Stanford University

Human Welfare, War and Sanctions in Iraq under Saddam Hussein

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This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN).

Abstract: Who bears the costs associated with the foreign policy decisions of dictators? And to what extent are the burdens of war borne by particular ethnic groups in a multi-ethnic society? Using internal Iraqi government documents amassed in the wake of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as well as survey data collected shortly after the fall of the regime, I provide evidence for the unequal distribution of war costs associated with the Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War as well as the impact of the international sanctions regime, what some have deemed an "invisible" economic war. I find that Shi`a Iraqis were more likely than their Sunni counterparts - and much more likely than Iraqi Kurds - to have been killed, become prisoners of war or to have gone missing in action during the first half of the Iran-Iraq War. Shi`a families were also more likely to have had a brother or father martyred in either the Iran-Iraq War or the First Gulf War while simultaneously being less likely to enjoy a "Friend of the President" designation, which afforded families certain rights and privileges vis-à-vis the regime. At the end of the sanctions period immediately following the fall of the regime, Shi`a Iraqis were also three times more likely to be living in poverty or extreme poverty than Sunnis from Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit but only about 20 percent more likely to be poverty stricken when compared to Sunnis from Iraq's far western provinces. These results provide strong evidence for the existence of a hierarchy of burden associated with the foreign policy decisions of the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein.

About the Speaker: Lisa Blaydes is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011).  Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project.  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-9 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.  She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

CISAC Central Conference Room, 2nd floor

Lisa Blaydes Speaker Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford

Lisa Blaydes

Encina Hall West, Room 408
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 723-0649
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Political Science
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Lisa Blaydes is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project.  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles, and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

 

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Lisa Blaydes Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University Speaker

Adi Greif

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C139
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Adi Greif is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University and a pre-doc at CDDRL from 2013-2015. Her dissertation, "The Long-Term Impact of Colonization on Gender", investigates why gender equality varies by former colonizer (French or British) in the Middle East and globally. It uses cross-national statistics, a regression discontinuity across the former colonial border in Cameroon, and interviews from Egypt and Jordan. Her research abroad was supported by a Macmillan Dissertation Fellowship.

Adi's research interests are colonialism, international alliances, state formation and comparative gender policies with focus on the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. She has lived in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, and visited Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. Adi holds an M.A. in Political Science from (Yale University) and a B.A with honors in Political Science and a minor in Math (Stanford University). Before coming to Yale, she worked at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. through the Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy.

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2015; CDDRL Pre-doctoral Fellow, 2013-2014
Adi Greif CDDRL Pre-doctoral Fellow Commentator
Seminars

An Army Like No Other: The Origins of Military Culture

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Gil-li Vardi joined CISAC as a visiting scholar in December 2011. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 2008, and spent two years as a research fellow at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at the University of Oxford, after which she joined Notre Dame university as a J. P. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History.

Her research examines the interplay between organizational culture, doctrine, and operational patterns in military organizations, and focuses on the incentives and dynamics of change in military thought and practice.

Driven by her interest in both the German and Israeli militaries and their organizational cultures, Vardi is currently revising her dissertation, "The Enigma of Wehrmacht Operational Doctrine: The Evolution of Military Thought in Germany, 1919-1941," alongside preparing a book manuscript on the sources of the Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) early strategic and operational perceptions and preferences.

CISAC Conference Room

Gil-li Vardi

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Gil-li Vardi joined CISAC as a visiting scholar in December 2011. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 2008, and spent two years as a research fellow at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at the University of Oxford, after which she joined Notre Dame university as a J. P. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History.

Her research examines the interplay between organizational culture, doctrine, and operational patterns in military organizations, and focuses on the incentives and dynamics of change in military thought and practice.

Driven by her interest in both the German and Israeli militaries and their organizational cultures, Vardi is currently revising her dissertation, "The Enigma of Wehrmacht Operational Doctrine: The Evolution of Military Thought in Germany, 1919-1941," alongside preparing a book manuscript on the sources of the Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) early strategic and operational perceptions and preferences.

Gil-li Vardi Visiting Scholar, CISAC; Lecturer, Department of History, Stanford; Research Fellow, Hoover Institution Speaker
Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford Commentator
Seminars

Exploring the Social and Religious Determinants of Female Genital Cutting in Egypt and North-Central Africa

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Female genital cutting (FGC) remains a nearly ubiquitous cultural practice among ever-married women in Egypt, Eritrea, Mali and Sudan, and is practiced elsewhere in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The goal of this project is to describe the social and religious determinants of FGC in these societies and to explore the factors underlying declines in FGC in countries like Egypt.

