More than six decades after the end of World War II, the Japanese government has yet to release an estimated ¥200 billion worth of unpaid wages owed to Korean forced laborers who were brought to wartime Japan. Nor has the government disbursed an additional ¥200 billion worth of financial benefits owed to Korean and Taiwanese military servicemen. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, American authorities directed Japanese officials to compensate these Asian victims of the war effort, setting up a custody account for labor conscripts in 1946 and a foreign creditor's account for military conscripts in 1949. However, the outbreak of the Korean War destroyed any chance of monetary compensation, as the U.S. preoccupation over the new cold-war conflict effectively froze up bank accounts relating to Japan's former colonial subjects. Clarifying the historical record of American involvement in this unresolved issue of war compensation can contribute towards resurrecting efforts to reach regional reconciliation between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia.

Matthew Augustine is the 2009-2010 Northeast Asia History Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the History Department at Columbia University and his B.A. from the Politics Department at Princeton University. His research interests include military occupations, especially the U.S. occupations in Japan, Korea, and Okinawa after World War II; transnational migrations and border controls; Japan's colonial empire in the Asia-Pacific; and the history and politics of war reparations in Northeast Asia.

Why do Western democracies respond militarily to complex humanitarian emergencies when and as they do?  Why do they send peacekeepers or combat forces to some conflicts and not others?  When they do so, how do they choose the political goals, military strategies, and military resources that they contribute to these operations?  I will explain what I mean by the term ‘complex humanitarian emergency,' and lay out the humanitarian implications of different kinds of military responses.  To illustrate, I will provide a few examples of complex emergencies and Western responses to them.  I will also offer some ideas about the factors that influence these policy decisions, and demonstrate their importance with a few comparative examples of Australian responses to complex humanitarian emergencies in its region.

Andrea Everett is a 2009-2010 CISAC visiting scholar. A Ph.D candidate in international relations at the Department of Politics at Princeton University, she is also a 2004 CISAC Undergraduate Honors Program graduate.  After graduating from Stanford but before arriving at Princeton, Andrea spent a year studying transatlantic relations in Berlin, Germany on a Fulbright scholarship.

Andrea's research interests include international security and comparative democratic foreign policy. She is especially interested in the role of domestic political influences on democratic states' foreign policy decisions in the security arena. Her dissertation, "Responding to Catastrophe: Explaining Democratic Responsiveness to Complex Emergencies," seeks to explain why Western democracies respond to complex humanitarian emergencies abroad when and as they do. She focuses on understanding when and how these states decide to use military force in pursuit of positive humanitarian outcomes, and investigates the roles of public pressure, characteristics of complex emergencies, military capabilities, and national interests in these decisions.

Kenneth Schultz is an associate professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His research examines how domestic political factors such as elections, party competition, and public opinion influence decisions to use force in international disputes and efforts to negotiate the end of international rivalries.

He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge, 2001), as well as a number of articles in scholarly journals. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association to a scholar under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research. Schultz received his BA in Russian and Soviet studies from Harvard University and his PhD in political science from Stanford University.

Representing the United States Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel John Vitacca is a national defense fellow for 2009-2010 at CISAC. 

John holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing from Texas A&M University, a Master of Business Administration degree in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Master of Arts degree in Military Operational Art and Science from Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Alabama.  He is a command pilot with over 3,400 flight hours in the B-2 and B-52, qualified as both an instructor and evaluator pilot.  Prior to coming to CISAC, John served in various assignments including a tour at the Pentagon as the Chief of the Global Persistent Attack Branch and the B-2/Next Generation Bomber subject matter expert.   Most recently, he was the Commander of the 393d Bomb Squadron at Whiteman Air Force Base, one of only two operational B-2 stealth bomber squadrons in the USAF.  His research at CISAC will focus on nuclear weapons policy issues.

Dr. Stephen Flynn served as a senior policy advisor on homeland security during the Obama campaign and during the presidential transition. Since May 2009, he has been supporting the Department of Homeland Security in drafting of the first Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) that will be presented to Congress by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano in Jan 2010. In addition, he has been assisting the newly created National Security Council Directorate for Resilience Policy on integrating the concept of resilience into presidential guidance on national preparedness. He will discuss how the homeland security mission is being recalibrated by the Obama Administration to place greater emphasis on building national capacity to withstand, quickly recover from, and adapt to man-made and natural disasters.

About the speaker:

In December 2009, Dr. Stephen Flynn becomes the fifth President of the Center for National Policy (www.cnponline.org), founded in 1981.  Prior to being selected to lead CNP, he spent a decade as a senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Following the election of President Barack Obama, he served as the lead policy advisor on homeland security for the presidential transition team.  He is a member of the bipartisan National Security Preparedness Group, co-chaired by former 9/11 commissioners, Governor Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton.

Dr. Flynn is the author of the critically acclaimed The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (Random House, 2007), and the national bestseller, America the Vulnerable (HarperCollins 2004).  He is a Consulting Professor at the Center of International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania.  Since 9/11 he has provided testimony on twenty-two occasions on Capitol Hill.  Dr. Flynn is also a member of the Marine Board of the National Research Council. Prior to September 11, 2001, he served as an expert advisor to U.S. Commission on National Security (Hart-Rudman Commission), and following the 9/11 attacks he was the principle advisor to the bipartisan Congressional Port Security Caucus, and advised the Bush Administration on maritime and homeland security issues. 

He is a frequent media commentator and has appeared on Meet the Press, 60 Minutes, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Today Show, the Charlie Rose Show, CNN and on National Public Radio.  Four of his articles have been published in the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs.  Excerpts of his books have been featured in Time, as the cover story for U.S. News & World Report, and as the subject of two CNN documentaries.

A 1982 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Dr. Flynn served in the Coast Guard on active duty for 20 years, including two tours as commanding officer at sea, received several professional awards including the Legion of Merit, and retired at the rank of Commander.  As a Coast Guard officer, he served in the White House Military Office during the George H.W. Bush administration and as a director for Global Issues on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration. 

Dr. Flynn received the M.A.L.D. and Ph.D. degrees in International Politics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in 1990 and 1991.  He was a Guest Scholar in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution from 1991-92, and in 1993-94 he was an Annenberg Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.   He has been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations since 1999.

Dr. Flynn is the principal for Stephen E. Flynn Associates LLC, where he provides independent advisory services on improving enterprise resiliency and critical infrastructure protection, and transportation and maritime security.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1960, Dr. Flynn lives in Connecticut with his wife JoAnn and their daughter Christina.

Rajan Menon is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. He was an Academic Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Carnegie Corporation of New York for two years, where he played a key role in developing the Corporation's Russia Initiative. Dr. Menon was also a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and as Director for Eurasia Policy Studies at the Seattle-based National Bureau for Asian Research. He is the author of Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986) and co-editor of Limits to Soviet Power (Lexington Books, 1989). He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and has also written for The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Newsday, and World Policy Journal, among other publications. Dr. Menon received his doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Menon's latest book, The End of Alliances, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. He is working on his next book, Hubris: The Anatomy of Military Disasters. Dr. Menon's other areas of research and writing include Russian politics and foreign policy; the international relations of Central Asia, the South Caucasus, South Asia, and the Asia-Pacific; energy development in the Caspian Sea zone; security issues in Asia; globalization, and the comparative study of empires.