FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
CISAC Conference Room
Who influences policy outcomes in the Philippines? While most analysts agree that the quality of policymaking has been poor, they offer two very different explanations. Some blame a too-strong presidency: Presidents keep personal control over policy, so policies change when one president succeeds another. Discontinuity undermines performance. Other observers blame the power of congress: Legislators have stymied presidential agendas for reform, while presidents have been powerless to stop congress from failing to act or from acting to undermine reform. Takeshi Kawanaka takes a different approach. He argues that while presidents have control of fiscal policy, congress is dominant when it comes to ordinary legislation. It is the allocation not the concentration of power that facilitates short-sighted pork-barrel politics and inhibits the growth of cohesive and disciplined political parties.
Takeshi Kawanaka, a visiting scholar in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has written mainly on Philippine politics. After two years of field work on local governance and political machines, he wrote Power in a Philippine City (2002). More recently he edited The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (2005, in Japanese), which deals with the interaction between democratic consolidation and economic liberalization. His current research is on the role of political institutions in shaping policy outcomes in new democracies. He received his PhD in political science from Kobe University, and his MA and BA from Waseda University.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Takeshi Kawanaka is a 2005-06 visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC, and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), Japan. He was a visiting research associate at the University of the Philippines from 1996 to 1998.
Since Kawanaka joined IDE in 1993, he has been working on politics in developing countries. He did field research mainly in the Philippines. He wrote a book on local politics, Power in a Philippine City (Chiba: IDE) and edited a book on post-democratization politics, The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (in Japanese, Chiba: IDE). Now, he works on political institutions and policy outcomes in new democracies.
Kawanaka received BA and MA in Law from Waseda University and a PhD in political science from Kobe University. He taught courses on Southeast Asian Politics at Komazawa University and Seijo University. Aside from Japanese and English, he speaks Tagalog.
In the view of many policy-makers, as well as the popular media, the alliance between the United States and South Korea is suffering from an unprecedented crisis of confidence. Anti-American views, particularly among the young, are widespread in South Korea. On an official level, there are constant tensions over the role of U.S. troops based in Korea and resistance to demands to open the Korean economy to foreign investment. Most seriously, there is a stark divergence in the approach of both countries toward North Korea.
This portrait of an alliance in crisis is often contrasted to a previous golden age in U.S.-Korean relations. According to this view, the alliance enjoyed a long period of harmony during much of the Cold War, when anti-Americanism was not a problem. The military alliance was secure and Korea's economic development was in harmony with the global policies of the United States. The two countries enjoyed a strategic convergence in their response to the threat of North Korea.
This view of the Cold War past has some elements of truth. But it is largely a myth that obscures a history of constant tension and even severe crisis in the alliance relationship. The clash between Korean nationalism and American strategic policy goals has been present from the beginning of the Cold War. Differences over the response to North Korea have been repeatedly an issue in the relationship. And anti-Americanism has been a feature of Korean life for decades.
Daniel Sneider will explore the myth of this golden age. He will focus on what may have been the most dangerous decade in US-Korean relations, from 1969-79, a period ranging from the Guam Doctrine to the assassination of President Park Chung Hee. It is a time when South Korean doubts about the durability of the alliance prompted the serious pursuit of nuclear weapons and the two countries clashed over North Korea policy, economic goals, human rights and democracy. Finally, he will look at how the myth of a golden age creates a distorted view of the current tensions in the alliance.
Daniel Sneider is a 2005-06 Pantech Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the foreign affairs columnist of the San Jose Mercury News. He is currently writing a book on the U.S. management of its alliances with South Korea and Japan. His column on foreign affairs, looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective, is syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service, reaching about 400 newspapers in North America. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the San Jose Mercury News, responsible for coverage of national and international news until the spring of 2003. He has had a long career as a foreign correspondent. From 1990-94, he was the Moscow Bureau Chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985-90, he was Tokyo Correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Previously he served in India and at the United Nations.