Lisa Blaydes

Encina Hall West, Room 408
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 723-0649
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Political Science
lisa_blaydes_108_vert_final.jpg

Lisa Blaydes is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project.  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles, and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

 

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Lisa Blaydes Assistant Professor, Political Science Speaker Stanford University
Sepideh Modrek Instructor, Medicine Speaker Stanford University
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Action Fund Fridays

Faculty Spotlight: Donald K. Emmerson

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Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

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Is There an Emerging Crisis of Democracy?

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Abstract:

Political polarization has paralyzed the functioning of democracy in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Taiwan, where students have recently occupied the parliament building.  Civil liberties and political opposition are under intensified assault by an abusive prime minister in Turkey.  Indian democracy is increasingly diminished by brazen corruption and rent-seeking. Several African democracies have failed, and others are slipping.  The Arab Spring has largely imploded, and Egypt is in the grip of military authoritarian rule more repressive than anything the country has seen in decades.  After invading and swallowing a piece of Ukraine, Russia now poses a gathering threat to its democratic postcommunist neighbors.  For the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House finds that the number of countries declining in freedom have greatly exceeded the number improving.  And most of the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, seem unable to address their long-term fiscal and other policy challenges.  Is there an emerging global crisis of democracy?  And if so, why?

Speaker Bio:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

 

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Reporting the Arab Uprisings and its Ethical Boundaries

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Description:

Arab screens along with social networks have been flooded over the past three years with words, images and videos that were meant to shed light on the revolts and uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain Libya and Syria. What started as a celebrated influx of information soon turned into means for disseminating sectarian and ethnic hatred, mainly in the cases of Syria and Egypt. Dr. Zahera Harb will discuss ethical boundaries that have been applied in Arab media coverage of the Arab revolts and uprisings, drawing on journalism epistemologies in the Arab world and focusing on recent developments in Syria and Egypt.

Speaker Profile:

Dr. Zahera Harb is a Lebanese journalist and academic. She is currently a senior lecturer in international journalism at City University London. Her recent publications include a co-edited collection titled Narrating conflict in the Middle East: Discourse Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and a monograph titled Channels of Resistance: Liberation propaganda Hezbollah and the Media (I.B. Tauris, 2011). She is a review editor for the Journal of Media Practice.

Dr. Harb has 11 years' experience as a journalist in Lebanon working for Lebanese and international media organizations. She started as a news reporter and distinguished herself in particular in the coverage of war operations in the battlefield of South Lebanon. She was then co-producer and presenter of a popular socio-political program (Khamseh Ala Sabaah, 5/7) before becoming one of the main news anchors at Tele Liban (the public service TV in Lebanon). At New TV she was appointed to a news anchor-editor post and hosted the main daily political show (Al Hadath). At Future TV (Pan Arab satellite channel) she produced and presented her own socio-political program (Ala Madar Assaa) while assigned as satellite news editor. She also produced several political and social documentaries for Lebanese TV stations and completed reporting assignments for BBC Arabic service (radio), CNN world report and Dutch TV. She hosted live coverage of distinguished political events inside and outside Lebanon.

Dr. Harb was trained in Lebanon, Holland and the UK and has a BA in Journalism, a Diploma in Broadcasting News and an MA and PhD in Journalism Studies and Political Communications.

She has been on the consultancy board of the Thomson Foundation UK for 7 years conducting media training in the UK and other parts of the world including Egypt, Tunisia, Kuwait, UAE, Malta, Spain, Armenia, Ukraine and Brussels.  

This event is sponsored by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and Mediterranean Studies Forum and in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center and Arab Studies Table. 

 

Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room

Zahera Harb Senior Lecturer in International Journalism Speaker City University London
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The Long-Term Impact of Imperialism on Gender

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Abstract:

Gender equality is considered important for development and good governance, yet the causes of cross-national variation in gender equality are still not well understood. This paper claims that the distinct types of rule pursued by the French versus the British imperial powers selected for postcolonial institutions that are systematically correlated with gender equality. The paper evaluates this conjecture using three tests: a cross-country test of former British and French colonies, a historical comparison of Syria and Iraq, and a regression discontinuity across the former colonial border within modern-day Cameroon (see Lee and Schultz 2012). Results indicate that, despite our understanding of British colonialism as beneficial for a variety of economic institutions (Acemoglu and Johnson 2004, La Porta et al. 2008, Lipset 1994) French institutions often better promoted gender equality. This paper contributes to the discussion on the relative importance of colonial institutions versus natural resource endowments or religion (Nunn 2013, Sokoloff and Engerman 2000, Ross 2008, Fish 2002, Inglehart and Norris 2003).

