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Anti-Americanism in South Korea

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In recent years, "anti-American" sentiments and protests - what some observers regard as the "wildcard" in the US-Korea alliance-- have created tensions in the management of the bilateral relationship. Analysts have pointed to nationalism, the South's newfound "love" for the North, and generational change among South Koreans as key explanations for the anti-Americanism. Katharine Moon offers a different kind of analysis, focusing on the rapid changes in democratization and decentralization of government that have fostered a new identity and activist role for local governments and citizens. Local autonomy, especially in the areas housing the U.S. military bases, has come to challenge the monopoly of the central government in managing the alliance relationship and a powerful force shaping the politics of anti-Americanism.

Katharine H.S. Moon, associate professor and chairperson, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College, and a non-resident scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University.

She is the author of Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia University, 1997; Korean edition by Sam-in Publishing Co., 2002) and other work on women and international relations, migrant workers, and social movements in East Asia. Currently, she is writing a book on "anti-Americanism" in Korea-U.S. relations from the perspective of Korea's democratization and the politics of social movements. Moon received a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 to conduct research in Korea and was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the George Washington University in 2002-03.

Katharine Moon has served in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Women's Issues in the U.S. Department of State and as a trustee of Smith College. She serves on the editorial board of several journals of international relations and consults for NGOs in the U.S. and Korea. She also serves on policy task forces designed to examine current U.S. - Korea relations.

Daniel I. Okimoto Conference Room

Katharine H.S. Moon Associate Professor and Chairperson Speaker Department of Political Science, Wellesley College
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Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy

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This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization

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Stanford University Press: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Gi-Wook Shin

Iraq now - headed for civil war or already there?

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James D. Fearon
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Is civil war likely to break out in Iraq? It already has, according to CISAC's James D. Fearon, a political science professor who studies recent civil wars. Fearon is among four experts Time asked to comment on the current violence in Iraq.

Noah Feldman

In looking at the brewing civil war between the two groups in Iraq, it's easy to assume that the cause is ancient hatred. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the overwhelming majority of Iraqi history, Sunnis and Shi'ites have lived peacefully side by side, and numerous Iraqis are the children of mixed marriages. Instead we are witnessing in Iraq what occurs when government collapses and there is no state around capable of guaranteeing personal security.

What do you do when your family is in peril and you cannot turn to the government for protection? The answer is that you will take security wherever you can get it. You need to find some group that will be capable of keeping you safe, and that group had better be one that can count on your loyalty just as you can count on its protection. If you are a member of my ethnic, racial or religious group, then we share at least some basic bond, which may be enough to ensure our loyalty to one another. I need some assurance that you will have my back, and identity is better than nothing.

Sunnis and Shi'ites may find themselves joining militias or supporting denomination-based political parties even if they are not particularly pious and would much prefer not to. Something similar happened in the former Yugoslavia when its government collapsed with the fall of communism and nothing replaced it. Ethnic activists - call them identity entrepreneurs - will always form the core of the new militia. These radicals will emphasize symbols, like al-Askari mosque that was blown up last week in Iraq, and hope that followers will react by strengthening their commitments to the group itself.

Is it possible to break the cycle of violence that gets under way when identity groups move toward civil war? One answer is for an outside force to impose a solution. The killing did not stop in Bosnia or Kosovo until Western powers showed they were willing to bomb. But this approach is not viable in Iraq, where U.S. bombs came first and civil strife has followed. Instead the only way out of the violence is for Iraqis to realize that they have more to gain by negotiating a settlement between their groups than they do by allowing a full-blown brothers' war to break out.

Vali Nasr Author The Shia Revival (forthcoming)

What lies at the heart of the sectarian violence in Iraq is not so much religious dispute as it is a very secular competition for power and prominence in the new Iraq. Iraq is not all that different from Northern Ireland or Bosnia, where religion paraded as ethnicity and became a vehicle for communal rivalries. In the vacuum of power left by the fall of Saddam Hussein, the game of numbers has favored Shi'as, who are 60% of the population. It is for this reason that they wholeheartedly embraced democracy. Disgruntled Sunnis, on the other hand, vested their fortunes in boycott and violence, hoping that as spoilers, they would gain leverage in negotiating over the future.

