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Tough Times, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia Now

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ISEAS is pleased to invite you to the panel discussion and book launch for Donald Emmerson's new book, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia.

Program

  • 3:00 pm - Welcome by Ambassador K Kesavapany - Director, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
  • 3.05 pm - Introduction of Panelists by Professor Donald K Emmerson
  • 3.10 pm - Presentation by Professor Donald K Emmerson
  • 3.20 pm - Presentation by Professor Jörn Dosch
  • 3.30 pm - Presentation by Dr Alan Chong Chia Siong
  • 3.40 pm - General Discussion
  • 4.30pm - Comments, Q & A
  • 4.30 pm - Concluding Remarks
  • 4.35 pm - Book Signing

Alan Chong Chia Siong is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.  His recent publications include "Asian Contributions on Democratic Dignity and Responsibility:  Rizal, Sukarno and Lee on Guided Democracy" in East Asia: An International Quarterly (2008) and Foreign Policy Global Information Space: Actualizing Soft Power (2007).  His PhD is from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Jörn Dosch is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds.  Among his recent publications are The Changing Dynamics of Southeast Asian Politics (2006), Economic and Non-traditional Security Cooperation in the Greater Mekong Subregion) (GMS) (co-authored, 2005).  His PhD is from Mainz University.

Donald K Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University.  His recent publications include "ASEAN's Black Swans," Journal of Democracy (2008) and "Southeast Asia in Political Science:  Terms of Enlistment," in Erik Martinez Kuhonta et al., eds, Southeast Asia in Political Science:  Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (2008).  His PhD is from Yale University.

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Seminar Room II
30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Pasir Panjang
Singapore 119614

Alan Chong Chia Siong Assistant professor in the Department of Political Science Speaker the National University of Singapore
Jörn Dosch Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies Speaker University of Leeds

Donald K. Emmerson

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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Affiliated Faculty, CDDRL
Affiliated Scholar, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
aparc_dke.jpg PhD

At Stanford, in addition to his work for the Southeast Asia Program and his affiliations with CDDRL and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Donald Emmerson has taught courses on Southeast Asia in East Asian Studies, International Policy Studies, and Political Science. He is active as an analyst of current policy issues involving Asia. In 2010 the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded him a two-year Research Associateship given to “top scholars from across the United States” who “have successfully bridged the gap between the academy and policy.”

Emmerson’s research interests include Southeast Asia-China-US relations, the South China Sea, and the future of ASEAN. His publications, authored or edited, span more than a dozen books and monographs and some 200 articles, chapters, and shorter pieces.  Recent writings include The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (ed., 2020); “‘No Sole Control’ in the South China Sea,” in Asia Policy  (2019); ASEAN @ 50, Southeast Asia @ Risk: What Should Be Done? (ed., 2018); “Singapore and Goliath?,” in Journal of Democracy (2018); “Mapping ASEAN’s Futures,” in Contemporary Southeast Asia (2017); and “ASEAN Between China and America: Is It Time to Try Horsing the Cow?,” in Trans-Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia (2017).

Earlier work includes “Sunnylands or Rancho Mirage? ASEAN and the South China Sea,” in YaleGlobal (2016); “The Spectrum of Comparisons: A Discussion,” in Pacific Affairs (2014); “Facts, Minds, and Formats: Scholarship and Political Change in Indonesia” in Indonesian Studies: The State of the Field (2013); “Is Indonesia Rising? It Depends” in Indonesia Rising (2012); “Southeast Asia: Minding the Gap between Democracy and Governance,” in Journal of Democracy (April 2012); “The Problem and Promise of Focality in World Affairs,” in Strategic Review (August 2011); An American Place at an Asian Table? Regionalism and Its Reasons (2011); Asian Regionalism and US Policy: The Case for Creative Adaptation (2010); “The Useful Diversity of ‘Islamism’” and “Islamism: Pros, Cons, and Contexts” in Islamism: Conflicting Perspectives on Political Islam (2009); “Crisis and Consensus: America and ASEAN in a New Global Context” in Refreshing U.S.-Thai Relations (2009); and Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (edited, 2008).