Philippines Conference Room
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Daniel C. Sneider is a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford. His own research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea. Since 2017, he has been based partly in Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, where he is working on a diplomatic history of the creation and management of the U.S. security alliances with Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. Sneider contributes regularly to the leading Japanese publication Toyo Keizai as well as to the Nelson Report on Asia policy issues.
Sneider is the former Associate Director for Research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. At Shorenstein APARC, Sneider directed the center’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, a comparative study of the formation of wartime historical memory in East Asia. He is the co-author of a book on wartime memory and elite opinion, Divergent Memories, from Stanford University Press. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, of Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, from Routledge and of Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, from University of Washington Press.
Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. He is the co-editor of Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, distributed by Brookings Institution Press, 2007; of First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier, 2009; as well as of Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration, 2010. Sneider’s path-breaking study “The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under the Democratic Party of Japan” appeared in the July 2011 issue of Asia Policy. He has also contributed to other volumes, including “Strategic Abandonment: Alliance Relations in Northeast Asia in the Post-Iraq Era” in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options, Korea Economic Institute, 2008; “The History and Meaning of Denuclearization,” in William H. Overholt, editor, North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019; and “Evolution or new Doctrine? Japanese security policy in the era of collective self-defense,” in James D.J. Brown and Jeff Kingston, eds, Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, Routledge, December 2017.
Sneider’s writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. He is frequently cited in such publications.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent. His twice-weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective was syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the Mercury News. From 1990 to 1994, he was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Prior to that he was a correspondent in India, covering South and Southeast Asia. He also wrote widely on defense issues, including as a contributor and correspondent for Defense News, the national defense weekly.
Sneider has a BA in East Asian history from Columbia University and an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
After a decade of gloom, the sun seems at last to be shining brightly on Japan. Its economy has now grown at a respectable pace for four years and the clouds of deflation seem finally to have broken. International factors were the proximate cause of this improvement, but below the surface fundamental changes have also started to occur in the structure of the domestic economy. These changes are largely benign in nature, though they do raise questions about Japan's fiscal health, its ability to fund the twin US deficits, and the trajectory of its relations with its neighbors. The purpose of this speech is to explain how these dynamices will unfold and what they mean for Japan, East Asia, and the United States.
Robert Madsen is a Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies. He also advises such private equity firms as Unison Capital and the Robert M. Bass Group and was Asia Strategist at Soros Private Funds Management, which undertook leveraged buyouts and corporate restructuring in Europe and East Asia. From time to time he consults for several government agencies, including in the past year an economics ministry, a foreign ministry, an intelligence agency, and a central bank. Madsen graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a Masters Degree, with Distinction, and a Doctorate in International Relations. He additionally holds a J.D., with Distinction, from Stanford Law School and is a member of the California State Bar.
Philippines Conference Room
Alla Kassianova has spent most of her professional life at Tomsk State University in Russia where she received an undergraduate degree in history and a PhD in historiography. She now teaches at the university's Department of International Relations. She is interested in Russia's foreign policy and security policy. Currently, Kassianova's research focuses on the defense industrial dimension of international security relationships.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Gideon Maltz is studying the role of presidential term limits in advancing democracy, strategies for more effectively enforcing term limits, and the question of term limits in the context of parliamentary systems. Maltz has worked as a Junior Fellow in the Democracy & Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company. He has also spent time working on comparative constitutionalism as a part-time consultant at the National Endowment for Democracy, on Sudan and Zimbabwe at the International Crisis Group, and on international trade at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson.
Maltz is a pre-doctoral (law) fellow at CDDRL in 2005-2006.
Encina Basement Conference Room
N/A
Gideon Maltz is studying the role of presidential term limits in advancing democracy, strategies for more effectively enforcing term limits, and the question of term limits in the context of parliamentary systems. Gideon has worked as a Junior Fellow in the Democracy & Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company. He has also spent time working on comparative constitutionalism as a part-time consultant at the National Endowment for Democracy, on Sudan and Zimbabwe at the International Crisis Group, and on international trade at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson.
