Bio: Dr. Arvind Gupta recently retired as India's Deputy National Security Advisor. In his capacity as Deputy NSA, he also headed India's National Security Council Secretariat from 2014 until 2017. Previously, he was the Director General of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), a thinktank funded by India's Ministry of Defence. Dr. Gupta joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1979 and served at India's diplomatic missions in Moscow, London and Ankara. At the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, he dealt with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, Russia, Kashmir, and the Central Asian affairs. He is an honorary professor in the Department of Defence and National Security Studies, Panjab University. He has an MSc in Physics from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is currently the Director of Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF), a Delhi-based independent, non-partisan think tank focussing on foreign policy, defense and security-related issues from an Indian perspective. His most recent book How India Manages its National Security was published by Penguin Random House in 2018.

Book Overview: In this authoritative and comprehensive survey of the challenges a changing global security environment poses to India, former deputy national security advisor Arvind Gupta outlines the important aspects of the country's security apparatus and how they interface to confront internal and external conflicts. We have today a turbulent Middle East to the west; a rising and assertive China to the north; Pakistan in the grip of the military and the militants across our border and an increasingly militarizing Indian Ocean region surrounding us. Additionally, climate change, cyber security and the vulnerability of our space assets are major areas of concern. Anything that weakens a nation weakens its security, which makes the issues of food, water, health, economics and governance critically significant. Arvind Gupta draws on his long experience in these areas to argue that instead of tactical remedies, a strategic, coherent, institutional approach is needed to deal with these challenges. Strengthening the National Security Council, for instance, could be one way forward.

How India Manages Its National Security explains with great clarity and thoroughness the concept and operation of India's national security apparatus. This book will be of great interest to practitioners, analysts and laymen alike and offer an important voice in the discussion on how national security challenges should be resolved in the decades to come.

On 11/29/18 a group of leading experts on China and American foreign policy released “Chinese Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance,” a report documenting Chinese efforts to influence American society. The report examines China's efforts to influence American institutions, including state and local governments, universities, think tanks, media, corporations, and the Chinese-American community, and differentiates between legitimate efforts--like public diplomacy--and improper interference, which demands greater awareness and a calibrated response.

In this special roundtable, two of the report’s co-editors, Orville Schell and Larry Diamond, and a Taiwanese scholar, Ji-Jen Hwang, will discuss the findings of the report and compare the forms and effects of Chinese “sharp power” in the United States with its practice in and toward Taiwan.

This event is co-sponsored by the US-Asia Security Initiative in the Asia-Pacific Research Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.  

Orville Schell

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell is also the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.

Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around in the world, and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy.  His 2016 book, In Search of Democracy, explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his writing and research, particularly on Africa and Asia.  He has just completed a new book on the global crisis of democracy, which will be published in 2019, and is now writing a textbook on democratic development.

Ji-Jen Hwang

Dr. Ji-Jen Hwang is a Research Scholar in the Institute for East Asian Studies (IEAS) at UC Berkeley. Before that, he was a Professor & Program Director of the International Master Program in Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in the Republic of China (Taiwan). In 2014-15, Dr. Hwang was a visiting fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) located in Washington D.C. He also completed an internship at the United States Library of Congress while doing his Master’s coursework. A native of Taiwan, he holds a Ph.D. in politics from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K., as well as a Masters in Library Science & Information Studies from the University of North Carolina. He has been working for a non-profit Think Tank based in Washington D.C. area as a Deputy Managing Director since April 2018. His current research is focused on relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan, in which he particularly aims to study how social media and the features in cyberspace have political impacts on these relations. He is well-known known as an expert in this area and been invited as a special lecturer to think tanks such as CSIS in Washington D.C., ASPI in Canberra, NATO, GlobalSec in Europe, and INSS in Seoul.

Abstract: State interventions against drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this paper offers a theory about different social order dynamics among five types of criminal regimes – Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Anarchic. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors; predate or cooperate with the community; and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival DTOs. Police interventions in these criminal orders pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. Evidence for the theory is provided by the use a multi-method research design combining quasiexperimental statistical analyses, extensive qualitative research and a large N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the slums from organized criminal groups.

Bio: Beatriz Magaloni is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty at the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development.

Her research focuses on the political economy of development. Beatriz’s work falls into four themes:  the study of authoritarian regimes; distributive politics; “traditional” forms of governance and how these compare to “modern” democratic institutions; and drug-trafficking violence and citizen security. Much of my research has been on Latin America.  

Beatriz is the founding director of the Poverty, Violence + Governance Lab, a place for action–oriented research that establishes partnerships with government agencies, police departments, and civil society organizations to conduct research that aims to generate knowledge as to what works and doesn’t to control violence, improve the functioning and accountability of security institutions, restrain human rights abuses, and increase opportunities for at-risk youth. The Lab engages researchers and students — undergraduates, M.A. and Ph.D. candidates — from the fields of political science, education, economics, international policy studies, and engineering.

She is the author of Voting for Autocracy (2006, Cambridge University Press –winner of the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award for the best book written in the previous two years on parties and elections and the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section). Beatriz is also the author of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico(2016, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estévez).

Beatriz’s articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, International Journal of Educational Development, Latin American Politics and Society, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Política y Gobierno.

Beatriz received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University. She also holds a Law Degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).