Journalism in Southeast Asia is triply constrained. In a given country, the regime in power may impose censorship or induce self-censorship. Outraged by an article, headline, or photograph, a threatening mob can achieve the same result. Concern for the bottom line may pressure commercial media to avoid "serious" analyses in favor of "lighter" stories with ostensibly greater reader, listener, or viewer appeal. Violence and sex may be featured for the same material reason. What is it like to work under such constraints? What strategies are available to journalists for defeating or deflecting them? How do the news environments in Indonesia and Thailand differ in these respects? What about the prejudices and preferences of journalists themselves? How do all these limits, incentives, and propensities go into the making of the news in Southeast Asia? Yuli Ismartono is uniquely suited to answer these questions. As a correspondent for TEMPO, she covered wars in Cambodia and Sri Lanka, drugs in the Golden Triangle, the student uprising in Burma, the Soviet exit from Afghanistan, Russian elections, the first Gulf War, and events in Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and, of course, Indonesia. For five years while TEMPO was banned, she worked in television and corporate public relations while writing for The Indonesian Observer. Her current responsibilities as executive editor include managing TEMPOInteraktif (online news).

Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the leading authorities in Islamic law in the United States and Europe who has frequently criticized contemporary Islamic legal interpretation as deviating from its original diversity and moderation. He teaches Islamic Law, Middle Eastern Investment Law, Immigration Law, and courses related to human rights and terrorism. Professor Abou El Fadl's books include: Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam (2001); Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (2001); Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (2001); And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourse (2nd ed. revised and expanded, 2001) and The Place of Tolerance in Islam (2002).

Over the last two years in Southeast Asia, acts of terror done in the name of Islam have divided analysts into two broad camps. Academic specialists on Islam in Southeast Asia have tended to emphasize the moderation of the vast majority of Muslims in the region and the local roots of so-called jihadist violence there. While not denying the moderation of most Muslims, Western journalists and officials have relied more on intelligence reports and detainee confessions to situate Southeast Asian jihadists within a global terrorist network organized and inspired by Al Qaeda. Compared with Western journalists and officials, scholars have also tended to portray Islam as a basically tolerant religion and to seek nonreligious explanations and motivations for seemingly Islamist violence. If the scholars have had faith in explanatory contexts--distinctively local, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and political--their counterparts in media and policy circles have been more inclined to showcase conspiratorial texts: interrogation transcripts, recordings of clandestine conversations, and the selectively Koranic rhetoric of militant Islamists urging global jihad. Which of these contrasting perspectives is superior, analytically and as a basis for counter-terror policy? Are the perpetrators of apparently Islamist terror in Southeast Asia thinking and acting locally? Or globally? Is there a demonstrably Al Qaeda network in the region? If so, what sort of a structure is it? How does it operate? Can a "war" against it succeed? If not, what might be a better approach? Zachary Abuza is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Simmons College. His most recent book is Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001). Foreign-affairs journals that have published his work include Asian Survey and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He has spoken on Southeast Asian subjects before Congress, at the State Department, on Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour," and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Time, among other media. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1998. In 1995-96 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Hanoi.

The act of suicide can take many forms and is an old "way out". However, the act always engenders some sort of statement in the community left behind. The recent political and war-like statements of suicide bombers trigger both general concerns and scholarly questions. Suicide is an individual act, but at the same time it can give shape to a movement. How can we understand the current acts of suicide bombing? In what way does it raise new ways of thinking about the underlying assumptions and mechanisms behind social behavior?

Papers Presented:

1. "Inside the Terrorist Mind" by Arie Kruglanski, University of Maryland. Paper presented to the National Academy of Science, April 29, 2002, Washington D.C.

2. "Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: Is there a Causal Connection?" by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, Working Paper 9074, National Bureau of Economic Research.

3. "The Interpersonal Influence Systems and Organized Suicides of Death Cults" by Noah E. Friedkin, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara.

4. "The Paradox of Suicide in Solidary Groups" by Douglas D. Heckathorn, Cornell University.

5. "Hamas, Taliban and the Jewish Underground: An Economist's View of Radical Religious Militias" by Eli Berman, Rice University, National Bureau of Economic Research.

6. "Suicide Missions: Motivations and Beliefs" by Jon Elster, Columbia University.

7. "Suicide Bombing: What is the Answer?" by Howard Rosenthal, Princeton University and Russell Sage Foundation.

In "Gender Militarized" Frhstck deals with how masculinity is created, constituted, and negotiated in present-day Japan. She describes how Japanese "militarized masculinity" constantly evolves, is culturally specific, contested, debated and resisted. In this talk, she argues that "militarized masculinity" draws from various kinds of manhood, depends on the subordination of alternative modes of manhood, cuts itself off from other modes of gender and is informed by past and present Japanese and non-Japanese militarisms as well as American militarism on its soil. At the core of Frhstck's analysis are the processes of institutional coercion and the expectations and struggles of enlisted personnel and officers in Japan's armed forces to create a "militarized gender" that is distinct from other types of manhood.

About the speaker:

Sabine Frhstck is an associate professor of modern Japanese cultural studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2003); "Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan" in the Journal of Asian Studies (2000); and (with Eyal Ben-Ari) "Now We Show It All! Normalization and the Management of Violence in Japan's Armed Forces" in the Journal of Japanese Studies (2002), among other articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a book about military-societal relations in modern and contemporary Japan entitled "Avant-garde: The Army of the Future."