Avishai Margalit is one of the foremost thinkers and commentators on the contemporary human condition, the moral issues of our time, and current problems facing Western societies. In addition to his influence as a philosopher, he is highly regarded for his profound and cogent observations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the broader struggle between Islam and the West. As the author of Idolatry (with Moshe Halbertal), The Decent Society, Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews, The Ethics of Memory, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma), and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises , Margalit has transformed philosophical perspectives on a range of political and societal issues.
Priya Satia's research interests span modern British cultural and political history, colonialism and imperialism, the experience and practice of war, technology and culture, human rights and humanitarianism, the state and institutions of government, arms trade, political economy of empire, and environmental history.
Satia was raised in Los Gatos, California and educated at Stanford, the London School of Economics, and the University of California, Berkeley where she earned her Ph.D. in 2004. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Stanford where she teaches courses on modern Britain and the British Empire.
Satia's latest book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East has been the recipient of several book prizes including the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, the AHA Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize in 2009, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference of British Studies Book Prize.
Her work can also be found in academic journals such as the American Historical Reviewand Past and Present. Her article, “The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control in Iraq and the British Idea of Arabia” won the Article Prize of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies for 2005-2006 and the 2007 Walter D. Love Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies.
Satia is currently researching the manufacture, trade, and use of small arms in the British empire for her book project, "Guns: The True History of the British Empire."
Professor Landry Signé is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Center for African Studies, founding chairman of the award-winning Global Network for Africa’s Prosperity, special adviser to world leaders on international and African affairs, full professor and senior adviser on international affairs to the chancellor and provost at UAA, and partner and chief strategist at a small African-focused emerging markets strategic management, investment, and government affairs firm. He has been recognized as a World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader, Andrew Carnegie fellow as one of the “most creative thinkers,” Woodrow Wilson Public Policy fellow, JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons in the World, Private Investors for Africa Fellow, and Tutu Fellow who “drives the transformation of Africa,” among others. Previously, Landry was founding president of a business strategy and development firm based in Montreal and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford. He has also served on the board of organizations such as AMPION Catalyst for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Africa, Citizens Governance Initiative, and the United Nations Association of Canada–Montreal, and was appointed by a United Nations Under-Secretary-General to serve on the Global Network on Digital Technologies for Sustainable Urbanization. He is the author of numerous key academic and policy publications on African and global affairs, with a special interest in the political economy of growth, development and governance; the politics of economic reform, foreign aid, and regional integration; entrepreneurship, non-market and business strategies in emerging and frontier countries; institutional change, political regimes, and post-conflict reconstruction; state capacity and policy implementation. Professor Signé received the fastest tenure and promotion to the highest rank of full professor of political science in the history of United States universities, for a scholar who started at an entry-level position in the discipline. He is a highly sought-after keynote speaker and presenter at conferences worldwide, engaging a broad variety of business, policy, academic, and civil society audiences. He has won more than 60 prestigious awards and distinctions from four continents and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Harvard International Review. Professor Signé was educated in Cameroon (with honors and distinction), in France (valedictorian and salutatorian), earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Montreal (Award of Excellence and Award for the Best International PhD Dissertation), and completed his Postdoctoral Studies at Stanford University (Banting fellowship for best and brightest researchers). He has also completed executive leadership programs at the University of Oxford Said School of Business (Tutu fellowship) and Harvard Kennedy School (World Economic Forum fellowship).
World War Two, the most violent period in the modern history of Europe and Asia (1937–1945), left deep scars still evident on both continents. Numerous and often conflicting narratives exist about the wartime era, ranging from personal memoirs to official accounts of wartime actions. Many issues, from collaboration to responsibility for war crimes, remain unresolved. In Europe some issues that have been buried for decades, such as the record of collaboration with Nazi occupiers, are now resurfacing. In Northeast Asia, World War Two’s complex, painful legacy continues to impact popular culture, education, diplomacy, and even economic relations.
While differences exist in the wartime circumstances and reconciliation processes of Europe and Asia, many valuable lessons can be gained through a study of the experiences on both continents. The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) facilitated a comparative dialogue on World War Two, bringing together 15 noted experts for the Colonialism, Collaboration, and Criminality conference, held June 16 to 17 at Stanford. Each of the event’s five panels paired an Asia and a Europe scholar addressing a common theme.
