Microblogs, Youtube, and mobile communications. These are a few of the digital platforms changing how we connect, and subsequently, reshaping global societies.
Confluence of technology and pervasive desire for information has in effect created widespread adoption. There is no doubt the Information Technology (IT) revolution is in full swing.
Comparing case studies across Asia and the United States, the fifth and final Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue (DISCONTINUED) considered opportunities and challenges posed by digital media. Experts and top-level administrators from Stanford and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on Sept. 12-13, 2013.
Relevant questions asked included: What shifts have occurred in traditional versus digital media for how people get information, and how does this differ across countries? What is the potential for digital media in civil society and democratization? Is it a force for positive change or a source of instability?
In the presentations and discussion sessions, participants raised a number of key, policy-relevant points, which are highlighted in the Dialogue’s final report. These include:
Digital media does not, on its own, automatically revolutionize politics or foster greater democratization. While the Internet and digital media can play an instrumental role, particularly where traditional media is highly controlled by the government, participants cautioned against overemphasizing the hype. One conception is that the Internet can instead be viewed as a catalyst or powerful multiplier, but only if a casual chain of latent interest exists. That being said, greater exposure of youth to digital media, particularly in areas of tight media control, can open new areas of awareness.
The upending of traditional media business models has not been replaced by viable digital media business models. As media organizations struggle with their business models, the quality of reporting is threatened. For traditional organizations, maintaining public trust can be challenging, particularly during wars after disasters, while in areas with previously tightly controlled press, digital media may be perceived as more authentic. On the one hand, policy-driven agenda setting may be easier in some issue areas, but digital media may amplify interest in controversial issues, particularly with history issues in Asia.
As Cloud Computing platforms provided by a small group of mostly U.S. companies is increasingly the underlying platform for digital media—as well as our digital lives in general—issues of information security and privacy are at the forefront of much of the public’s mind. Revelations by former U.S. contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of the US government’s espionage activities raise concerns among journalists concerned with issues such as free speech of the press, media independence from government, and protection of sources.
Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of scholars and thought leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing higher education policy and the dramatic demographic shift across Asia.
The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue was made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.
STANFORD, California – Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) is pleased to announce Aung Zaw as the 2013 recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award. Zaw has been selected for his leadership in establishing independent media in Myanmar (Burma) and his dedication to integrity in reporting on Southeast Asia.
Launched in 2002, the Shorenstein Journalism Award recognizes outstanding journalists who are leaders in constructing a new role for reporting on Asia, including incorporation of Internet-based journalism and social media. The award was originally designed to honor distinguished American journalists for their work on Asia, but since 2011, Shorenstein APARC re-envisioned the award to encompass distinguished Asian journalists who pave the way for press freedom, and have aided in the growth of mutual understanding between Asia and the United States. Shorenstein APARC is delighted to recognize Zaw as the first Burmese recipient of the award.
Aung Zaw’s commitment to independent journalism flows from his long involvement in the struggle against authoritarian military rule in Myanmar and his engagement in the movement for democracy in that Southeast Asian nation. For two decades, Aung Zaw was an active participant in the resistance to military rule and the push for greater press freedom. In 1988, he participated in the mass protests of students, monks, housewives and ordinary citizens against the regime of General Ne Win.
Zaw was arrested, interrogated, and held in the Insein prison for his pro-democracy activities. Upon release, Zaw continued to work with the resistance movement until the military staged a coup in September of that year, whereupon he was forced into exile in neighboring Thailand. From there, he wrote political commentaries for various media outlets and launched The Irrawaddy magazine with a group of fellow Burmese exiles.
Upon the selection of Aung Zaw as the 2013 Shorenstein Journalism Award recipient, jury member Nayan Chanda of Yale University’s Center for the Study on Globalization said:
“In the darkness that descended over Burma in the years following the brutal military crackdown on the democracy movement, former student leader Aung Zaw was one of the few who kept a flickering lamp burning from exile. Nothing was more important than to get news out of the country where fear stalked and jails overflowed with detainees. From his exile perch in Thailand, Aung Zaw published TheIrrawaddy which emerged as an important news magazine not only for a muzzled Burma, but it also covered stories from all over Southeast Asia that were often left out by mainstream media. Aung Zaw's contribution to bringing original news and analysis from Southeast Asia to the world cannot be overestimated.”
