This event is available through livestream only. Please register in advance for the webinar by using the link below.

REGISTRATION LINK: https://bit.ly/34pAVrb

Inside the Billion Dollar Whale Scandal: 2020 Shorenstein Journalism Award Recipient Tom Wright to Headline Award Panel Discussion

Tom Wright, winner of the 2020 Shorenstein Journalism Award, addresses these questions and more in his keynote address.

Wright is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Billion Dollar Whale, which unravels the story of one of the world's greatest financial scandals involving the multibillion-dollar looting of the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB. Wright’s work sparked investigations by law enforcement and regulators in multiple countries and outrage in Malaysia, where the ruling coalition, after 61 years in power, suffered a landslide defeat in a shocking 2018 election.

The keynote will be followed by a guided interview with the award winner led by Meredith Weiss, Professor and Chair of Political Science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, SUNY.

The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session moderated by Donald K. Emmerson, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #SJA20 to join the conversation.

Speakers:

Meredith Weiss is Professor and Chair of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research addresses social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, parties and elections, institutional reform and (anti)corruption, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. She has conducted fieldwork in those two countries as well as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste, and has held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US.

Her books include Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia (2006), Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (2011), The Roots of Resilience: Political Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (2020), and eleven edited or co-edited volumes, most recently, The Political Logics of Anticorruption Efforts in Asia (2019) and Toward a New Malaysia? The 2018 Election and Its Aftermath (2020).  Her articles appear in Asian Studies Review, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Democracy, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and elsewhere.

Professor Weiss co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements book series on Politics and Society in Southeast Asia and is an associate editor for Southeast Asia of the Association for Asian Studies’ (AAS) Journal of Asian Studies. She co-founded the Southeast Asian Politics related group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and chairs the APSA’s Asia Workshops steering committee, is past chair of the AAS’s Southeast Asia Council, and is on the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Council. She received her MA and PhD in Political Science from Yale University and a BA in Political Science, Policy Studies, and English from Rice University.

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The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of US $10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists who have spent their careers helping audiences around the world understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region, defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Australasia. Award recipients are veteran journalists with a distinguished body of work. News organizations are also eligible for the award.

The award is sponsored and presented by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University. It honors the legacy of the Center’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. It also symbolizes the Center’s commitment to journalism that persistently and courageously seeks accuracy, deep reporting, and nuanced coverage in an age when attacks are regularly launched on the independent news media, on fact-based truth, and on those who tell it.

An annual tradition, the Shorenstein Journalism Award alternates between recipients whose work has mostly been conveyed through American news media and recipients whose work has mostly been conveyed through news media in one or more parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Included among the latter candidates are journalists who are from the region and work there, and who, in addition to their recognized excellence, may have helped defend and encourage free media in one or more countries in the region.

Learn more at https://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/events/shorenstein-journalism-award.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About this Event:  This book offers a novel theory of the nuances in relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto’s New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional (BN), and China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). How did business-state relations in all three regimes come to be seen as “crony,” and why do some crony arrangements generate growth and political stability and others stagnation or crisis? The book develops conceptual models of state-business relations (mutual alignment and mutual endangerment) and explains their genesis. I argue that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are the political status of capitalists, determined during regime formation, and the political management of the financial system. The research draws on extensive archival and interview sources as well as novel datasets on corporate filings in each country.

 

About the Speaker:  Meg Rithmire is F. Warren MacFarlan associate professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. Professor Rithmire holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her first book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and local property rights regimes in the Chinese economic reforms. A new project, for which Meg conducted fieldwork in Asia 2016-2017, investigates the relationship between capital and the state and globalization in Asia. The project focuses on a comparison of China, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. The research has two components; first, examining how governments attempt to discipline business and when those efforts succeed and, second, how business adapts to different methods of state control. 

 

 

 

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

 

About the Event:   As we enter the stretch run of the 2020 US election campaign, join us for an inside look at how public policy is formulated on political campaigns, and the key policy debates animating the election.

 

About the Speaker:  Lanhee J. Chen, Ph.D. is the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution; Director of Domestic Policy Studies and Lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University; and an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. 

A veteran of several high-profile political campaigns, Chen has worked in government, the private sector, and academia. 

Chen has advised numerous major campaigns, including four presidential efforts.  In 2012, he was policy director of the Romney-Ryan campaign, serving as Governor Mitt Romney’s chief policy adviser and a senior strategist on the campaign.  Chen also advised Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 bid; Romney’s 2008 effort; and the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004.  In the 2014 and 2018 campaign cycles, he was the Senior Adviser on Policy to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). 

He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science, A.M. in Political Science, J.D. cum laude, and A.B. magna cum laude in Government, all from Harvard University.   

This event is being live-streamed on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PTnI4nwGRLCERCHdP-cogw

On August 9, 2020, Belarus held a presidential election, which Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus' president of 26 years — claimed to have won with 80 percent of the vote. Exit polling, however, demonstrated that the opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, actually garnered wide popular support. Since the election, Belarusians have taken to the streets to demand a new election and/or that Lukashenko step down. But the regime appears intent on remaining in power and has used force against peaceful protesters. Workers in key factories have since gone on strike, and widespread protests continue. 

Join us for a special zoom seminar on Wednesday, August 19 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. PDT with Michael A. McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and former US Ambassador to Russia; Anna Grzymala-Busse, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center; and Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow and Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program at FSI in a session on the events in Belarus that will be moderated by Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on August 26th, at 10 a.m. pacific time, for a look how governments around the world are pushing to ban strong encryption. The talk will feature speakers Sam Woolley, Riana Pfefferkorn and Mathew Baum as they explore the different policy issues being used by governments to justify their agendas. This event is open to the public, but registration is required.

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Matthew A. Baum (Ph.D., UC San Diego, 2000) is the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Department of Government. His research focuses on delineating the effects of domestic politics on international conflict and cooperation in general and American foreign policy in particular, as well as on the role of the mass media and public opinion in contemporary American politics. His research has appeared in over a dozen leading scholarly journals, such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. His books include Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age (2003, Princeton University Press), War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War (2009, Princeton University Press, co-authored with Tim Groeling), and War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy (2015, Princeton University Press, co-authored with Phil Potter). He has also contributed op-ed articles to a variety of newspapers, magazines, and blog sites in the United States and abroad. Before coming to Harvard, Baum was an associate professor of political science and communication studies at UCLA. 

Riana Pfefferkorn is the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Her work focuses on investigating and analyzing the U.S. government's policy and practices for forcing decryption and/or influencing crypto-related design of online platforms and services, devices, and products, both via technical means and through the courts and legislatures. Riana also researches the benefits and detriments of strong encryption on free expression, political engagement, economic development, and other public interests.

Dr. Samuel Woolley is a writer and researcher. He is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and in the School of Information (by courtesy) at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the program director of propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement at UT. Woolley's work focuses on the ways in which emerging technology are leveraged for both democracy and control. He is the author of the book "The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth" (PublicAffairs), an exploration of how tools from artificial intelligence to virtual reality are being used in efforts to manipulate public opinion and discusses what society can do to respond. He is the co-editor (with Dr. Philip N. Howard), of the book "Computational Propaganda" (Oxford University Press), a series of country-based case studies on social media and digital information operations.