Few in the West recognized the depth of either the Shi'a anger at the Saddam regime or the Sunni rage born of loss of power. There is a strong sense of Iraqi identity among both Shi'as and Sunnis, but as strong allegiance to sect and ethnicity in every election has shown, a shared notion of what Iraqi identity means and how each community sees the future of Iraq is fast disappearing. As happened in Bosnia, in Iraq mixed marriages and shared memory of coexistence will not be enough to stop internecine violence.

Shi'as embraced the political process that the U.S. set in place in 2003 in the hope that it would guarantee their security and serve their interests. There is indication now that many Shi'as are having second thoughts. Already overstretched in facing the Sunni insurgency, the U.S. can hardly afford losing the Shi'a as well. If tensions escalate to a full-blown civil war, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria may all join the war to protect their co-sectarians and to scramble for pieces of a failed Iraq.

Pulling Iraq back from the brink will be difficult. Building a strong central government and an effective security force will help. The challenge is to get them up and running before events on the ground pass a point of no return.

James D. Fearon

By any reasonable definition, there has been a civil war in progress in Iraq at least since the Coalition Provisional Authority formally handed over authority to the Iraqis in 2004. A civil war is a violent conflict within a country fought between organized groups seeking to compel a major change in government policies or to take control of the center or a region. The insurgents in Iraq target the U.S. military, but they are also fighting against the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to think that if the U.S. suddenly withdrew, the insurgents would not continue to fight to control or shape the government.

When we hear talk about incipient civil war in Iraq, the fear is of an escalation of the current insurgency into a much bigger war. Analysts may have in mind something like the U.S. Civil War, with Sunni and Shi'ite armies fighting each other across well-defined fronts. Or they may imagine a sudden spasm of massive communal conflict and ethnic cleansing along the lines of Bosnia or Rwanda. Neither scenario is all that likely, although bouts of violent ethnic cleansing are certainly possible in a few parts of the country, especially Kirkuk.

My guess would be that as the insurgency continues to create insecurity, sectarian militias will continue to grow in power and influence. They will increasingly supply local security, but in the form of protection rackets that extort as they protect. They will clash with each other over territory and control of revenue sources. Since the Sunnis remain highly disorganized, some of these local fights may initially be intra-Shi'ite. But in the absence of effective political incorporation and protection from national police and army units - which are heavily infiltrated by Shi'ite militias - Sunnis will gradually form a patchwork of militias. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood conflict and violence will increase. Think Lebanon.

Juan Cole

If you look at the ethnic conflicts and street demonstrations during Iraq's modern history, it is remarkable how few have involved Shi'ites fighting Sunnis. During the colonial era, Iraqis were united by their opposition to the British occupation. Sunni and Shi'ite tribes cooperated in rebelling against British rule, and were only put down with a bombing campaign in 1920 that killed 9,000. In 1941 mobs targeted Iraq's small Jewish population; Jews had been a valued part of the Iraqi national fabric but were accused, unfairly, of being pro-colonial. After World War II, much of the violence in Iraq was fueled by issues of class. In 1948 slum dwellers and railway and oil workers revolted against a government treaty with Britain. In 1959, Arab nationalists assassinated Communist Party members, while mobs in Mosul and Kirkuk attacked and killed rich businessmen and landowners.

Iraqi Muslims have not all along been severely divided by religious sect. There have been many instances of strong cooperation between Sunnis and Shi'ites. Other social divides have led to mob violence in the past, but Iraqis have overcome them to re-establish national unity. It remains to be seen whether they can accomplish this feat again.

