Can there be such a thing as a democratic coup? Critics of the September 2006 seizure of power in Thailand say "no." To them the overthrow of an elected government has set back democracy. Others, including many inside Thailand, support the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as having ended a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Thai democracy, in their view, has been corrected not capsized. Who is right, and what does it mean for democracy in Thailand and beyond? Prof. Ockey will set the stage by reviewing and assessing five different explanations for the September event. He will stress the diversity of motives and interests among the coup's supporters. Prof. Winichakul will then offer a particular interpretation. He will portray the coup as a move by the Thai monarchy and an army general close to the palace that bodes ill for the future of democracy. SEAF Director Don Emmerson will moderate the discussion.

About the panelists:

Jim Ockey is the author of Making Democracy: Leadership, Class, Gender and Political Participation in Thailand (2004) and many articles on Thai politics. Before 2006 he taught at Canterbury University in New Zealand. His Ph.D is from Cornell University.

Thongchai Winichakul's publications include the prize-winning book, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (1994). In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. His Ph.D is from the University of Sydney

Professor Levi received his PhD in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Before coming to Stanford, he was an adjunct professor in the Conservatory of Theater Arts and Film at Purchase College, SUNY, where he taught film and media history and theory, as well as fundamentals of film-making. He also taught film studies at New York University and Hunter College, CUNY.

Levi has written essays on cinema and nationalism, psychoanalytic film theory, and experimental cinema, and he coedited Filosofska igracka (A Philosophical Toy), a selection of Annette Michelson's writings on film and modernist art. His book Disintegration in Frames, about aesthetics and politics in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema, is forthcoming.

Levi's teaching brings together his commitment to film as an art form with the study of cinema as a social and cultural phenomenon. His lectures and writing emphasize issues of film style and textual analysis, historical contextualization, and encounters between theory and practice of the moving image. Levi's courses include East European Cinema; Italian Cinema; Film Aesthetics: Editing; Practical Film Analysis; and Cinema/Ideology. He has also made short experimental films and instructional videos.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Pamela Constable is the deputy foreign editor of The Washington Post. Previously she covered South Asia for The Washington Post for several years from April 1999, with extensive coverage of Afghanistan as well as both India and Pakistan.n She continues to visit and report from Afghanistan.

Before arriving in New Delhi in 1999, Constable worked for The Post from 1994 to 1998 covering immigration and Hispanic affairs in the Washington area, and reported from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti and Cuba.

Prior to joining The Post, Constable worked for The Boston Globe as deputy Washington bureau chief and foreign policy reporter from June to September 1994. From 1983 until 1992, she was The Globe's roving foreign correspondent, Latin America correspondent and diplomatic correspondent. During this time she reported from Haiti, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and Brazil, as well as in Washington.

Her latest book is Fragments of Grace: My Search For Meaning in the Strife of South Asia. She is the co-author with Arturo Valenzuela of A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet and has written articles for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Current History and other publications. She was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 1990 and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for coverage of Latin America in 1993. Constable is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received a B.A. from Brown University.

Evgeny Kiselev, b.1956, educated in Moscow University, Institute of Asian and African Countries, majored in Middle Eastern Studies, history of modern Iran and Farsi language. He started his career by serving in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in 1979-1981 as Farsi interpreter. He took to television journalism in 1987 and quickly rose to prominence as television reporter and news anchor during the years of Gorbachev's reforms. In 1993 co-founded NTV, the first independent television company in the history of Russia. For many years NTV was setting up the highest standards of modern broadcasting journalism in Russia and was considered the most popular television channel among Russian newly emergent middle class, educated people, liberal intellectuals, supporters of democratic reforms etc. During the 90s and the early 2000s NTV was famous for its bold and outspoken style of reporting on the major issues, including such touchy ones as the war on Chechnya, political intrigue in the Kremlin, high-level corruption in the government and many others. For more than a decade Evgeny Kiselev was hosting "Itogi" (Results) - a weekly show that combined in-depth reports, journalistic investigations, live interviews with leading politicians and newsmakers, opinion and commentary. It was famous for its outspoken criticism of government policy. "Itogi" was the longest-running political show on Russian television and was closed only due to the events that changed Evgeny Kiselev's career. In 2001, following the election of Vladimir Putin to Russia's presidency, the government started to crack down on independent media. NTV was put under the control of the government after a hostile takeover by Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly, and Evegeny Kiselev, who by that time was general director of NTV, had to leave the company. He was involved in two other major projects aimed at preserving the independent voice of television in Russia, but both television stations were closed by the government. Evgeny Kiselev remains active as an independent columnist and political analyst, he has a popular weekly program on the "Echo of Moscow", the leading Russian radio station, he also lectures at home and abroad.

His new television project - "Vlast" ("Power"), a show that will concentrate again on Russian politics and power struggle that is already starting in Russia on the eve of the next presidential election in 2008, is scheduled to appear in December on RTVi, the last remaining independent Russian station.

Cosponsored with the German Studies Department.

Karl Heinz Bohrer is a journalist, literary editor, professor and magazine editor. He received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1962 and studied

history, philosophy, German literature, and sociology. His dissertation was on the Geschichtsphilosophie of the German Romantics.

He was appointed Professor for Modern German Literary History at the University of Bielefeld in 1982, where he currently leads a group working on aesthetic theory. In 1983, he became editor (since 1991 co-editor with Kurt Scheel) of the influential Merkur, the "German journal of European thought."

As editor and co-editor of Merkur, Bohrer has attempted to steer aesthetics into the center of public discourse in Germany; Merkur's contents have shifted accordingly in emphasis from the political to the aesthetic realm, but without abandoning commentary on current affairs. The politics of Merkur are at the same time controversial and disengaged, strident and independent.

Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Ambassador James E. Goodby is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held several senior government positions dedicated to arms control and nonproliferation, including deputy to the special adviser to the president and secretary of state on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 2000-2001; special representative of President Clinton for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons, 1995-1996; chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements, 1993-1994, and vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks, 1982-1983. He served as U.S. ambassador to Finland in 1980-1981.

Bart Bernstein is a Professor of American history at Stanford University. He has written very widely on post-World War II American history, including the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, economic policy, diplomacy, nuclear history, and scientific discovery.