Shapiro presents research he conducted with David A. Siegel, a student in Stanford's Graduate School of Business:

A review of international terrorist activity reveals a recurring pattern of financially strapped operatives working for terrorist organizations that seem to have plenty of money. This observation is hard to square with traditional accounts of terrorist financial and logistical systems, accounts that stress the efficiency with which terrorist financial networks distribute funds while operating through a variety of covert channels. In order to explain the observed inefficiencies, we present a hierarchical model of terror organizations in which leaders must delegate financial and logistical tasks to middlemen for security reasons; however, these middlemen do not always share their leaders' interests. In particular, the temptation always exists to skim funds from any financial transaction. To counteract this problem, leaders can threaten to punish the middlemen. Because logisticians in international terrorist organizations are often geographically separated from leaders, and because they can defect to the government if threatened, violence is rarely the effective threat it is for localized groups such as the IRA. Therefore leaders must rely on more prosaic strategies to solve this agency problem; we focus on leaders' ability to remove middlemen from the network, denying them the rewards of future participation. We find that when the middlemen are sufficiently greedy, and when the organization suffers from a sufficiently strong budget constraint, that leaders will choose not to fund attacks in equilibrium because the costs of skimming are too great. Further, we show there can be important non-linearities in terrorists' response to government counter-terrorism. Specifically, we find that given constrained funding for terrorists, government efforts will yield few results until they reach a certain threshold, at which point cooperation between leaders and middlemen in terrorist groups breaks down leading to a dramatic drop in the probability of terrorist success.

Often those who report or analyze state repression emphasize its intensity without exploring its logic. Drawing on his latest book, Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia (2004), Prof. Boudreau will treat state repression as a strategic activity designed to undercut threats, defeat rivals, and strengthen new regimes with reference to the dictatorships of Ne Win in Burma, Suharto in Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. He will highlight state capacity, social challenges, and how they interact in struggles for power. By asking what state repressions seems designed to accomplish, Boudreau seeks to develop a more fully political understanding of state violence in relation to social resistance.

Vincent Boudreau heads the Department of Political Science and the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York. His many publications include a unique study of the internal dynamics of anti-regime activism in the Philippines, Grassroots and Cadre in the Protest Movement (2001). He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1993.

Albert J. Bergesen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, and this year visiting professor of sociology at Stanford, where he offered "The Sociology of Terrorism" during the Winter quarter, and will offer, "Sayyid Qutb: The Father of Islamic Fundamentalism", this summer as a Stanford CSP course. His research centers upon Islamic fundamentalism/sociology of religion and the quantitative study of political violence. At present he is assembling a Terrorist Events File comprised of contemporary transnational terrorist events since 1968 and the 1878-1914 period of anarchist terrorist events. This data, and the resultant theoretical structures and models derived from it's analysis, will be used to construct a natural history of Cycles of Terrorism, which will have implications for trying to make predictions about present trends in type of attack, the geographical locale of attack, and the social/political characteristics of targets and victims.

This event is co-sponsored by the Commitee for Black Performing Arts, the Institute for Diversity in Arts, and the Asian American Activities Center.

Rushay Booysen - hip hop activist from Port Elizabeth, South Africa and writer for www.africasgateway.com

Mr. Booysen works with young artists who express their opposition to ongoing oppression through hip hop culture. Much of his activism and writing focus on issues facing the "coloured" community in South Africa. His photo essay on youth culture in Port Elizabeth will appear in the next issue of Stanford's Black Arts Quarterly. Recently, Mr. Booysen has begun working with the local city council in Port Elizabeth to broaden opportunities for young performers. His interviews with local South African artists, such as J-Bux, and international artists, such as DJ Krush, have appeared in international internet journals.

Chizuco Naito - writer, cultural critic, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tokyo, Japan

Her work addresses minority cultures, imperialism, and sexuality in modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Ms. Naito has published extensively on topics such as reader response activism, imperialism in modern Japanese literary studies, sexual politics, and romantic love as a topic of resistance. She has written on authors as diverse as Nakagami Kenji, Hoshino Tomoyuki, Matsuura Rieko, and Natume Soseki. While most of her courses focus on modern and contemporary Japanese fiction, she recently taught a course on Star Trek and US Imperialism.

Dylan Rodriguez - Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside

Dr. Rodriguez teaches Filipino American Studies and Ethnic Studies. He received his Ph.D. and his M.A. degrees in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been involved in Critical Resistance and has written extensively on the prison industrial complex as it is expressed both in the United States and internationally. His essay "The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation with Angela Davis" appeared in the March, 2001 issue of Social Justice.

Setsu Shigematsu - Lecturer in Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside

Whether addressing representations of sexuality in Japan or the development of Asian American social movements, Dr. Shigematsu routinely engages questions of identity and liberation. She has written and presented research on women and violence in Japanese comics, as well as on war's impact on women (specifically "comfort women" and karayuki-san in the Pacific War). Originally from Quebec, Dr. Shigematsu earned her Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Cornell University. She has also studied the development of transnational activism in Asian women's movements.

Carla Williams - Photohistorian, writer, and artist

Ms. Williams, who resides in Oakland, is the co-author of The Black Female Body and other books. Her work as a photographer is featured in the Smithsonian's current "Reflections in Black" exhibit. She has been a frequent guest speaker at events at Stanford, as well as a Humanities Center Fellow, and is currently completing two major book projects, one of which focuses on an African American artist's model in the 1930's, Maudelle Bass. Ms. Williams, who is originally from Los Angeles, also maintains the website www.carlagirl.net.

With a musical performance by JenRO, the female rapper, and spoken word by Stanford student Kiyomi Burchill.

In the United States since 9/11, there has been a tendency to reduce Southeast Asia's connections to the Middle East to religion: that is, to the Muslim faith shared by majori-ties east of the Mediterranean and south of the South China Sea, not to mention the Muslim minorities elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While addressing the changing nature and importance of this overlap, Professor von der Mehden will also analyze how and why these two regions, spatially so far apart, have been interacting on a range of economic, security, and political issues, including the question of Palestine. He will argue that there is more interaction today between the two regions than ever before. Each region has become more involved in the affairs of the other. But these burgeoning connections are not what they were expected to be. Nor are they all benign.

Fred von der Mehden is internationally known for his extensive scholarship on politics, religion, and development in Southeast Asia. His talk will update and expand on his 1993 book, Two Worlds of Islam: Interaction between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. A senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995), Professor von der Mehden's many other books include Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia (1986); Southeast Asia 1930-1970 (1974); Comparative Political Violence (1973); and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (1963). He has just returned from Southeast Asia, where he has lectured or done research almost every year since the 1950s. He is California-trained, having earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley; an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School; and a B.A. from the University of the Pacific.