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Military Culture and Civilian Victimization: The Case of American Strategic Bombing in World War II

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Alexander Downes is assistant professor of political science at Duke University specializing in international security. Before coming to Duke, Downes held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (Harvard University) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (Stanford University). His current research focuses on why states attack enemy noncombatants in warfare, a subject on which he is revising a book manuscript that includes case studies of strategic bombing, blockade, counterinsurgency, and ethnic cleansing. His previous research on the relative efficacy of partition versus negotiated settlements as solutions to ethnic wars has appeared in the journal Security Studies.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Alexander Downes Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science Speaker Duke University
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Maid to Order in Post-1997 Hong Kong: Stories of Indonesian Workers?

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The profile of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong has changed in significant ways since Hong Kong's reunification with the People's Republic of China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the SARS outbreak of 2003. Several changes have also appears, the most striking of which is the influx of about 90,000 Indonesian domestic workers and the relative decrease in the number of Filipinas. Another change is the tenor and scope of the workers' activism.

Drawing from recent migrant worker protests (including the anti-WTO protests of December 2005,) Dr. Constable considers the increasingly global and transnational aspects of foreign domestic worker activism and the increased breadth of their networks and affiliations, as well as the implications of such activism in relation to newly generated and displaced meanings of citizenship and human rights within and beyond the context of the self-ascribed "Asian World City" of Hong Kong.

Nicole Constable received her MA and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose interests include the anthropology of work; ethnicity, nationalism, and history; gender, migration, and transnationalism; folklore; and ethnographic writing and power.

Her geographical areas of specialization are Hong Kong, China and the Philippines. She has conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong on constructions of Hakka Chinese Christian identity and on resistance and discipline among Filipina domestic workers.

Her current research involves Chinese and Filipino immigrants to the U.S. and U.S.-Asian correspondence marriages.

Philippines Conference Room

Nicole Constable Professor, Department of Anthropology Speaker University of Pittsburgh
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Elder-care, Gender and Son Preference: The Role of Cultural Transmission and Diffusion during the Process of Rural-urban Migration in China

John Bender

424 Santa Teresa Street
Humanities Center
Stanford, CA 94305-4015

(650) 723-3052 (650) 723-1895
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Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
Professor of English
Professor of Comparative Literature
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John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Faculty of the The Europe Center. His research and teaching focus on the 18th century in England and France. His special concerns include the relationship of literature to visual arts, to philosophy and science, as well as to the sociology of literature and critical theory. 

 

Bender is the author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (1972), Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in 18th-Century England (1987), which received the Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies, The Culture of Diagram (2010)--as co-author with Michael Marrinan—and Ends of Enlightenment (2012).

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center

Stephen W. Hinton

BRAUN 214
Stanford, California, 94305-3076

(650) 723-0731 (650) 725-2686
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Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Music
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
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Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. From 2011-15 he served as the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. From 2006–2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts, and from 1997–2004 chairman of the Department of Music. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik; Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks; the critical edition of Die Dreigroschenoper for the Kurt Weill Edition (edited with Edward Harsh); Kurt Weill, Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition); and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith’s Collected Works.

He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history and theory, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has also served as editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. Recent articles include “The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg’s Two Practices of Composition” (Music & Letters, 2010) and “Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre: Psychology and Comprehensibility” (Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice). His book Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, the first musicological study of Kurt Weill’s complete stage works, won the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in musical theater. Together with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, he produced the series of online courses called Defining the String Quartet focusing on the music of Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019).

Denning Family Director of the Arts Initiative and the Stanford Institute for Creative and the Arts
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

112 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-2904
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Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, Emeritus
Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus
Professor of French and Italian, Emeritus
Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Emeritus
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies, Emeritus
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Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus (since 2018) , in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian. During the past two decades, he has received twelve honorary doctorates from universities in seven different countries. While Gumbrecht continues to be a Catedratico Visitante Permanente at the University of Lisbon and became a Presidential Professor at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) in 2020, he continues to work on two long-term book projects at Stanford: "Phenomenology of the Human Voice" and "Provinces -- a Historical Approach."

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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