Japan are major financiers of the United States federal government and newly nationalized financial firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Two leading economic experts on Japan and China will discuss the impact of the U.S. financial crisis on Asia. Does Japan’s experience with banking collapse bear any lessons for the United States today? Will China continue to finance the United States government? How will a U.S. recession affect the prospects for economic growth in Asia?

Richard Katz has taught about Japan’s economy as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. Previously, and as a Visiting Lecturer in Economics at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook.  Mr. Katz is the author of two books on Japan's economic trvails; The System That Soured--The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (M.E. Sharpe 1998) and Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe 2002).  He has twice testified about Japan and Asia before Congress, in 1998 and 2005. Both times the hearings were held by the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee. In the year 2000, he served on the Council of Foreign Relations' Task Force on the Japanese economy.  Having received his B.A. degree in History from Columbia University in 1973, Mr. Katz went on to obtain his M.A. in Economics at New York University (NYU) in 1996.
 
Mark Spiegel served as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at New York University.  He has served as a visiting professor in the Economics Department of U.C. Berkeley, as well as a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley.  He has also served as a consultant at the World Bank, as a visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan, and as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Committee on International Economic Analysis.  Dr. Spiegel received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and his B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.  Dr. Spiegel has published numerous articles in both academic and policy-oriented journals on international financial issues and on economic issues associated

Abstract: In this age of increasing "Global Transparency," commercial satellite imagery has now made it possible for anyone to remotely peer "over the fence" and view what heretofore had been otherwise impossible...clandestine nuclear facilities (most significantly, those capable of producing fissile material suitable for use in nuclear weapons). The synergistic combination of readily available tools: personal computers, the internet, three-dimensional virtual globe visualization applications such as Google Earth, and high resolution commercial satellite imagery has gone beyond what anyone could have imaged just a few years ago. The downside of all this is that those who want to keep their clandestine nuclear facilities and associated activities from being either detected, identified, and/or monitored, are becoming more adept in their use of camouflage, concealment, and deception.

Iran is one such case where it has followed a steep learning curve of adapting to the threat that overhead observation can pose. After repeated dissident group revelations about Iran's clandestine nuclear facilities, together with confirming media broadcast of commercial satellite images of those facilities followed by verification inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); the government of Iran has become increasingly aware of this threat and gone to greater and greater lengths to try and defeat it. Iran's cover-up tactics have improved with time...from concealed infrastructure and false cover stories (Natanz)...to refurbishment and sanitization of facilities following removal of incriminating equipment (Kalaye Electric and Lashkar Abad), to the wholesale razing of facilities together with the removal of dirt and vegetation to defeat IAEA forensic environmental sampling (Lavizan).

While the international community continues to debate the issue of whether or not Iran's nuclear program is purely peaceful in nature (helping it to stay an "open case"), Iran is defiantly pursuing its goal of fissile material production. Syria, on the other hand (evidently together with North Korea), was also quite aware of the overhead observation threat, taking great pains to conceal its plutonium production reactor at Al-Kibar. Syria disguised the true function of the facility by employing minimal site security (no fences or guard towers), having minimal support infrastructure (with non visible powerlines and only buried water lines), not installing a telltale reactor ventilation stack or cooling tower, hiding the reactor building in a ravine (terrain masking), and finally camouflaging the facility with a false façade to make it appear as a byzantine fortress. Nonetheless, despite all those steps, a leak of ground-level reactor construction and interior photographs, which formed the basis for the subsequent bombing of the facility by Israel, successfully thwarted that effort (the "closed case?"). Rather than confessing the truth about al-Kibar, the Syrian government rushed to remove all traces of the destroyed reactor and supplant it with a new larger footprint building for as yet unknown purposes while continuing to claim it was previously only a disused military warehouse. The IAEA asked d Syria for permission to inspect not only the Al-Kibar site, but reportedly up to three other sites thought to be associated with it. The Syrians refused access to all but the now heavily sanitized Al-Kibar location. We must now all await the IAEA report on the findings of that singular onsite inspection.

Frank Pabian is a Senior Nonproliferation Infrastructure Analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has over 35 years experience in the nuclear nonproliferation field including six years with the Office of Imagery Analysis and 18 years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "Z" Division.  Frank also served as a Chief Inspector for the IAEA during UN inspections in Iraq from 1996-1998 focusing on "Capable Sites." In December 2002, Frank served as one of the first US nuclear inspectors back in Iraq with UN/IAEA. While at Los Alamos, Frank has developed and presented commercial satellite imagery based briefings on foreign clandestine nuclear facilities to the International Nuclear Suppliers Group, the IAEA, NATO, and the Foreign Ministries of China and India on behalf of the NNSA and STATE.

Capital in its many facets is variable.  Like quicksilver, it can divide, reunite, and metamorphose seamlessly across a spectrum of ownerships by foreigners, the state, and domestic private
entrepreneurs.  

What does variable capital mean in and for Vietnam?  Who are the different investors?  How do they respond to state efforts to attract investments from overseas Vietnamese?  How do global supply chains—corporate buyers, contract factories, and subcontractors—shape the changing nature and impacts of capital in Vietnam?  How does a self-described socialist state use policies on investment, employment, and the privatization of state-owned factories to control the relations between workers and owners?  What roles in this mix are played by journalists who can ignore neither the party line nor the workers who protest in spite of it?  

In addition to addressing these questions, Prof. Tran will argue that workers in Vietnam are not resigned to being squeezed between morphing capital and state control.  They defend their interests flexibly in diverse forms of protest, overt and covert, including appeals to the state’s own socialist vision.  Fresh from extensive fieldwork in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, and footwear, Prof. Tran will show how Vietnamese workers use origin, class, gender, and ethnicity to mobilize collective action against morphing capital in a one-party state.

Angie Ngoc Tran is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay.  Her latest publications include articles in the Labor Studies Journal (2007) on labor media and labor-management-state relations in Vietnam.  Her PhD is from the University of Southern California (1996).

About the speaker
George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, among other books.

Dr. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 is the twelfth and latest book in the Oxford History of the United States, and the first book in the series to focus on a single subject, U.S. foreign policy.

Dr. Herring earned a PhD in history from the University of Virginia, and has been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

About the moderator
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and co-director of The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Professor Kennedy is the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American Studies).

About From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

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From the American Revolution to the fifty-year struggle with communism and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 tells the dramatic story of America’s emergence as a superpower—its birth in revolution, its troubled present, its uncertain future.

» Buy it from Oxford University Press: "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776" (Oxford University Press, 2008)

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation in print. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winner of prestigious Bancroft and Parkman prizes. From Colony to Superpower is the only thematic volume commissioned for the series.  Here, George C. Herring uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America’s dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world’s greatest superpower.

Quotes in praise of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

“George Herring’s well-paced, readable, and up-to-date history of U.S. foreign relations will be the authoritative account for this generation.”
- Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine
“In this splendidly detailed account, George Herring expertly guides us through the rich and fascinating story of America’s foreign relations. This is history on a grand scale, clearly and elegantly rendered. Anyone who wants to understand how the Untied States has come to occupy its current place on the world stage should read this magisterial book."
- Fredrik Logevall, co-author of A People and a Nation