Prior to moving to Stanford in 1999, Emmerson was a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he won a campus-wide teaching award. That same year he helped monitor voting in Indonesia and East Timor for the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center. In the course of his career, he has taken part in numerous policy-related working groups focused on topics related to Southeast Asia; has testified before House and Senate committees on Asian affairs; and been a regular at gatherings such as the Asia Pacific Roundtable (Kuala Lumpur), the Bali Democracy Forum (Nusa Dua), and the Shangri-La Dialogue (Singapore). Places where he has held various visiting fellowships, including the Institute for Advanced Study and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 



Emmerson has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale and a BA in international affairs from Princeton. He is fluent in Indonesian, was fluent in French, and has lectured and written in both languages. He has lesser competence in Dutch, Javanese, and Russian. A former slam poet in English, he enjoys the spoken word and reads occasionally under a nom de plume with the Not Yet Dead Poets Society in Redwood City, CA. He and his wife Carolyn met in high school in Lebanon. They have two children. He was born in Tokyo, the son of U.S. Foreign Service Officer John K. Emmerson, who wrote the Japanese Thread among other books.

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Stanford announces $100 million for energy research, PESD to collaborate with new institute

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In a Jan. 12 press conference, Stanford President John Hennessy announced a new interdisciplinary initiative on energy issues and $100 million in new spending for energy research. The initiative will be housed at the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency and will draw upon intellectual resources from the entire university, including FSI's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD), which has been studying the production and consumption of energy and its effects on sustainable development since 2001.

One of the issues Hennessy singled out - finding an alternative to coal that is environmentally friendly yet cheap enough to sell to China - is at the core of PESD's Global Coal Markets platform, one of the program's four active research platforms. Richard K. Morse and others are tracking power generation in China, India, and the U.S. and finding that coal use is on the rise but the whole picture is complex due to the current world economic crisis. On the issue of climate change, David G. Victor recently proposed a new policy framework, "climate accession deals," for more successfully engaging developing nations in a post-Kyoto world.

On Feb. 12, PESD will host a public conference titled "Public Forum: How Will Global Warming Affect the World's Fuel Markets?", as part of the program's winter seminar on coal. Peter Hughes, director of Arthur D. Little's Global Energy & Utilities Division, will talk about whether natural gas is the "default climate change option." Hughes' presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, Stu Dalton from EPRI, and PESD Director David Victor.

PESD research findings are regularly featured in the New York Times, energy blogs, Newsweek, scholarly journals, and in printed book publications. The relevancy of its research findings derives from its interdisciplinary look at energy through law, political science, and economics.

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Loan sanctions: a new tool for diplomacy?

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Seema Jayachandran is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a Research Affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and Stanford Center for International Development (SCID).

Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including health, education, labor markets, and political economy. Her work has been published in the American Economic Review ("Odious Debt," on sovereign debt incurred by dictators), Journal of Political Economy ("Selling Labor Low," on labor market risk in India), and the Quarterly Journal of Economics ("Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments," on increased education caused by declines in maternal mortality in Sri Lanka), and other journals.

Her current projects are based in India, Nepal, and Zimbabwe. She also works on social issues in the United States. Previously she was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley. She also worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company in San Francisco. She earned a PhD and master's degree from Harvard University, a master's degree from the University of Oxford where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor's degree from MIT.

Seminar summary:

Seema Jayachandran's presentation focused on the problem of what to do about "odious debt" -- that is, debt lent to rogue regimes that ultimately must be borne and paid by successive (legitimate) governments. She asks to what extent the status quo can change so that lenders will not want to lend to illegitimate governments. Her solution lies in increasing the costs of lending to rogue regimes through a policy of loan sanctions. Adopting an ex ante posture, Jayachandran argues that interests rates for loans would move toward infinity if banks knew that future legitimate governments would repudiate the debts of past regimes, particularly if new governments would have the blessing of the international community to do so. The loan-sanctions solution addresses a challenge faced by the debt relief movement, which focuses on debt "overhang," which weakens a poor country's economy. Instead, loan sanctions focus on the notion that some debt is, simply, illegitimate. And while trade sanctions pose problems (Jayachandran mentions that trade sanctions are often easy to evade and hurt people more than government), loan sanctions prevent a sanctioned government from borrowing. Loan sanctions are also self- enforcing (e.g., a lender would not lend if that lender knew it was unlikely to be repaid). The author raised questions for debate about who or what international body would implement loan sanctions or policy, the problem of banks making short-term loans to dictators who pay, and defining bad behaviors narrowly (or broadly) enough so as to target rogue or illegitimate regimes.