Gideon graduated with a B.A. in Ethics, Politics & Economics from Yale and is currently a third-year student at Stanford Law School. He is also a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN).
Co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Israel, San Francisco and the Jewish Community Relations Council
Yaron Deckel is considered by many to be one of Israel's top political reporters and commentators. Mr. Deckel has covered the trials and tribulations of Israeli politics since 1985, including five general election campaigns. He is a seasoned radio and television journalist, having unprecedented access to all the major players in Israeli politics during the last 17 years. Since September of 2002, Mr. Deckel has been reporting from Washington as the IBA's Bureau Chief. Of special note is Mr. Deckel's recent interview with President Bush at his Texas ranch - the first exclusive interview granted to an Israeli journalist. Mr. Deckel has also served as guest expert on Israeli politics to NPR, ABC News Radio, CBC TV and others. Additionally, he has briefed U.S. administration officials, congressmen, ambassadorial staff at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, U.S. and European policymakers and business people about the state of Israeli politics. Mr. Deckel holds a Bachelor's degree in Criminology and a Master's degree in Political Science from Bar-Ilan University. His Master's degree focus was on the intersection of politics and the media in Israel.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Philip Coyle is a recognized expert on U.S. and worldwide military research, development and testing, on operational military matters, and on national security policy and defense spending, including defense acquisition reform and defense procurement. He also has extensive background in missile defense, in military space systems, and in high-technology weapons, such as high power lasers and other directed-energy weapons.
From Sept. 29, 1994, through Jan. 20 2001, Coyle was assistant secretary of defense and director of Operational Test and Evaluation, in the Department of Defense, and he is the longest serving director in the 20-year history of the office. In this capacity, he was the principal advisor to the secretary of defense on test and evaluation at DoD.
Appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the 2005 Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission, Coyle is currently serving on that commission, and was nominated for this position by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Coyle has 40 years experience in research, development, and testing matters. From 1959 to 1979, and again from 1981 to 1993, he worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. From 1987 to 1993, he served as laboratory associate director and deputy to the laboratory director. In recognition of his 33 years service to the laboratory and to the University of California, the university named him laboratory associate director emeritus.
Coyle graduated from Dartmouth College with an MS in mechanical engineering (1957) and a BA (1956). His wife, Dr. Martha Krebs, was assistant secretary of energy and director of the office of science from 1993 to 2000, and was the founding director of the new California NanoSystems Institute, a research partnership between UCLA and U.C. Santa Barbara. They have four grown children and four grandchildren, and live in Los Angeles.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
The visit of China's President Hu Jintao to the United States this week is yet another opportunity for chatter about the "Chinese threat.'' In the lead-up to his arrival, we have heard rising voices from Congress and from the administration on everything from China's currency manipulation and piracy of intellectual property to its military buildup.
Do not be deceived. There is no real appetite in either Washington or Beijing for confrontation over any of these issues, much less a serious exploration of the challenge that China presents to American global leadership.
Neither government can afford an escalation of tensions. Economically, we are too intertwined. Strip away the packaging on the $200 billion trade deficit with China and you will find American companies running global assembly lines that begin in Ohio, pass through Malaysia, and end up in southern China.
Strategically, the United States is painfully dependent on China to try to cope with the greatest security challenge in northeast Asia: North Korea's nuclear program.
Beijing is wedded to its doctrine of "China's peaceful rise.'' First formulated three years ago, it aims to keep things calm with the United States and most of its neighbors, buying time to manage the tightrope act of continuing high growth while preserving domestic stability.
In any case, Washington is too bogged down in the Middle East to do more than bark now and then about China.
