In January-April 2011, the Program on Human Rights will host the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series, a weekly series featuring presentations by leading scholars of human rights. The series will comprise 10 high profile international and domestic human rights scholars, lawyers and activists who have made significant contributions to international justice, women and children's rights, environmental rights and indigenous rights.

Sanela Diana Jenkins has turned a life of hardship into triumph, as she has developed into a successful business woman, a devoted mother, and a philanthropist.

As a native of Sarajevo, Bosnia, Jenkins lived her childhood and teenage years in the midst of genocide. She lived in the country long enough to graduate from Sarajevo University with a degree in economics. Shortly thereafter, Jenkins was forced to flee her homeland during the conflict in Bosnia, which was responsible for the death of her brother Irnis. Compelled to leave her parents behind, Jenkins found herself as a refugee in London, where she was eventually granted asylum.

It was in England where Jenkins began to lay the groundwork for her future. Jenkins enrolled in London's City University to further her education. During her schooling, she learned English and worked odd jobs to support her parents back in Sarajevo. Not long after Jenkins discovered her new-found freedom, she met her husband Roger Jenkins, a financial executive in London, who was teaching classes at City University.

Jenkins has dedicated a large part of her attention back to her native land by establishing The Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation for Bosnia in Memory of Irnis Catic. The Foundation, which is closely associated with the funding of the medical school at the University of Sarajevo, aims to provide financial support toward establishing Bosnian schools and orphanages. Additionally, it is instrumental in building homes for the country's poor, supplying emergency aid & relief, and cleaning the country's lakes and polluted areas. The Foundation is the largest privately funded Bosnian organization of its kind. In 2008, Jenkins won the Mostar Peace Connection Prize for her humanitarian work.

Who should fight? It is no idle question in an era in which thousands of U.S. troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect Americans back home. In fact, the answer has profound consequences for the way policymakers make decisions about how these wars are waged. On Dec. 2, scholars from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University examined this issue as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Their conclusion: there is a wide and troubling divide between the 2.4 million Americans who volunteer to serve in the military and the many millions more who choose not to.

The statistics are revealing: During World War II, some 16 million men, and several thousand women, served in the military, representing 12 percent of the U.S. population. They came from all walks of life, and those who stayed home made sacrifices of their own for the greater war effort. But while the U.S. population has more than doubled since then, the military is now just 4 percent of the size it was in the 1940s. At the same time, today's wars require virtually no sacrifice at home, and those who enlist come from an extremely narrow demographic segment of the U.S. population. According to Stanford historian David Kennedy, who spoke at the event, in 2007, only 2.6 percent of enlisted personnel had exposure to college, compared to 32 percent of men age 18 to 24 in the general population. The military is disproportionately composed of racial, ethnic, and other demographic minorities, he noted. The political elites making the decisions about warfare seldom have children serving. Among the 535 elected members of Congress in 2008 only 10 had children in the military.

The implications of this are vast. A lack of personal familiarity for many Americans with the military breeds to some puzzling behavior, says Eliot Cohen, the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Congressmen say they can't imagine U.S. troops committing the kinds of atrocities recorded at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; left-leaning anti-war advocates at Moveon.org refer to General David Petraeus, the highly regarded commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as General Betray Us. More than that, a large gap between those who make the decisions about war and those who fight it raises serious questions about accountability. The Vietnam-era draft inspired thousands of Americans to push back against Washington's decisions to expand the war. Conversely, the existence of the all volunteer army, in effect since 1973, may have one been one reason for the relatively smaller level of protest in the run up to, and the execution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, at a 2006 Oval Office meeting with President George W. Bush, Kennedy said the president told him that if the draft had been in place he "would have been impeached by now."

The gap also raises concerns about civic unity. Earth-shaking events such as World War II and Sept. 11 brought citizens together, says Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. But sustaining that unity is extremely difficult, and becomes even more so when one segment of the population is willing to give its life to protect Americans while the vast majority go on with their lives without making any sacrifice of their own. To Elshtain, this raises a basic issue of fairness and social justice. There is a general lack of equity, she says, when "some families bear a radically disproportionate burden of service and sacrifice." As their peers "study or work or frolic, they die" in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Redressing this imbalance is an extraordinary challenge. Surely a draft would help. But it raises ethical questions of its own. There is also no political will to reinstate it. Nor, says Cohen, is it necessary or even desirable from a military perspective. A better set of solutions, he suggests, would start with expanding the depth and scope of relations between civilians and military personnel. He recommends siting military bases around the country so that civilians in New England, say, where there is virtually no military presence, can have greater exposure to an institution about which many of them know very little. Elite universities such as Stanford and Harvard, which have long prohibited on-campus ROTC activities, should start revisiting and revising their policies so that over time the military will have a wider diversity of background. Doing so might enrich the campus experience, and it could also lead to a stronger military in which the highly educated graduates of America's elite educational institutions would take a greater role influencing America's elite military institutions. For now, Kennedy observes, we have effectively "hired some of the least advantaged of our fellow countrymen to do some of our most dangerous business." And we continue down this path at our peril.

October 15, 2010 was the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Edwin O. Reischauer, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and a key leader in establishing the field of East Asian studies. George R. Packard, president of the United States-Japan Foundation, worked with Reischauer in the 1960s and recently published a biography about him entitled Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan. Packard spoke at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on October 28 to share his perspective on Reischauer's life and career.

Reischauer was born to missionary parents in Japan, where he spent the first part of his life. According to Packard, Reischauer had a lifelong appreciation for Japan that deepened with time, but he also recognized that the more time he spent living in and studying Japan, the more that there was for him still to learn. Reischauer attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate and Harvard University as a doctoral student. During World War II, he worked for the U.S. State Department translating intercepted messages.

The Pearl Harbor-era view of Japan in the United States was that of a "treacherous" country-one that still surfaces from time to time, according to Packard. Reischauer's life's work was to improve American education and understanding about Japan. While teaching at Harvard University, Reischauer, along with China studies pioneer John King Fairbank, helped to build the field of East Asian studies in the United States. Packard credits their efforts for changing the British imperial-era designation of the "Far East" to "East Asia." In addition to his works such as Japan, Past and Present and A History of East Asian Civilization, Reischauer was committed to writing about Japan in popular publications like Reader's Digest.

Reischauer served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan from 1961-1966. While there, he helped to diminish the "Occupation mentality" of Americans in Japan and planted the seeds for the eventual return of Okinawa, said Packard. During his time as ambassador, Reischauer suffered many professional and personal setbacks, including the death of President Kennedy, a supporter of his efforts; the escalation of the Vietnam War, for which he drew criticism although he was not a proponent of it; and being stabbed by a deranged student. According to Packard, after the stabbing incident Reischauer was deeply concerned about generating negative sentiment toward Japan, and thus intentionally kept quiet about it to the media. After returning to Harvard University in the late 1960s, Reischauer continued to draw criticism for the Vietnam War and in later decades was labeled as a "Japan apologist."

Despite his critics, the wisdom of Reischauer's work in academia and government rings true today, as evidenced by Japan's place as a global economic power and the successful and significant role that the U.S.-Japan relationship plays in the peace and economic stability of East Asia. 

An international forum on North Korea was held in Palo Alto on October 26, 2010, in an effort to educate the public on reunifying the two Koreas. The San Francisco Chapter of the National Unification Advisory Council organized the forum. Approximately 150 audience members heard panelists speak about the economic, social, and political challenges that face South Korea today in its preparation for a peaceful reunification, as well as about their visions for the future of North Korea.

Gi-Wook Shin, the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), moderated the presentations and the panel discussion. The panel of four experts included John Everard, 2010-2011 Pantech Fellow at APARC and a former British ambassador to North Korea, speaking about diplomacy and security; Greg Scarlatoiu, director of public affairs and business issues at the Korea Economic Institute, on economic issues; Sang-Hun Choe, 2010-2011 Fellow in Korean Studies at APARC and a reporter at the International Herald Tribune, on factionalism; and Jung Kwan Lee, the South Korean Consul General in San Francisco, on South Korea's policy toward North Korea.

Everad analyzed North Korea's development during the Cold War of a diplomatic technique by which it repeatedly attempted to play one ally off against another in its relationships with the Soviet Union and China. While arguing that North Korea continues to make effective use of this technique against South Korea, the United States, and the European Union, Everad noted that North Korea's current political uncertainty, following the succession, and its ongoing economic concerns will together create a situation in which it may be very difficult for North Korea to maintain political solidarity.

Scarlatoiu, meanwhile, contended that North Korea's is a post-Stalinist, neo-patrimonial economy. Thus, with recent efforts such as the 2002 market reforms and the 2009 currency reform, the North Korean regime has found itself confronted with a major dilemma. According to Scarlatoiu, while economic reforms are necessary to the long-term survival of the regime, they could also lead to the regime's collapse. This predicament, he added, must be considered as the regime undergoes a leadership transition in the succession to Kim Jong-un.

Choe spoke on the process of succession to Kim Jong-un as well, pointing out that while Kim Jong-un is indisputably the heir to the leadership of North Korea, he has yet to prove his competency as North Korea's future leader. In addition, Choe emphasized that difficulties judging North Korea's intentions and anticipating its behavior stem from the outside world's inability to understand the North Korean leadership and the goals that it truly has in mind.

Finally, Lee stressed that the basic objectives of South Korea's policy on North Korea are to promote a common prosperity and to peacefully resolve North Korean nuclear issues. However, he also made it clear that the South Korean government is seeking to keep North Korean nuclear issues distinct from the issue of inter-Korean relations.