The Irrawaddy newsmagazine is published in both English and Burmese and features in-depth analysis and interviews with experts from Myanmar and contributors from around the world. As the first independent publication in Myanmar, The Irrawaddy remains a significant resource for current news on the dynamic political and economic environment. In 2012, Zaw returned to his homeland of Myanmar for the first time in 24 years and established a local office for The Irrawaddy in Yangon. This past year, the Burmese government lifted the ban on major media, allowing for readership and distribution of The Irrawaddy throughout the country.
In addition to managing The Irrawaddy, Zaw is a contributor for the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, Bangkok Post, The Nation, and several other publications based in Europe. He has been featured on interviews on CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. He is the author of Face of Resistance and has written publications distributed through the Irrawaddy Publishing Group, including ten-installments of The Dictators, a series that analyzes the lives and careers of Myanmar’s main military chiefs and their cohorts.
In 2010, Zaw was awarded the prestigious Price Claus Award for Journalism, which honors journalists who reflect progressive approaches to culturally focused journalism in developing countries. Zaw is currently a visiting scholar at Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
On March 6, 2014, Zaw will visit Stanford University to take part in a lunchtime panel discussion on the future of democracy in Myanmar. Zaw will receive the award at a dinner ceremony where he will deliver a talk on his work as a journalist and the role of the media in democratization of Myanmar.
ABOUT THE AWARD
The Shorenstein Journalism Award honors a journalist not only for their distinguished body of work, but also for their promotion of free, vibrant media and for the future of relations between Asia and the United States. The award, which carries a prize of $10,000, is presented to a journalist who consistently creates innovative approaches to unravel the complexities of Asia to readers, among them the use of the Internet and how it can act as a catalyst for change.
The award was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and the press. The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The award honors Shorenstein’s legacy and endows rising journalists with a grant to continue their work.
Originally created to identify journalists based in the U.S. reporting on Asia, the Shorenstein Journalism Award now also recognizes Asian journalists who report on Asian affairs with readers in the U.S. and Asia. Past recipients have included: Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times (2012), Caixin Media of Caixin Weekly/Caijing Magazine (2011), Barbara Crossette of The Nation (2010), Seth Mydans of the New York Times (2009), Ian Buruma (2008), John Pomfret (2007), Melinda Liu of Newsweek and The Daily Beast (2006), Nayan Chanda (2005), Don Oberdofer (2004), Orville Schell(2003), and Stanley Karnow (2002).
For the 2013 award, the distinguished selection jury includes:
Nayan Chanda is the director of publications and the editor of YaleGlobal Online Magazine at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. For nearly thirty years, Chanda was at the Hong Kong-based magazine, Far Eastern Economic Review. He writes the ‘Bound Together’ column in India’s BusinessWorld and is the author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warrior Shaped Globalization. Chanda received the Shorenstein Journalism Award in 2005.
Susan Chira is the assistant managing editor for news and former foreign editor of the New York Times. Chira has extensive experience in Asia, including serving as Japan correspondent for the Times in the 1980s. During her tenure as foreign editor, the Times twice won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (2009 and 2007).
Donald K. Emmerson is a well-respected Indonesia scholar and director of Shorenstein APARC’s Southeast Asia Forum and a research fellow for the National Asia Research Program. Frequently cited in international media, Emmerson also contributes to leading publications, such as Asia Times and International Business Times.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross director at the Asia Society of New York’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and former jury member for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Schell has written extensively on China and was awarded the 1997 George Peabody Award for producing the groundbreaking documentary the Gate of Heavenly Peace. He received the Shorenstein Journalism Award in 2003.
Daniel C. Sneider is the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC and was a research fellow at the National Bureau for Asian Research. Sneider frequently contributes to publications such as Foreign Policy, Asia Policy, and Slate and has three decades of experience as a foreign correspondent and editor for publications including the Christian Science Monitor and the San Jose Mercury News.
ABOUT THE TOPIC: No country was as devastated by the Cold War as Afghanistan, yet the historical understanding of how the global conflict came to Kabul remains tentative, generally limited to studies that begin in the late 1970s. Scholars have generally treated the American role in pre-invasion Afghanistan as minimal, or have seamlessly connected Kabul's half-turn toward Moscow in the mid-1950s with the 1979 invasion. Extensive research, however, demonstrates the profound impact Americans had in mid-century Afghanistan. Based on multinational research, this paper will explore how Americans helped to bring the Cold War to the mountain kingdom in the early 1950s. While the Truman administration considered Afghanistan marginal and strategically indefensible, a fateful combination of local initiative, misperception, and ideology helped to add the kingdom to the roster of Cold War battlegrounds, where it would remain until the conflict's end.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Robert Rakove is a lecturer for the International Relations Program. He studies the modern history of U.S. foreign relations, paying particular attention to the Cold War in the Third World. He received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2008, and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. He is presently at work on a history of the U.S.-Afghan relationship in the decades before the Soviet invasion.