The debate over remembrance of World War Two
Asia’s relative lack of progress in achieving reconciliation of the painful legacies of the war in Asia and the Pacific continues to bedevil current relations in the region. This is a consequence of the way the Cold War interrupted the resolution of wartime issues and blocked dialogue over the past, particularly between Japan, China, and South Korea, suggested Daniel C. Sneider, associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC. The widely held image of an unrepentant Japan ignores the fierce debate within Japan over wartime memory, often obscured by the prominence of rightwing nationalist views. Meanwhile, within China and Korea, wartime memory is also increasingly contested ground, from the issue of collaboration to the emergence of a more nationalist narrative in China, further complicating relations among those Asian neighbors.
Daniel Chirot, a professor of international studies at the University of Washington, emphasized that immediate postwar economic and security needs, including the growth of Communism, accelerated West Germany’s willingness to reconcile with its Western neighbors. He concurred with Sneider, saying that no such imperative existed in Northeast Asia until the need for economic cooperation three decades after the war. He suggested that the growth of regional integration might, as in Europe, drive Northeast Asia toward greater reconciliation.
Divided memories
Justice for sensitive historical human rights issues, such as World War Two atrocities, bears increasing importance in today’s ever-globalized economic and political climate, stated Thomas Berger, a professor of international relations at Boston University. Berger noted the challenge that Japan’s factional politics poses to a revision of the country’s official wartime narrative, and suggested that a strong regional structure, such as the European Union, could effectively facilitate reconciliation in Northeast Asia.
Frances Gouda, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam, examined the use of Anne Frank and former Indonesian president Sukarno as “icons of memory” in Dutch interpretations of World War Two. She asserted that Frank’s victimization allows people to come to terms with Nazi war crimes, but that Sukarno’s vilification as a Japanese collaborator oversimplifies history and allows the Netherlands to avoid confronting its own colonial past.
Collaboration and resistance
France’s Vichy regime, responsible both for collaborating with the Nazis and acting independently to persecute Jewish citizens, remains a painful and unresolved subject in the country’s contemporary quest for national identity, said Julian Jackson, a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London. He pointed to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s act of making a national martyr out of Guy Môquet, a young communist who died resisting the German Occupation, as a key example of the complexities involved in trying to come to terms with France’s past.
Ongoing territorial disputes over islands located between Japan and its neighbors in China and Korea are a product of the unresolved legacy of the wartime era in Asia. Sovereignty over those islands was left deliberately unresolved by the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty which formally ended the war, suggested Alexis Dudden, a professor of history from the University of Connecticut. As a result, the territorial disputes have become a battleground on which larger questions of historical memory about the war are contested, not only by Japanese conservatives but also by Koreans and Chinese, she said.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s press statement at the San Francisco Peace Treaty.
(U.S. National Archives)
Paths to reconciliation
Gi-Wook Shin, director of Shorenstein APARC and a professor of sociology, suggested that while Europe’s experience with war and reconciliation offers lessons for Asia, significant differences exist between the wartime and post-war situations of the two continents, and that reconciliation in Asia requires time. Increased economic interaction between the countries in Northeast Asia serves less to foster reconciliation, he said, than to spur competition for regional dominance. Shin emphasized that the United States, which has greatly impacted the region’s post-war history, can play a critical role as a facilitator in establishing lasting regional accord.
The Nazi regime’s systematic attempt to completely wipe out all traces of Jewish history and culture in Europe, even as closely bound as it was with Germany’s own traditions, is a unique case, stated Fania Oz-Salzberger, a professor of history at Haifa and Monash Universities. She explored universal elements in the German-Jewish reconciliation experience, noting, like Shin and Chirot, the important element of time that is needed to reflect upon painful events of the past. Oz-Salzberger especially spoke of the healing that takes place at the level of society and culture, sometimes even before governments are ready to reconcile with one another.
Continuing political impacts
Gilbert Rozman, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, suggested that Northeast Asia’s wartime history debates will continue to complicate regional relations unless China, Japan, and Korea reach a point of mutual reconciliation. He noted the role that Japan’s government, in the 1980s during its financial heyday, and more recently, China’s leaders during a similarly strong economic era, have played in prolonging the debate.