Speaker Bio:

Adi Greif is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University and a pre-doc at CDDRL for the academic year 2013-2014. Her dissertation, "The Long-Term Impact of Colonization on Gender", investigates why gender equality varies by former colonizer (French or British) in the Middle East and globally. It uses cross-national statistics, a regression discontinuity across the former colonial border in Cameroon, and interviews from Egypt and Jordan. Her research abroad was supported by a Macmillan Dissertation Fellowship.

Adi's research interests are colonialism, international alliances, state formation and comparative gender policies with focus on the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. She has lived in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, and visited Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. Adi holds an M.A. in Political Science from (Yale University) and a B.A with honors in Political Science and a minor in Math (Stanford University). Before coming to Yale, she worked at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. through the Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy.

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Adi Greif 2013-14 Pre-Doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
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Rethinking Libya’s Political Isolation Law

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In a recently released paper titled “Rethinking Libya's Political Isolation Law" co-produced by Brookings Doha Center (BDC) and CDDRL’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Roman David and Houda Mzioudet examine the controversy over Libya’s Political Isolation Law (PIL) that passed in May 2013 and its likely effects. The BDC-Stanford University Project on Arab Transitions aims to generate comprehensive analysis of the conditions affecting democratization and good governance during the period of Arab transition. 

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Vote counting begins in the election for the new president of Libya's General National Congress in Tripoli June 25, 2013.
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The Future of the US-Japan Alliance

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The US-Japan alliance is the longest, most stable, and most indispensable alliance in the modern history of East Asia.  It has served as the foundation for the region's security structure for well over a half-century.  However, with China's emergence as a rising economic and military power, and given territorial disputes involving China, Japan, and South Korea, and with escalating nationalistic rhetoric and fundamental disagreements over historical interpretations of the Pacific War, the United States and Japan are now facing worrisome tensions and strains that could undermine the solidarity of the US-Japan alliance.  Is the time-tested US-Japan alliance capable of managing both the shifts in the regional balance of power, and the threat of conflict over disputed territories, and the rising thermometer of nationalistic sentiments?   

Ambassador Ryozo Kato, former Ambassador of Japan to the United States from 2001 - 08, the longest tenure of any Japanese Ambassador to the United States, and former Commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball from 2008 - 2013, has had a long and distinguished career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Japanese Government. A graduate of Tokyo University Faculty of Law and Yale Law School, he served his country in Australia, Egypt, and the United States, in addition to multiple global assignments within the Ministry in Tokyo.

Positions which Ambassador Kato served in the United States include the Third Secretary in the Embassy (1967–1969), Minister in the Embassy (1987–1990), and Consul-General in San Francisco (1992–1994). He returned to Japan to serve as the Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau (1995–1997) and the Deputy-General of the Foreign Policy Bureau (1997–1999). After serving as the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs (1999–2001), he was appointed the Ambassador of Japan to the United States of America from 2001 to 2008. He has been recognized and respected on both sides of the Pacific for his outstanding understanding of the issues and his clarity in direction to resolve them.

Philippines Conference Room

Ryozo Kato former Ambassador of Japan to the United States Speaker
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Seoul-Tokyo Relations in Peril: Is a "Reset" Possible?

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Koret Distinguished Lecture Series: Lecture IV

From early 2012, South Korea-Japan relations worsened due to what many Koreans regard as a series of Japanese provocations involving historical and territorial disputes. Unfortunately, the neighbors failed to utilize the opportunity to improve the situation following leadership changes in both countries at the beginning of 2013. Today their bilateral relationship, long considered a cornerstone of peace and stability in Northeast Asia, appears to the worst since the normalization of diplomatic ties in 1965. Former Korean ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo will analyze the complicated structural reasons behind this downward spiral and explore whether differences over history can be addressed and an early diplomatic "reset" achieved.

Ambassador Shin has served various diplomatic positions during his thirty-five year career in foreign affairs, including service as ambassador to the State of Israel from 2006 to 2008 and to Japan from 2011 to 2013. He is currently a professor at the Korean National Diplomatic Academy and also a special research fellow at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Seoul National University.

The Koret Distinguished Lecture Series was established in 2013 with the generous support of the Koret Foundation. 

Philippines Conference Room

Shin Kak-soo former Korean Ambassador to Japan Speaker
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Koret Distinguished Lecture Series
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