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Robert Rakove
Lecturer, Program in International Relations, Stanford; CISAC Affiliate
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Robert Crews
Associate Professor of History, Stanford; Director, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford
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Frontiers in Food Policy: Perspectives on sub-Saharan Africa is a compilation of research stemming from the Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The series, and this volume, have brought the world's leading policy experts in the fields of food and agricultural development together for a comprehensive dialogue on pro-poor growth and food security policy. Participants and contributing authors have addressed the major themes of hunger and rural poverty, agricultural productivity, resource and climate constraints on agriculture, and food and agriculture policy, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.
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The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) addresses critical challenges to international security through methodologically rigorous, evidence-based analyses of insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence. The project is comprised of leading scholars from across the country from a variety of academic disciplines. ESOC aims to empower high quality of conflict analysis by creating and maintaining a repository of micro-level data across multiple conflict cases and making these data available to a broader community of scholars and policy analysts.
William J. Perry was only 18 when he found himself surrounded by death, a young U.S. Army mapping specialist in Japan during the Army of Occupation. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II had just come to an end.
“The vast ruins that once had been the great city of Tokyo – nothing, nothing had prepared me for such utter devastation that was wrought by massive waves of firebombing rained down by American bomber attacks,” said Perry, who was then shipped off to the island of Okinawa in the aftermath of the last great battle of WWII.
More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in that closing battle of 1945, codenamed Operation Iceberg.
“Not a single building was left standing; the island was a moonscape denuded of trees and vegetation,” Perry told a rapt audience during a recent speech. “The smell of death was still lingering.”
The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs.
“It had taken multiple strikes by thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of high explosive bombs to lay waste to Tokyo,” he recalls. “The same had been done to Hiroshima and then to Nagasaki with just one plane – and just one bomb. Just one bomb.
“The unleashing of this colossal force indelibly shaped my life in ways that I have now come to see more clearly,” said Perry, who would go on to become the 19th secretary of defense. “It was a transforming experience. In many ways – I grew up from it.”
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform. Photo Credit: U.S. Army
Now, nearly seven decades later, the 86-year-old Perry has come full circle. His new winter course will take students back to his fateful days in Japan after the United States became the first – and last – nation to use atomic weapons. He’ll go through the Cold War, the arms race and expanding nuclear arsenals, and today’s potential threats of nuclear terrorism and regional wars provoked by North Korea, Iran or South Asia.
Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today (IPS 249) – to serve as the backdrop for an online course at Stanford next year – concludes with the declaration Perry made in 2007: The world must rid itself entirely of nuclear weapons. And students will get a primer on how to get involved in organizations that are working on just that.
“They did not live through the Cold War, so they were never exposed to the dangers and therefore it doesn’t exist to them; it’s just not in their world,” Perry said of millennial and younger students. “I want to make them aware of what the dangers were and how those dangers have evolved.”
Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, both Democrats, joined former Republican Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger in launching a series of OpEds in The Wall Street Journal (the first in 2007) that went viral. Together they outlined how nations could work together toward a world without nuclear weapons.
“I think I have some responsibility since I helped build those weapons – and I think that time is running out,” Perry said in an interview.
Perry helped shore up the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, procuring nuclear weapons delivery systems for the Carter administration. Later, as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton, his priority became the dismantling of nuclear weapons around the world.
Taubman, a consulting professor at CISAC, will guest lecturer in Perry’s class, along with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway, Martha Crenshaw and Scott Sagan. Other speakers are expected to include Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Andrei Kokoshin, deputy of the Russian State Duma; Ashton B. Carter, who just stepped down as deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Joeseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.
The world is far from banning the bomb. According to the Ploughshares Fund, an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons remain in the global stockpile, the majority of which are in Russia and the United States.
President Barack Obama declared shortly after taking office in his first foreign policy speech in Prague that because the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons, Washington “has a moral responsibility to act.”
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace
and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said back in May 2009.