Memories of war are transmitted across the years through a complex process involving multiple actors and they can later influence political behavior, explained MIT political science professor Roger Petersen. He described the process within the context of the Lithuania’s successful declaration of independence from the former Soviet Union in January 1991. Petersen stated that Lithuanian émigrés, in part, helped keep the narrative of Soviet aggression and Lithuanian martyrdom alive until the conditions were right for action many decades later.
The Colonialism, Collaboration, and Criminality conference grew out of Shorenstein APARC’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, which for the past three years has examined the legacy of war-era memories in Northeast Asia and the United States and explored possible means of reconciliation. Shorenstein APARC has already published the first in a series of four books based on the project, and an edited volume of papers from the June 2011 conference is forthcoming next year.
Hero Image
Japanese wartime era postcard depicting the seizure of Rehe in northern China in late 1937.
Japan leads, chased closely by South Korea, with China, on a vastly larger scale, not far behind. Not as mercantilist development states nor as threats to America's high-tech industry, but rather as the world’s most rapidly aging societies.
A wave of unprecedented demographic change is sweeping across East Asia, the forefront of a phenomenon of longer life expectancy and declining birthrates that together yield a striking rate of aging. Japan already confronts a shrinking population. Korea is graying even more quickly. And although China is projected to grow for another couple of decades, demographic change races against economic development. Could China become the first country to grow old before growing rich? In Southeast Asia, Singapore also is confronting a declining birthrate and an aging society. Increasingly, Asia’s aging countries look to its younger societies, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and India, as sources of migrant labor and even wives. Those countries in turn face different demographic challenges, such as how to educate their youth for global competition.
The third Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue will focus on demographic change in the region and its implications across a wide range of areas, including economies, societies, and security. Asia’s experience offers both lessons and warnings for North America and Europe, which are facing similar problems. Questions to be addressed include:
What are the inter-relationships between population aging and key macroeconomic variables such as economic growth, savings rates, and public and private intergenerational transfers?
How and why do policy responses to population aging differ in Japan, South Korea, and across different regions of China?
What are the effects of demographic change on national institutions such as employment practices, pension and welfare systems, and financial systems?
What policies can or should be pursued to influence future outcomes?
How will demographic change affect security in the Asia-Pacific region?
How have patterns of migration impacted society and culture in East Asia, in comparative perspective?
How will demographic change influence the movement of people across the region and the prevalence of multicultural families?
What lessons can Asia, the United States, and Europe learn from each other to improve the policy response to population aging?
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.
Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. The first Dialogue examined the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States. It also explored the challenges posed by competition for resources and the possibilities for cooperating to develop sustainable forms of energy and better consumption practices. Last year’s Dialogue considered the question of building an East Asian Community similar in concept to the European Union. Participants discussed existing organizations, such as ASEAN and APEC, and the economic, policy, and security implications of creating an integrated East Asia regional structure.
The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.
Kyoto International Community House Event Hall
2-1 Torii-cho, Awataguchi,
Sakyo-ku Kyoto, 606-8536
JAPAN
More than six decades after the end of World War II, the Japanese government has yet to return an estimated ¥278 million worth of unpaid financial assets owed to Asian victims of forced mobilization for the war effort. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, American authorities directed Japanese officials to deposit these assets in the Bank of Japan for eventual restitution, setting up a custody account in 1946 and a foreign creditor’s account in 1949. However, the outbreak of the Korean War destroyed any chance of restitution, as the U.S. preoccupation over the cold war conflict effectively froze the unpaid assets that still remain in the Bank of Japan. Clarifying the historical record of American involvement in managing these accounts can contribute towards a U.S.-mediated effort to reach regional reconciliation between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia.
Sixty-six years ago, a small group of scientists, policy makers and military leaders embarked upon a highly secretive project to build a nuclear bomb. It would change the world forever. Today, the tightly-controlled knowledge and technologies of the Manhattan Project have given way to the open culture of the internet and the Information Age.
