The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is Asia’s most resilient regional organization.  Its ambitious new charter aims to foster, in a dynamic but disparate region, a triply integrated region comprising a Political and Security Community, an Economic Community, and a Socio-Cultural Community.  The charter’s debut under Thailand’s 2008-09 chairmanship of the Association was badly marred, however, by political strife among Thai factions, clashes on the Thai-Cambodian border, and border-crossing risks of a non-military kind.  How have these developments affected ASEAN’s regional performance and aspirations?  Are its recent troubles transitional or endemic?  Do they imply a need for the Association to reconsider its modus operandi, lest it lose its role as the chief architect of East Asian regionalism?

Dr Thitinan Pongsudhirak is director of the Institute of Security and International Studies and an associate professor of international political economy at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.  He is a prolific author, having written many op eds, articles, chapters, and books on Thailand’s politics, political economy, foreign policy, and media, and on ASEAN and East Asian security and economic cooperation.  He has worked for The Nation newspaper (Bangkok), The Economist Intelligence Unit, and Independent Economic Analysis (London).  His degrees are from the London School of Economics (PhD), Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (MA), and the University of California (BA).  His doctoral study of the 1997 Thai economic crisis won the United Kingdom’s Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics—currently the only work by an Asian scholar to have been so honored. 

Carolina for Kibera (CFK) inspires and nurtures youth leaders in the slum of Kibera, Kenya through a unique model of participatory development.  CFK recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it.  CFK's long-term initiatives provide youth opportunities to learn and serve while addressing a wide range of community needs including healthcare, education, waste recycling and reduction, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, and girls' empowerment.  CFK's model of participatory to fight abject poverty, and prevent ethnic, gender and religious violence has been internationally recognized, earning awards as a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation "Hero of Global Health" and the 2008 Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Reflections of Hope Award.  CFK is a major affiliated entity of UNC based at the Center for Global Initiatives.

Salim Mohamed Salim Mohamed co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Carolina for Kibera for eight years. At the age of 16, he was involved in the development of MYSA - the largest youth sports program in Africa based in the Mathare slum of Nairobi.  Salim has helped launch community based sports and development programs in Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria and presented at the International AIDS Conference. He serves as a director for Shoe 4 Africa, an advisor to Global Education Fund and a YES! facilitator.  A TED Africa Fellow, he is currently pursuing a master's degree at the University of Manchester.

Rye Barcott  While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001, Barcott founded CFK with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed. Barcott served five years in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.  In 2006, he was named an ABC World News Person of the Year.  A TED Fellow and member of the UNC Chancellor's Innovation Circle, Barcott is writing a book that juxtaposes community organizing and counter-insurgency (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).

Daniel Markovits is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He has written articles on contract, legal ethics, distributive justice, democratic theory, and other-regarding preferences. Professor Markovits concentrates, in each area, on the ways in which legal orderings engage the human instinct in favor of sociality to sustain cooperation even among persons who pursue conflicting interests and endorse competing moral ideals. He finds respectful relations in surprising places, for example in contracts between self-interested buyers and sellers, litigation between adversary disputants, and political competition between partisan parties. In each case, Markovits argues, seemingly competitive interactions contain, in their immanent logic, forms of reciprocal recognition and respect. After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.

Co-sponsored with Political Theory