Perry – a senior fellow at CISAC who received his BS and MS from Stanford and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics – laments the regression of the movement to dismantle the nuclear legacy of the Cold War.
Obama has so far not acted on his pledge in his contentious second term, as China and Russia expand their stockpiles. North Korea and Iran are attempting to build nuclear weapons and India and Pakistan are building more fissile material. The U.S. Senate still has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the U.S. and Russia have not moved forward on a follow-up to the New START Treaty.
Perry recognizes that the issue is slipping from the public conscience, particularly among young people. So he’s putting his name and experience behind a Stanford Online course slated to go live next year. It will correspond with the release of his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” and will take a more documentary approach, weaving together key moments in Perry’s career with lectures, archival footage and interviews and conversations between Perry and his colleagues and counterparts.
"Bill Perry has had a remarkable career and this project draws on his unparalleled experience over a pivotal period in history," said John Mitchell, vice provost for online learning. "We hope his brilliant reflections will be useful to everyone with an interest in the topic, and to teachers and students everywhere."
At the heart of his winter course, online class and memoir are what Perry calls the five great lessons he learned in the nuclear age. The first four are grim remnants of what he witnessed over the years: the destructive nature of the atomic bombs on Japan; his mathematical calculations about the number of deaths from nuclear warfare; his work for the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and one pre-dawn call in 1978 from the North American Aerospace Defense Command saying there were 200 missiles headed toward the United States from the Soviet Union. That turned out to be a false, but terrifying alarm.
His fifth final lesson is hopeful, if not cautionary. It goes like this:
As secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, Perry oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and the United States and helped the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to go entirely non-nuclear. In that mission, he often visited Pervomaysk in the Ukraine, which was once the Soviet Union’s largest ICBM site, with 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States.
On his final trip to Pervomaysk in 1996, he joined the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers to plant sunflowers where those missiles had once stood.
“So reducing the danger of nuclear weapons is not a fantasy; it has been done,” Perry said. “I will not accept that it cannot be done. I shall do everything I can to ensure nuclear weapons will never again be used – because I believe time is not on our side.”
Abstract According to international human rights law, countries have to provide palliative care and pain treatment medications as part of their core obligations under the right to health. The failure to take reasonable steps to ensure that people who suffer pain have access to adequate pain treatment may also result in the violation of the obligation to protect against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The lecture will discuss Human Rights Watch’s research on this issue in India, Ukraine, Senegal, Kenya, and Mexico; our national and international advocacy efforts; and how we evaluate the impact of our work.
Joe Amon, PhD MSPH, is the Director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Since joining Human Rights Watch in 2005, Joe has worked on a wide range of issues including access to medicines; discrimination, arbitrary detention and torture in health settings; censorship and the denial of health information; and the role of civil society in the response to infectious disease outbreaks and environmental health threats. Between January 2009 and June 2013 he oversaw Human Rights Watch's work on disability rights. He is an associate in the department of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University. In 2012 he was a distinguished visiting lecturer at the Paris School of International Affairs of SciencesPo.
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Joe Amon
Director of Health and Human Rights
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Human Rights Watch
Karl Eikenberry is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a faculty member of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and researcher with The Europe Center.
Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty.
Before appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a thirty-five year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General. His military operational posts included commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces from 2005-2007.
He has served in various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China; Senior Country Director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Deputy Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy on the Army Staff.
He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Ambassador Eikenberry earned an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office while studying at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense Chinese Language School in Hong Kong and has an Advanced Degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China.
His military awards include the Defense Distinguished and Superior Service Medals, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Ranger Tab, Combat and Expert Infantryman badges, and master parachutist wings. He has received the Department of State Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards, Director of Central Intelligence Award, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award. He is also the recipient of the George F. Kennan Award for Distinguished Public Service and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal. His foreign and international decorations include the Canadian Meritorious Service Cross, French Legion of Honor, Afghanistan’s Ghazi Amir Amanullah Khan and Akbar Khan Medals, and the NATO Meritorious Service Medal.
Ambassador Eikenberry serves as a Trustee for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Asia Foundation, and the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the Council of American Ambassadors, and was previously the President of the Foreign Area Officers Association. His articles and essays on U.S. and international security issues have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and The Financial Times. He has a commercial pilot’s license and instrument rating, and also enjoys sailing and scuba diving.
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Karl Eikenberry
William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, CDDRL, TEC, and Shorenstein APARC Distinguished Fellow; and Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and Retired U.S. Army Lt. General
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William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.