The revolution in technology and information dissemination that has transpired since the dawn of the nuclear age has had far-reaching effects on the entire national security apparatus. It has presented dangers, but also opportunities. In the arms control arena, new communication tools allow treaties to be negotiated with greater speed, and computing models help sustain nuclear stockpiles without testing. Verification techniques and technologies are developing in new and innovative directions. However, the traditional tools of arms control policy are limited in how they apply to cyber-weapons and warfare; new ones will be needed.
Identifying the challenges associated with the Information Age, as well as solutions and opportunities, will drive the arms control agenda for the next century.
Drell Lecture Recording: NA
Drell Lecture Transcript: NA
Speaker's Biography: Rose Gottemoeller was sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, on April 6, 2009. She was the chief negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. Since 2000, she had been with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She most recently was a senior associate in the Carnegie Russia & Eurasia Program in Washington, D.C., where she worked on U.S.–Russian relations and nuclear security and stability. She also served as the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from January 2006 – December 2008.
Formerly Deputy Undersecretary of Energy for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and before that, Assistant Secretary for Nonproliferation and National Security, also at the Department of Energy, she was responsible for all nonproliferation cooperation with Russia and the Newly Independent States. She first joined the Department of Energy in November 1997 as director of the Office of Nonproliferation and National Security.
Prior to her work at the Department of Energy, Ms. Gottemoeller served for 3 years as Deputy Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. From 1993 to 1994, she served on the National Security Council in the White House as director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs, with responsibility for denuclearization in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Previously, she was a social scientist at RAND and a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. She has taught on Soviet military policy and Russian security at Georgetown University.
Ms. Gottemoeller received a B.S. from Georgetown University and a M.A. from George Washington University. She is fluent in Russian.
The number one topic around the globe has been the world after Bin Laden and the appropriate ways for democracies to dispose of terrorists. From Washington, to Brussels, to Tel Aviv and Islamabad, pundits and average citizens have weighed in on the debate.
Sweden’s contribution to the question of how to deal with terrorism was to provide a welcome mat - in the form of a taxpayer-funded lecture tour - for the notorious Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) airplane hijacker, Leila Khaled.
Khaled literally burst onto the world scene in 1969 when she boarded TWA’s flight 840 in Rome with hand grenades taped around her waist. She stormed the cockpit, declaring she belonged to the Che Guevara Commando Unit of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP. Terrified passengers were held hostage and only released after Israel agreed to free Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons. One year later, she masterminded a new brutal hijacking after undergoing plastic surgery to conceal her identity.
In 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, The European Union through its European Council decided to include the PFLP on its list of terrorist groups.
The people of Israel are all too familiar with the savagery of the PFLP. It took responsibility for the 2001 assassination of Tourism Minister, Rehavam Zeevi. On Friday night, March 11th 2011, two PFLP members butchered the Fogel family in Itamar, including four-and eleven-year-old children and a three-month infant.
Ms. Khaled sits on the PFLP Central Committee and has not expressed regret for her involvement in terrorism. Because of her history of aiding and abetting terrorism, a police complaint was recently issued against her in Sweden for gross violations of international law.
But that came too late. During her tax-payer funded visit to Sweden, Khaled spoke at the May Day demonstrations of the Stalinist Swedish Communist Party and the Anarcho-syndicalist Trade Union Federation. She held publicly funded lectures at an Art Gallery and spoke on developments in the Middle East at the publicly- funded Södertörn University College.
Incredibly, Khaled also participated at a seminar on political activism arranged by the Left Party represented in Sweden’s Parliament.
The organizers of her appearances had nothing but praise for the PFLP leader. Anna Ahlstrand, Project Manager at Konsthall C, which is funded by the government’s Arts Grant Committee, declared “she is an icon for many people”. Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Project Manager at the Governmental Arts Grants Committee that financed her tour described the arch terrorist as “a very established feminist thinker.”
Irresponsible behavior Unfortunately, Leila Khaled isn’t the first member of a Palestinian terrorist group to get special treatment from Stockholm. In 2006, the Swedish consulate in Jerusalem, in contravention of EU regulations, granted a Schengen visa to Hamas’ Minister of Refugees, Atef Adwan. Such a visa makes it possible for the bearer to travel across 15 European Countries. That decision provoked protests from Israel, which said it lent legitimacy to Hamas, and from France, which had rejected earlier visa requests by Hamas leaders.