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Seema Jayachandran Assistant Professor of Economics Speaker Stanford Univesity
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North Korea in The Cold War International System

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North Korea has often been considered an aberration in the post-Cold War international system, a relic of a Stalinist past. In fact, a close examination of North Korean foreign relations during the Cold War period reveals that Pyongyang's behavior never fit neatly into the paradigm of a bipolar international order, and that the Cold War itself had a distinctive dynamic in the Korean context. This dynamic helps to explain the continued existence of a divided Korea to this day, long after the bipolar international system has ended. Based largely on formerly secret materials from North Korea's Cold War allies in Eastern Europe, this paper suggests that Pyongyang's "aberrent" behavior long pre-dates the 1990s. It argues that North Korea has exhibited more continuity than change in the way it has dealt with the outside world over the last several decades, focusing on three areas of foreign policy: economic extraction, political non-alignment, and the development of an independent nuclear weapons capability.

Charles K. Armstrong is The Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. In the fall semester of 2008 he was a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University.

A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong is the author or editor of several books, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007), The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, second edition 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.  His current book projects include a study of North Korean foreign relations in the Cold War era and a history of modern East Asia.

Professor Armstrong holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Yale University, an M.A. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 1996.

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Charles K. Armstrong Associate Professor, Director of the Center for Korean Research Speaker Columbia University
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The Immigration Dilemma: the Demise of Social Justice

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Stephen Macedo joined the faculty of the Princeton University in 1999 as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics. On September 1, 2001, he was appointed director of the University Center for Human Values.

Macedo studies topics in political theory, ethics, American constitutionalism and public policy, with an emphasis on liberalism and its critics, and the roles of civil society and public policy in promoting citizenship. He chairs the Princeton Project on Universal Jurisdiction, which has formulated principles of international law to guide national courts seeking to prosecute human rights violations irrespective of the nationality of the victims or alleged perpetrators. From 1999 through 2001, he served as founding director of Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs.

Macedo has taught at Harvard University and at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He earned a bachelor's degree at the College of William and Mary, master's degrees at The London School of Economics and Oxford University, and a master's degree and Ph.D. at Princeton University

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Stephen Macedo Politics Dept. and Director, Center for Human Values Speaker Princeton University
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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

FSE welcomes Wolfram Schlenker as Cargill Visiting Fellow

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FSE is pleased to welcome Wolfram Schlenker as the first Cargill Visiting Fellow. Schlenker, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia, studies the economics of climate change and its impacts on agriculture, among other topics. His recent publications have appeared in Nature, Climatic Change, and Environmental and Resource Economics.
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On the Soap Box: Heroes and Villains in Asian Television Drama

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While representations of history are very common in Western film and television, in East Asia we find the perhaps unique genre of history ‘soap operas’ that portray influential political figures of the past rather than fictitious characters, describing their lives in intimate personal detail in the format of a lengthy ‘soap’, often broadcast daily. Some use their heroes and heroines/villains and villainesses simply as a set on which to stage romantic or other interesting stories (historic settings are extremely popular in East Asia); others claim to present ‘authentic’ history, and may lead to considerable controversy, especially in authoritarian states, such as the People’s Republic of China, where history is an extremely sensitive subject. In recent years in particular, some of these soaps have drastically revised official verdicts on a number of historical figures, stirring intense public debate and triggering government interference and censorship.

Matthias Niedenführ analyzes East Asian history soap operas, especially those from China, both in light of recent political and social changes and in comparison with “histotainment” (history entertainment) on German television, where historical dramas tend to come in the form of miniseries and to be paired with documentary broadcasts. While there is clearly less official scrutiny in the case of German television productions than in those of China, it is shown that revisiting hitherto accepted ‘truths’ or problematizing the personalities and actions of history’s ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ may be highly contested in both totalitarian states and multi-party democracies.

Matthias Niedenführ is the Director of the European Centre for Chinese Studies, a consortium of four German and Danish universities based at Peking University. Prior to his move to Beijing, he was the co-ordinator for the Confucius Institute in Nuremberg and a research fellow at the University of Erlangen, working on a major international project on national identities and historical revisionism in East Asia. He has degrees in Asian Studies and Economics, with a particular interest in the Chinese and Japanese media. His current research projects focus on the representation of history in the mass media, and on the internationalization of the Chinese economy.