"At the strategic level, the United States is really focused like a laser on the Middle East,'' and the Chinese like it that way, said Asian security expert Kurt Campbell. "They appreciate the fact that with the U.S. attention focused elsewhere, it allows China to play a larger role in Asia as a whole,'' he told a gathering last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Typically, while Washington is focused on Hu's visit, the Chinese defense minister is in the midst of an unprecedented Asian tour that will take him to North and South Korea and to Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. China's prime minister has just finished a swing through Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Cambodia.
In my own travels through Asia recently, from South Korea and Japan in the northeast down to Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong in Southeast Asia, I found a stunning growth in China's influence. The question of how to deal with China's rise is high on every agenda.
Everywhere people are looking over their shoulder, worried about China's burgeoning strength and presence. They are equally fearful that the United States is abandoning the field to China. But they also don't want to choose between these two powers.
That is even true in Japan, where the popular media and politicians are full of talk about the Chinese threat. But look a little closer and you will also find a growing counter-movement, particularly in elite policy circles, warning against becoming separated from the rest of Asia. The battle for succession to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is stepping down in the fall, is now being shaped around this issue.
The China-Japan rivalry tends to reveal the more muscular side of China's "peaceful rise,'' one that Americans rarely glimpse. In Vietnam, senior foreign policy officials recounted what happened when the Japanese came courting to gain Vietnam's backing for a resolution to give them permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council, a key goal of Japan's foreign policy. Japan is Vietnam's largest aid donor and a major source of foreign investment.
China and Vietnam have a long and stormy history as neighbors, including wars that go back centuries and -- more recently -- a brief invasion in 1979 that ended in defeat for the Chinese. Relations these days are relatively good, however, fed by growing trade, heavily in China's favor.
Hu, in his role as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, sent a special envoy to talk to the leadership of the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party. Sometimes, a Vietnamese official told me, the Chinese can be very indirect. Not this time. The message was simple: "Don't do it!'' The ``or else'' was left unspoken.
The Vietnamese compromised, supporting Japan's membership but refusing to co-sponsor the resolution. China was not pleased, but apparently accepted it.
For the Vietnamese, a senior official explained, they must engage in a "lot of fine balancing.'' Vietnam "can't stop engaging China'' but wants to make sure China becomes a "predictable'' power.
In Washington, when the cloud of rhetoric clears, that formula pretty much sums up the reality of U.S.-China relations, too.
Commentators across the political spectrum have suggested that a profoundly confrontational clash between western and traditional cultures is taking place. Are modernity & religiosity in fundamental conflict? Are western values - equated with modernity and secularism - incompatible with orthodoxy? Are traditions - based in religion and emphasizing the importance of established practices - antithetical to "progress"? Is the conflict so profound that it has become our new "cold war"? Join our panelists to explore one of the more disturbing challenges facing our world today.
Jointly sponsored by the Stanford International Initiative and the Undergraduate Admissions Office.
Cubberley Auditorium
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C137
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Coit Blacker is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He served as director of FSI from 2003 to 2012. From 2005 to 2011, he was co-chair of the International Initiative of the Stanford Challenge, and from 2004 to 2007, served as a member of the Development Committee of the university's Board of Trustees.
During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he oversaw the implementation of U.S. policy toward Russia and the New Independent States, while also serving as principal staff assistant to the president and the National Security Advisor on matters relating to the former Soviet Union.
Following his government service, Blacker returned to Stanford to resume his research and teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he also co-directed the Aspen Institute's U.S.-Russia Dialogue, which brought together prominent U.S. and Russian specialists on foreign and defense policy for discussion and review of critical issues in the bilateral relationship. He was a study group member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) throughout the commission's tenure.
In 2001, Blacker was the recipient of the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford.
Blacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies for his work on U.S.-Russian relations. He is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., and Ph.D).
Blacker's association with Stanford began in 1977, when he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Arms Control and Disarmament Program, the precursor to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.
Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).
Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.
Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.
Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.