Tonya Putnam has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University in March 2005. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, but will be moving to the Center on Globalization and Governance at Princeton University for a postdoctoral fellowship next academic year. Her dissertation, Courts Without Borders? The Politics and Law of Extraterritorial Regulation, explores the extraterritorial reach of U.S. federal courts and regulatory institutions, and implications for the development of de facto international regulatory frameworks. Other research areas have included human rights in peace implementation missions, comparative legal responses to the threat of cybercrime and cyberterrorism, risk communication in the context of radiological terrorism (dirty bombs), and obstacles to military reform in Russia.

The accession of Cyprus to the European Union (EU) in May of 2004 constitutes the most positive strategic development in the history of the island state since its independence in 1960. In the last two years, the Cypriot people have experienced watershed events, filled with frustrations, challenges but also opportunities. Cyprus' EU membership has extended the borders of the EU to the strategic corner of the Eastern Mediterranean and has brought the Middle East ever closer to Europe. It is hoped that Cyprus' EU membership can contribute to the expansion of peace, stability, security and prosperity in the area. Cyprus is situated at the crossroads of three continents and civilizations, where global political and economic interests, as well as international security concerns, converge. Together with its American ally and with the help of its European partners Cyprus aspires to play a positive role, and to act as a bridge of mutual understanding and the promotion of sustained and result oriented dialogue between its Middle Eastern neighbors and Europe. At the same time, Cyprus strives to achieve a just, permanent, functional and mutually acceptable solution to the Cyprus problem, an end of the Turkish military occupation, reunification and prosperity for all Cypriots within their common European home.

His Excellency Euripides L. Evriviades presented his credentials as the Ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus to the United States to President George W. Bush on 4 December 2003. He is also accredited as High Commissioner to Canada. Ambassador Evriviades served as Ambassador of Cyprus to the Netherlands from August 2000 to October 2003. Prior to his posting in The Hague, he served as the Ambassador to Israel from November 1997 until July 2000. Earlier in his career, Mr. Evriviades held positions at Cypriot embassies in Tripoli, Libya; Moscow, USSR/Russia; and Bonn, Germany.

After the end of the Cold War, the world's attention focused on the vast quantity of potentially unsecured nuclear material- weaponized and unweaponized- that resided in the former Soviet Union. The closed borders of the Soviet Union were thrown open and facilities containing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were no longer under the watchful eye of a ubiquitous KGB. Russian scientists possessing knowledge about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were able to visit or immigrate to any country of their choice, including rogue nations with active WMD programs.

In response, a number of nonproliferation programs were established by Western nations to help stem the emigration of Russian weapons scientists to countries of concern. The key question is whether these nonproliferation programs are achieving their objectives. To answer this question, we conducted a survey of 600 Russian scientists (physicists, chemists and biologists). The data indicate that U.S. and Western nonproliferation programs are indeed effective. The programs significantly reduce the likelihood that Russian scientists would consider working in rogue countries. The data further suggest that continuation of the Western assistance programs is necessary in order to prevent scientists from going rogue.

Biography

Dr. Deborah Yarsike Ball is a political-military analyst specializing in Russian affairs in the Nonproliferation, Arms Control and International Security Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has been a fellow at Harvard University's Center for Science and International Affairs, as well as Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control. Her work focuses on Russian civil-military relations, military doctrine and security issues, the prevention of theft of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear material from the former Soviet Union, as well as the safety and security of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Dr. Ball has conducted analysis of various regime's internal and external political and social behavior and their holistic use of the elements of power and influence.

Ball's publications include: "How Safe Is Russia's Nuclear Arsenal?" in Jane's Intelligence Review (December 1999) and "The Social Crisis of the Russian Military," in "Russia's Torn Safety Nets" (Ed. by Mark G. Field and Judyth L. Twigg, St. Martins, 2000), and "The State of Russian Science" in Post-Soviet Affairs, (July-Sept. 2002, with Theodore Gerber). Among her committee assignments, Dr. Ball is currently serving on a US National Academy of Sciences Committee tasked to assess the indigenization of US programs to prevent leakage of plutonium and highly enriched uranium from Russia.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japanese "nationalism" (if such a term is even applicable) depended less on imagined similarities among Japanese than it did on their contrived customary differences from foreign peoples such as the Ainu. The boundaries of the early modern Japanese realm were ethno-geographical, and Ainu identity and difference was critical in constructing the borders of Japan.

After 1799, the Tokugawa shogunate and, later, the Meiji state, undertook policies of deculturation and assimilation toward the Ainu, because the Meiji strategy toward state building relied less on difference than on myths of internal homogeneity. The Meiji state conscripted Ainu into the myth of Japanese homogeneity through assimilation; but earlier forms of Ainu autonomy and difference first had to be destroyed.

Interestingly, wolf eradication offers one vantage point from which to view the process of Ainu deculturation and assimilation in the context of the colonization of Hokkaido and the creation of the modern myths that provided the foundation for Japan's ethnic nationalism. Ainu origin mythology held that the Ainu people were born from a union of a wolf and a goddess, and so when Ainu tracked and killed wolves and wild dogs under state bounty programs legitimized as "imperial grants," they committed mythological patricide, replacing their origin myths with Japanese ones that, over the course of the late Meiji period, served as the foundation of Japan's modern nation.

Japan Brown Bag Series

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies