Commentators across the political spectrum have suggested that a profoundly confrontational clash between western and traditional cultures is taking place. Are modernity & religiosity in fundamental conflict? Are western values - equated with modernity and secularism - incompatible with orthodoxy? Are traditions - based in religion and emphasizing the importance of established practices - antithetical to "progress"? Is the conflict so profound that it has become our new "cold war"? Join our panelists to explore one of the more disturbing challenges facing our world today.

Coit D. Blacker is director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He also serves as co-chair for Stanford University's International Initiative. Professor Blacker is the author or editor of seven books and monographs, including Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev and Soviet Security Policy, 1985-91 (1993); Reluctant Warriors: The United States, the Soviet Union and Arms Control (1987); and, with Gloria Duffy, International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (1984). During the first Clinton administration, Professor Blacker served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council. Professor Blacker is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., Ph.D.).

Amir Eshel is chair and associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, and director of the European Forum at FSI. His research focuses on German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. He is currently working on a book about the poetic figuration of historical narratives, and he is also involved in an interdisciplinary project on urban space in Berlin. At Stanford, he has taught courses on German Jewish literature, literature of the Holocaust, modern German poetry and the contemporary German novel. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of German studies, he taught at the Universitaet Hamburg (Germany). He is a member of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association of Jewish studies, the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In 2002 he received the Award for Distinguished Teaching, from Stanford University's dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received an MA and PhD in German literature, both from the Universitat Hamburg. He speaks Hebrew, German and English, and has a good knowledge of Yiddish and French.

Robert Gregg is the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor in Religious Studies (Emeritus), and serves as Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. His scholarship includes a book on philosophies concerning death and grieving in ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian communities; two volumes concerning struggles over orthodoxy and heresy in 4th century Christianity that are focused on the "arch-heretic" Arius and reactions to his teachings; a translation of Athanasius' Greek Life of Saint Antony - the famous account of his activities as one of the first desert monks; and a study of 250 Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic, and Latin inscriptions from the Golan that allow glimpses of interactions between Jews, "pagans," and Christians in the Golan Heights and Syria, 1st-7th centuries CE. Professor Gregg's current research treats several "sacred stories" which appear both in the Bible and in the Qur'an-and examines interpretations of these scripture narratives by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers and graphic artists in each of the religions' early centuries.

Paula M. L. Moya is Associate Professor and Vice-Chair of English at Stanford University, where she recently completed a term as Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and Chair of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) major. Her publications include essays on feminist theory, multicultural pedagogy, and Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and identity. She is the author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (University of California Press, 2002) and coeditor of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000) and Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave in 2006.) For the past five years, she has been actively involved as a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society. For more information, visit www.fmsproject.cornell.edu.

Raena D. Saddler grew up in St. Louis and attended high school at Colorado Academy in Denver. She is currently a Junior double-majoring in Religious Studies (with a focus on Christianity) and Psychology on the "Health and Development" specialization track (focusing both on adolescent development and clinical psychology). She is also minoring in International Relations with a focus on aid to lesser developed countries--Africa in particular. Raena is planning to spend next fall semester in Rome and come back to work on an honors paper for Religious Studies. She enjoys traveling abroad, and spends a few weeks every summer doing aid-work in Mozambique, Africa. Since coming to Stanford, Raena has been volunteering for three years at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) working with junior high and high school girls as a youth leader and small group leader. In addition to that, she is the head coach for the Menlo-Atherton High School JV women's lacrosse team. Outside of coaching she loves to be around kids and babysits for several families in the area. When she isn't going to class, babysitting, or coaching, she spends the rest of her time with her closest friends and boyfriend of two years.She is very passionate about youth leadership and social justice, and hopes to work for an international aid organization in the future.

Jointly sponsored by the Stanford International Initiative and the Undergraduate Admissions Office.

The Brazilian government is declaring victory in its decades-long struggle to become self-sufficient in the supply of oil. The milestone is cause for celebration in a country that has long paid a high price for imported energy.

It will also reverberate here in the United States where policy-makers, too, are trying to wean the nation from costly imports, jittery markets and the foreign spigot. But we must learn the right lessons. Brazil's success came not from treating oil as an addiction but by producing even more of the stuff and by becoming even more dependent on world markets

Here in the United States, most attention to Brazil's fuel supply has focused on the country's aggressive program to replace oil with ethanol that is made by fermenting homegrown sugar. American newspapers are filled with stories about Brazil's famous "flex fuel" vehicles that make it easy to switch between ethanol and conventional gasoline.

Guided partly by Brazil's apparent success, American policy-makers are crafting new mandates for ethanol, and flex fuel vehicles are now taking shape. We have the impression that ethanol is king.

In reality, ethanol is a minor player in Brazilian energy supply. It accounts for less than one-tenth of all the country's energy liquids.

The real source of Brazil's self-sufficiency is the country's extraordinary success in producing more oil. After the 1970s oil shocks, when Brazil's fuel import bill soared, the government pushed Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, to look asunder for new energy sources.

Petrobras delivered, especially at home, where the firm pioneered the technologies that make it possible to extract oil locked in sediments under the seabed in extremely deep water. In the middle 1970s Brazil struggled to produce just 180,000 barrels of oil per day while importing four times that amount. Today it produces about 2 million and is self-sufficient. Indeed, the current milestone of self-sufficiency arrives with the inauguration of Brazil's newest deep water platform, the "P50." When P50 reaches its full output later this year, that one platform will deliver more liquid to Brazil than the country's entire ethanol program.

Brazil's self-sufficiency offers three lessons for U.S. energy policy:

-First is that ethanol, with current technology, will do little to sever our dependence on imported energy. Today's approach involves growing a crop - sugar in Brazil, corn in the United States - and then fermenting the fruits to yield fuel. Sugar plants in Brazil's climate are a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to biomass than is corn in the Midwest, but U.S. policy nonetheless favors corn (and imposes tariffs on imported sugar) because the program is really a scheme to deliver heartland votes rather than a commercially viable fuel.

Yet, even with Brazil's favorable climate and sugar's inviting biology, ethanol is already reaching the limit. That's because the land and other resources devoted to ethanol can be put to other uses such as growing food and cash crops.

Indeed, today the Brazilian government is actually reducing the share of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline because sugar growers prefer to make even more money by selling their product as sugar on the world market rather than fermenting it into alcohol.

New technologies - notably "cellulosic biomass"- could breathe fresh life into ethanol and replace still more oil. Cellulosic biomass is intriguing because it cuts costs by allowing the entire plant - the cellulose in the stalks, as well as the prized grain or sugar - to be fermented into fuel.

Advocates for this technology, including President Bush in his State of the Union address, have wrongly confused the sexy promise of this new-fangled approach to making ethanol with the practical realities of fuel markets. Schemes to produce cellulosic biomass, today, work only under special circumstances and nobody has delivered the fuel at the industrial scale that would be required for the technology to become commercially viable.

-Second, we should learn that, for now, the greatest force to loosen the world's oil markets lies with oil itself. We can use oil more efficiently, as would occur with a gasoline tax or wise fuel economy standards. But we can also find ways to produce more of the stuff - as Brazil did with Petrobras.

The problem for U.S. policy-makers is that the richest veins for new production lie mainly outside the United States and beyond our direct control.

Indeed, the Brazilian government made Petrobras more efficient by putting the firm partly beyond its control as well. When the government sold part of the company on international stock exchanges, it accepted Western accounting procedures and other strictures that have given Petrobras the autonomy and accountability to its shareholders that, in turn, helped make it an efficient company.

We have a stake in seeing other countries do the same - from Algeria to Mexico to Iran and even Russia. But we must remember that Brazil did this on its own, in response to internal pressures for reform, with little leverage from foreign governments.

-Third, we should learn from Brazil not to confuse the goal of greater self-sufficiency with the illusion of independence. Even as Brazil has become self-sufficient it has also, ironically, become more dependent on world markets. That's because the Brazilian government has wisely relaxed price controls so that the prices of fuels within the country are set to the world market. Thus Brazilians see real world prices when they fill up at the pump, and the decisions about which cars to buy and how much to drive reflect real costs and benefits of the fuel they consume. That is why, even as the country becomes self-sufficient, Brazilians are working ever harder to be more frugal with oil - because the price at the pump is high and rising.

Dependence on oil is a liability that must be managed. But it is not an addiction.

Efficiency, sober policies toward modest alternatives such as ethanol, and more production - all tools of the manager, not the addict - are required. Brazil helps show the way, but only if we learn the right lessons.

Three months ago the Russian energy giant Gazprom forced Ukraine to pay sharply higher prices for natural gas. At the time, the story was portrayed as a political struggle for control in Kiev. But last week Gazprom announced it was tripling gas prices in Belarus, a country that is politically close to the Kremlin. Moldova has been forced to accept a doubling of prices over the next three to four years, and the other former Soviet republics are already paying market prices for Russian gas.

The truth is that these price increases are not political. Rather, they reflect worrisome economic and geological facts about Russian gas fields. The Kremlin is not simply trying to use Gazprom to reassert authority in Belarus, Ukraine or anywhere else. There are in fact deep problems with Gazprom -- problems created by its inefficient management and a looming decline in gas production.

Russia controls over a quarter of the world's gas reserves -- more than any other country. Most of the known Russian reserves (about 80 percent) are in west Siberia and concentrated in a handful of giant and super-giant gas fields. Since the early 1970s the rate of discovery for these new fields has been declining. Moreover, output from the country's mainstay super-giant fields is also steadily falling.

Huge investments are needed to replace this dwindling supply, and all the options for new production will prove costly and difficult. New fields in the far north and east of the country are distant from most of Russia's people and export markets, requiring wholly new transport systems such as pipelines. Moreover, most of these fields are found in extremely harsh environments where it is technically and financially difficult to operate.

Gazprom controls neither the capital nor the technology that will be needed. The state-controlled company is already deeply in debt and burdened by many expensive obligations, such as supplying Russia's population and friends with cheap gas. The company has to work with foreign partners.

So far Gazprom has been able to forestall crisis. Economic stagnation across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since 1990 dampened gas demand. Russia, which had a surplus at the time, sharply increased its gas exports and made contractual commitments that will remain in force for many years.

But following the long stagnation, Russia's internal gas consumption is rising again as the economy expands. And new Russian policies to promote development of the country's eastern regions will, in the next few years, require large new commitments to supply gas to that region (along with spending on railroads, airports and other infrastructure).

Even when the Russian economy was in the doldrums the country was notable as a large gas consumer because of its extremely inefficient energy system. Today Russia is the world's second-largest gas user, after the United States, although its economy is only one-twentieth the size of the U.S. economy.

Electricity in Russia is produced for the most part by gas, but the country's gas-fired electric generators work at 33 percent efficiency on average, compared with 50 to 55 percent in Europe. More than 90 percent of residential and industrial gas consumers don't have meters. Gas is even cheaper than coal -- Russia is the only large country where that is true -- so incentives to switch to an abundant fuel are weak.

In recent years Russia has boosted gas supplies by squeezing Turkmenistan to sell gas to Russia at a deep discount. But Turkmen gas production is poised to decline, and Turkmenistan's gas industry is barely functional because the country's political environment is scary for long-term investors. Other Central Asian suppliers, notably Kazakhstan, are unlikely to be able to bridge the gap.

Caught between growing internal consumption of gas, continued inefficiency and mounting external obligations, Russia's gas industry faces a looming crisis. Given the country's vast resources, it seems that many producers could fill the void. But a series of policy decisions created two roadblocks that Gazprom has been happy to reinforce. One is the lack of access to the Gazprom-controlled pipeline network, which explains why few companies even bother to look for gas: They know they can't get what they find to market. The other barrier to investment is the low internal prices, which make gas production uneconomic except for companies that can sell their products outside.

Gazprom needs cash -- much more cash -- for investment. At the same time, it needs a strong incentive for former Soviet republics to cut their own very inefficient consumption.

Analysts have ignored the risk that Russia's supplies could fall short because they focus on Russia's vast gas resources and the new Western investors who are -- albeit cautiously -- entering into joint ventures with Gazprom. But those resources and ventures are for the long term, and the looming crisis of supply is unfolding now.

The gas shortage is likely to become most acute over the next few years. If there is an unusually cold winter in 2008, the year of Russia's presidential election, then Gazprom will face a politically unpleasant choice: whether to cut off internal customers (voters) or the Western customers who are the firm's main source of hard cash.

The writer is a research fellow at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. She is co-author of "Axis of Oil" and of a forthcoming comprehensive review of Russia's gas pipelines.

There was no Orange-style revolution in Belarus following the 19 March presidential elections. But there may have been the beginning of a revolution of the spirit that will bring the last tyranny in Europe to an end. Observers should not lament the "failure" of revolution but should hail the beginning of a genuine democratic movement, which is stronger today than it was just a few years ago.

From the beginning of this campaign, there was little sign of a real contest. Lukashenka could have won a free and fair election: Strong economic growth and social stability might have guaranteed him half of the vote or so, had the vote actually been counted. But a free and fair vote carried the risk of defeat, however remote, and the ghost of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 fueled hysteria within the regime. Consequently, just before the vote, the government criminalized opposition-related activity and began to arrest election monitors and activists from nongovernmental organizations on charges of terrorism.

Yet Lukashenka wanted some legitimacy for his reelection and therefore allowed opposition candidates to participate. Surprisingly, two challengers, the leader of the united opposition, Alyaksandr Milinkevich, and the former rector of the Belarusian State University, Alyaksandr Kazulin, refused to bow to the dictator and decided to play by their own rules. Their 30-minute campaign speeches on state TV (that is how much exposure to alternative opinions an ordinary TV viewer in Belarus has had in five years) were devoted not much to the issues but to attacking Lukashenka's character - an act previously unthinkable in a country where one official once declared Lukashenka to be "a bit higher than God." Both candidates emphasized freedom and democracy rather that day-to-day issues in their messages and found much sympathy, to the surprise of observers. Thousands turned out on the streets to hear speeches from opposition candidates, numbers that were unthinkable even in Minsk just a year ago.

Lukashenka saw the crowds as well and got nervous. Kazulin, whose particularly scathing attacks made him an instant celebrity, was beaten up by riot police. Dozens of observers and reporters were denied visas, expelled, or even arrested and charged with helping to plot a coup. State TV propped up its propaganda, and the KGB began to discover one plot after another every several days. In the last revelation, the head of the KGB claimed that the opposition would poison the tap water in Minsk using decomposing rats. And dozens of opposition activists with experience in street protests were rounded up in the run-up to the vote. Yet even in the face of these repressive tactics, Lukashenka's autocratic regime failed to deter people from mobilizing on the streets after the vote to denounce the fraudulent results.

On 19 March, at least 20,000 people took to the streets to protest the announcement of a "smashing" victory for Lukashenka, who was declared winner with 83 percent of the vote cast. And the protesters did not stop there, organizing an around-the-clock vigil on the central square of Minsk to demand annulment of the vote and new elections.

To be sure, the size of the protests was nowhere near the crowds that turned out in the streets in Kyiv a year and half ago. Yet thousands of Belarusians braved not only the blizzard but explicit threats of jail and even the death penalty made by the KGB on the eve of elections. Most of them faced immediate dismissal from state jobs or university if found in the crowd or even caught checking an opposition website. And they barely had means to communicate with each other due to suspension of most of the opposition press and an almost total blockade of the Internet and mobile communications. Could one have expected a protest of more than just a handful of dissidents in these, almost Soviet-style conditions?

SMALL VICTORIES

In retrospect, one has to admit that the protest was doomed. The opposition knew it did not win the elections and hence did not attempt to stage a revolution as such: that is, to attempt to snatch power from Lukashenka by force. Instead, the protest turned into a show of defiance, an attempt to get the sympathy and attention of fellow countrymen. Day after day, the numbers dwindled, not least because each new day brought the protesters closer to an imminent show of force by the government. It came on the morning of 23 March, when people on the square were surrounded and thrown into police trucks, then taken to jails and sentenced to various prison terms.

The dramatic end of the protest also highlighted an unpleasant fact for the Belarusian opposition: A combination of fear imposed by the government on one part society, and acceptance of the regime by another part, still limits its appeal and following. The streets of Minsk these days were full of pictures of solidarity and defiance, but also of indifference from passers-by and loathing for the protesters from the regime's supporters.

Lukashenka's opponents still have a long way to go to communicate their message to the entire society - and will have to do so in an even more repressive political climate than they have endured so far. But failures and disappointments shall not distract attraction from the opposition's successes in this campaign and afterward. It achieved unity and presented society with a leader whom many accepted as a credible alternative to Lukashenka. It invigorated the network of democratic activists, who braved certain repression and imprisonment. It spurred public debate, and the quest for free information was boosted even when the regime knocked out independent newspapers by the dozens. And it proved to the society and the entire world that support for democratic change in Belarus is not limited to just a handful of fanatics.

The March events may be the beginning of a newly invigorated fight for democracy in Belarus as much as it can trigger a new, more severe round of oppression from the regime. The West cannot stop paying attention. Those struggling for democracy, especially those already in jail, deserve our solidarity; families of political prisoners need support; and recently expanded democratic assistance programs, especially efforts to expand access to independent media within Belarus, must be sustained, not cut, now that the election is over.

Democrats in Belarus defied expectations and demonstrated that they exist, they have some popular support, and they are willing to take risks in their fight for freedom. Now, more than ever, supporters of freedom in the West need to stand with them.