Singapore's general elections in 2006 are unlikely to shake the country's legendary political stability. Despite repeated predictions over decades that the long-ruling People's Action Party (PAP) would falter, opposition parties and dissident groups have made little headway. Cherian George will offer a counter-intuitive reason for this situation: deliberate self-restraint in the use of violence by the state against its opponents. Since the 1980s, modes of repression in Singapore have grown increasingly subtle and sophisticated. Thanks to "calibrated coercion," the PAP has been able to neutralize opposition with minimum political cost. The study of authoritarian regimes would benefit from more nuanced attention to the methodology of coercion. It is time for analysts to stop treating coercion as if it were not problematic - a black box that need not be taken apart. Or so, based on Singapore's case, Prof. George will argue.

Cherian George is the author of Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore (2006) and Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control (2000). After completing his PhD in communication at Stanford in 2003, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, Singapore. He is now deputy head of the journalism program at Nanyang Technological University.

Nancy Peluso will discuss how "political forests" originated in colonial-era Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and how they have been maintained over at least a century and a half of broader political-economic change. She will argue that forests were produced and normalized in Southeast Asia through political categories embedded in the law, scientific and public practice, colonial and post-colonial empires of forestry, and the insurgencies and emergencies of the Cold War era. This required the sometimes violent separation of the components of agrarian environments. From the fact that forests can be shown to be not only biological but also historical and political in nature she will draw important implications for conservation, development, and "green governance."

Nancy Lee Peluso is program director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics at UC - Berkeley, where she teaches courses in political ecology and studies forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. She is the co-editor of Violent Environments (2001) and Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (1996) and the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (1992) and many journal articles and book chapters. She is presently finishing a book manuscript whose working title is "Ways of Seeing Borneo: Territoriality, Violence, and the Production of Landscape History". She is an associate editor of Global Environmental Politics and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Her PhD is from Cornell University.

Professor Andrew Mack is the Director of the Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. Prior to establishing the Human Security Centre, he was a Visiting Professor at the Program on Humanitarian Policy at Harvard University (2001) and spent two and a half years as the Director of Strategic Planning in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations (1998-2001).

Professor Mack has held the Chair in International Relations at the Institute of Advanced Study at the Australian National University (1991-1998), was the Director of the ANU's Peace Research Centre (1985-91) and was the ANU's Senior Research Fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (1984-85).

He has held research and teaching positions at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia) the London School of Economics, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research, University of California at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Fudan University in Shanghai and the International University of Japan.

His pre-academic career included six years in the Royal Air Force (engineer and pilot); two and a half years in Antarctica as meteorologist and Deputy Base Commander; a year as a diamond prospector in Sierra Leone and two years with the BBC's World Service producing the current affairs program "The World Today".

This talk addresses a set of intimately intertwined contradictions that characterize military-societal relations in present-day Japan: the contradiction between Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which forbids a standing army and the existence of its armed forces; the contradiction between the civilian prohibition of violence and the military's training for and potential demand of violent acts; and the dilemma of representing a profession that must negotiate between societal mores and the demands associated with military service. More specifically, Professor Frühstück will untangle the Self-Defense Forces' public relations strategies, ranging from comics to live firing exercises. She argues that these strategies are deeply embedded in Japanese culture and affecy various segments of the Japanese public in radically different ways.

Sabine Frühstück focuses her research on the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Her book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, is a history of sexual knowledge in Japan and the different uses made of that knowledge. Based on a wide variety of sources including military data on soldiers' health, sex education treatises for youth, and pronatalist and expansionist propaganda that fought frigidity in women and impotence in men, the book analyzes the techniques at work in conflicts and negotiations that aimed at the creation of a normative sexuality. Frühstück has co-edited Neue Geschichten der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien and Zentraleuropa 1700-2000 and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure.

The rise of women's liberation movement in 1970 marked the beginning of a radical feminist politics that emerged in response to the New Left in Japan. In 1972, the mass media televised a political conflict between the state and a sect called the United Red Army. The production of this televised spectacle constituted a crises for the New Left in that it de-legitimized the use of "revolutionary violence." Shigematsu's talk will discuss how members of the women's liberation movement responded to this crises as an example of their radical feminist politics. This response involved a re-articulation of a woman's role in "revolutionary violence" and a radical notion of relationality.

Martha Crenshaw is the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., where she has taught since 1974. She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. Her recent work includes the chapter on "Coercive Diplomacy and the Response to Terrorism," in The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (United States Institute of Peace Press), "Terrorism, Strategies, and Grand Strategies", in Attacking Terrorism (Georgetown University Press), and "Counterterrorism in Retrospect" in the July-August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs. She serves on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chairs the American Political Science Association Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism.

She has served on the Council of the APSA and is a former president and councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2004 ISPP awarded her its Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and in 2005 the Jeanne Knutson Award for service to the society. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Orbis, Political Psychology, Security Studies, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. For the next three years she will be a lead investigator with the new National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. She is also the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2005-2006. She serves on the Committee on Law and Justice and the Committee on Determining Basic Research Needs to Interrupt the Improvised Explosive Device Delivery Chain of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. Her current research focuses on why the U.S. is the target of terrorism and the distinction between "old" and "new" terrorism, as well as how campaigns of terrorism come to an end.

Linda Kirschke is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, in the Department of Politics, and her research focuses on state politics and ethnic violence. She published "Informal repression, zero sum politics and late third wave transitions" in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 2000. Drawing on the cases of Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, this article shows that transitions to multiparty politics place Sub-Saharan South Africa at high risk for civil violence. Kirschke was a Eurasia Title VIII Fellow at the Social Science Research Council in 2002-03, working on Russian language training. In 2003-04, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia Universityís Council for European Studies. Kirschke has a BA in French and African studies and has worked for human rights organizations in France, London and Africa.