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Matthias Niedenführ Director Speaker European Centre for Chinese Studies, Peking University
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Reckoning with the Past: Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia

November 2008 Dispatch - North Korean Succession: China's Interests, China's Leverage, and U.S.-ROK Alliance Considerations

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s apparent stroke in mid-August raises the possibility of near-term political succession in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). This has prompted U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) planners—concerned with command and control of North Korea’s fissile material under conditions of regime disarray, internecine conflict, or collapse—to examine afresh the alliance’s assumptions, contingency plans, and political strategies.

The Korean Peninsula occupies a central place in the Chinese national security calculus. Chinese policy above all aims to avert military conflict on the Peninsula and regime collapse in the North. Conflict and collapse scenarios could embroil China in unwanted military action, imperil its long-term economic development program, jeopardize its crucial ties with the United States and South Korea, open the floodgates to North Korean refugees, and alter the Northeast Asian strategic landscape to China’s disadvantage.

For these and other reasons, China has emphasized the need for a peaceful, negotiated resolution of the problem posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. It has encouraged North Korea to emulate, to the extent feasible, China’s own post-1978 economic reforms. At the same time, China has deepened political and commercial ties with South Korea, and sustained the North Korean regime through generous economic and military assistance.

China’s core interests—plus its special ties with North Korea’s military, party, security, and economic elite—have persuaded many outside observers that Beijing possesses not only unique insights into the Pyongyang regime’s internal dynamics but also potential leverage. Further, many assume that China, having both the need and ability to influence North Korea’s political succession, will do precisely that—shape, or if necessary impose, a North Korean succession that accords with China’s policy interests.
China has consistently denied having superior knowledge and usable leverage, and has adamantly rebuffed speculation regarding its national ambitions and potential actions.

Such disclaimers notwithstanding, some in the ROK and the United States postulate that national and alliance interests might best be served by “coordinating” with China on North Korean regime change/collapse scenarios. A few even argue that the alliance should “subcontract” this issue to China, thereby tacitly acquiescing in its intervention to ensure a peaceful, stable transition.

Despite the high stakes, crucial U.S.-ROK contingency planning seemingly has been approached in an environment that is rich in conjecture and hope, and poor in hard intelligence and agreed assessments.
Yet it is possible—indeed imperative—to do better than this. With respect to one small part of the complex whole—China’s interests, potential leverage, and likely actions—a starting point for rigorous
analysis might include the following issues and questions:

Knowledge : Does China in fact enjoy superior knowledge of internal DPRK decision-making? What are the sources of and limits upon such knowledge? How have the North Koreans approachedspecial bilateral ties with the Chinese in the realms of party-to-party affairs and military cooperation?
Are there reasons to believe that China contributed to North Korea’s nuclear program? If not, are there reasons to believe that North Korea shared any knowledge whatsoever of its activities with China? Has China sought to cultivate North Korean officials and, if so, when, and how successfully?  How has North Korea reacted to any such Chinese activities?

Leverage: How much leverage does China enjoy over North Korean political, military, and economic decisions? What are the sources of such leverage? What are the constraints? How should one assess North Korea’s likely response to Chinese pressure? What options does North Korea enjoy in deflecting such pressure?

A Proactive Approach by China to North Korean Political Succession : What posture is China likely to adopt toward political succession in North Korea? What are its policy options? What assets does it hold? How does the issue of North Korean succession—including the possibility of regime chaos or collapse—fit into China’s broad strategic posture? What external considerations (especially those involving the ROK, the United States, Japan, and Russia) must China take into account?

ROK and U.S. Policy Considerations Regarding China’s Potential Involvement in a North Korean • Political Succession: What essential posture should the ROK and the United States adopt? On the one hand, should they enlist China’s cooperation in “managing” political succession in North Korea, or endeavor to minimize that involvement, instead addressing North Korean succession scenarios as primarily a task for the U.S.-ROK alliance? On the other hand, should they accept (and even tacitly encourage) China’s superior ability to effect a stable succession that preserves peace and stability? Should they broaden the scope of the current six-party talks to include formal discussion among “the five” (excepting North Korea)? Or should some other approach be adopted?

On one level, U.S. and ROK planners must urgently address these issues in order to have confidence that the two allies can deal smoothly with any North Korean political succession scenario. On a deeper level, a rigorous bilateral analysis of this type can serve to strengthen the U.S.-ROK alliance itself by fully illuminating a broader set of underlying national attitudes, interests, and priorities.

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