So far Sweden’s decision to grant entry to Khaled – a leading representative of an organization deemed a terrorist group by more than 30 countries, including Sweden, all EU Member States and the United States – hasn’t spurred protest from the US or other European countries.
But the decision to allow her into Sweden could have broader consequences. It comes at a time when many European nations want to take back direct control of their national frontiers. Indeed, the European Commission is currently debating the re-imposition of border controls within the so-called Schengen region.
Leila Khalid’s taxpayer-funded trip comes even as Swedish authorities continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated calls from the Jewish Community and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to fund security for Jewish institutions facing increasing anti-Semitism and global Islamist threats.
The irresponsible behavior of Swedish authorities will likely doom any future role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Back in 2000, following a more even-handed Middle East policy under then Swedish PM Goran Persson, Stockholm did help facilitate Israeli Palestinian negotiations.
According to leaked WikiLeaks reports, Carl Bildt, the current Foreign Minister is characterized, as a “medium size dog with big dog attitude.” But his government hasn’t even bothered to present a veneer of neutrality when it comes to the Holy Land, as evidenced by the fact that not a single minister visited Israel during the Swedish EU Presidency.
On the Iranian front, Bildt distinguished himself as one of the EU leaders most opposed to increased sanctions against Tehran. The very same diplomat rushed to Istanbul in June 2010 to personally greet and have his picture taken with Swedish participants in the infamous Turkish Gaza Flotilla.
If Sweden is serious about opposing terrorism and promoting Mideast peace, it must reveal the circumstances behind Leila Khalid’s entry and departure from Swedish and EU Territory and who approved the allocation of taxpayers’ funds for a woman who stands for everything Osama Bin Laden lived and died for.
This paper begins with contested issues among various approaches to institutions and seeks an analytical/conceptual framework for integrating them. Based on fundamental studies of knowledge theory and epistemic game theory, it discusses the role of institutions in substantive forms as societal artifacts that cognitively mediate agents’ strategic interactions and their individual beliefs in societal games. This approach is termed as the institutions-as-cognitive-media-view and its implications to the role of culture, institutional complementarities, and policy in the institutional process are discussed. It concludes with a proposal for a three-level approach to institutions: generic-ontological, comparative-substantive, and policy-design levels.
The Center for International Security and Cooperation is pleased to announce the selection of 13 rising seniors for participation in its Undergraduate Honors Program in International Security Studies.
The program provides an opportunity for eligible students focusing on international security subjects in any field to earn an honors certificate.
Students selected intern with a security-related organization, attend the program's honors college in Washington, D.C. in September, participate in a year-long core seminar on international security research, and produce an honors thesis with policy implications.
Joshua Alvarez
International Relations, Minor in Economics
Identity and Security: Turkey's Grand Strategy in the Middle East
Keshia Bonner
International Relations, Minor in Economics
United States Policy Towards Hamas and Hezbollah as State Actors
Stephen Craig
Political Science
Security Issues and Domestic Constraints on European Integration
Noura Elfarra
Political Science
How does Regime Change and Revolution Affect the Secret Police?
Alison Epstein
International Relations
British and American Intelligence Cooperation: the Iraq Inquiry and the New Face of the Special Relationship
Peter Hong
Political Science
Recalibrating and Resolving Deficiencies in Multinational Nuclear Fuel Cycle Initiatives
Mohammad Islam
Electrical Engineering, Minor in International Relations
Domestic Terrorism Prevention Strategies in the US and UK
Suraya Omar
Materials Science and Engineering
North Korea's Ambitions for a Light Water Reactor
Clay Ramel
Science, Technology & Society – Energy Engineering Concentration
National Security Dimensions of Developing an Energy Secure United States
Nick Rosellini
International Relations, Minor in Economics & Modern Languages
The NATO Strategic Concept: Evolution of a Nuclear Posture 1957-2010
Ram Sachs
Earth Systems, Minor in Modern Languages
Environmental Dimensions of Security - Yemen and Violent Extremism
Jeffrey Sweet
Materials Science and Engineering
The Effect of Public Perceptions of Diseases such as HIV, H1N1, SARS, and Anthrax on the Effectiveness of Controlling Epidemics
Reagan Thompson
International Relations, Minor in Chinese
The Chinese Influence in Africa: Case Studies of Ghana and Angola
