An army officer turned social entrepreneur, Vivek Garg will share his transition from combat to economic development work and present three case studies on how he used economic tools to foster peace among hostile communities in conflict affected regions of Kashmir and Northeast India.

Vivek Garg is Founder and CEO of a social venture called BAPAR (Business Alternatives for Peace, Action and Reconstruction), which focuses on impact entrepreneur incubation and early stage investment for the economic reconstruction of conflict affected regions of India. Prior to BAPAR, Garg served as an infantry officer with the Indian Army for over 10 years, wherein he led combat operations in Kashmir and Siachen Glacier. He coordinated operations and deployment of a division size force of 10,000 troops and managed a development aid budget of US$ 2.5M in insurgency infested, tribal regions bordering China and Myanmar. Garg is currently pursuing a degree with the Sloan Master’s Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Stanford Law School.

About the Topic: For most of human history, a pitched battle was deemed a lawful way of settling an international dispute--a kind of trial, with a kind of verdict. Today the idea of settling disputes by deliberately staging battles sounds utterly lawless.  Yet the striking truth is that the battle warfare of the past was in important ways more civilized than the warfare of the present; and it is well worth asking whether we can still learn anything from the old forms of war.  Those forms were founded on a forgotten species of the law of war.  Modern law of war is humanitarian law, dedicated to preserving lives.  But our ancestors' law of war was law of victory, dedicated to answering two legal questions:  How do we know who won? What rights is the victor entitled to claim?  Those questions sound coldblooded today, but they laid the groundwork for a practice of limited warfare. 

About the Speaker: James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and specializes in comparative law, criminal law, and legal history.  He is the author of several prizewinning books, including Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, and The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War.  He has published several notable articles, "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty" which was published in the 2004 volume of The Yale Law Journal.  Professor Whitman received a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. 

Anupma Kulkarni is currently a Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN) and Co-director of the West Africa Transitional Justice (WATJ) Project, a cross-national study on the impact of truth commissions and international criminal tribunals from the perspective of victims of human rights violations in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.  Dr. Kulkarni received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and was Assistant Professor at Arizona State University from 2007-2009.  She has been a MacArthur International Peace and Cooperation Fellow at CISAC and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law.  Her research specializes in transitional justice, the ways in which post-war and post-authoritarian societies address matters of memory and accountability for human rights violations as part of the larger project of effecting democratic change and political and social reconciliation.  Her book manuscript, Demons and Demos: Truth, Accountability and Democracy in Post-Apartheid South Africa, is based on her award-winning fieldwork in South Africa.  She is also co-authoring, with David Backer, The Arc of Transitional Justice: Violent Conflict, Its Victims & Pursuing Redress in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, a book based on primary research conducted under the auspices of the WATJ Project, made possible through generous support from the National Science Foundation.

The world has undergone major drastic changes in the last two decades driven by several major factors, eg, explosion of human population and connectivity. Such changes seem further accelerated in recent years and it seems that our future becomes more uncertain and unpredictable. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident awakened us and led to creation of Independent Investigation Commission by the National Diet of Japan; The Commission Report revealed some of the fundamental issues of Japan’s nuclear policy. Meanwhile, multi-stakeholders’ engagement has become critical in various social affairs and in policy making domains within and across national boundaries, and has contributed in significant ways to affect the processes of addressing and impacting global agenda, such as climate change, food and water, energy, urbanization, biodiversity, human capital with shifting the balance of economy and power. In my view, the principles of our society may be changing quite fast heading somewhat differently from our conventional norm. The science community can and should contribute to these issues in nurturing future leaders, but in what way?

Kiyoshi Kurokawa is a graduate of University of Tokyo School of Medicine, trained in internal medicine and nephrology, in US 1969-84; Professor of Med, Dept Med ofUCLA Sch Med (79-84), Chair, Univ Tokyo Faculty of Med (89-96), Dean of Tokai Univ School of Med (96-02, President of Science Council of Japan (03-07), Science Advisor to Prime Minister (07-09), Board member of A*STAR (06-00), Bibliotheca Alexandria (04-08), Khalifa University (08- ), Okinawa Institute of Science and Tech (06- ), Global Science and Innovation Advisory Board of the Prime Minister of Malaysia (11-); President of Intl Soc Nephrology (97-99), Inst of Medicine of US Academies (92). Recently, chaired Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission by the National Diet of Japan (Dec 11-July 12). AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award (2012), ‘100 Top Global Thinkers 2012” of Foreign Policy.

In recent years, China has had several confrontations with Vietnam, the Philippines and most recently Japan, over maritime sovereignty issues in the South and East China Seas. The popular press and specialists alike often portray these disputes as a clear indication of Beijing's growing willingness to coerce or intimidate its neighbors and disregard international norms and laws in the pursuit of its national objectives. Some observers associate Chinese behavior with a long-term strategic plan to dominate the Asia-Pacific. Dr. Michael D. Swaine, a senior associate in the Asia Program and a China national security specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will offer his interpretation of the interests, motives, and policies driving Chinese behavior in this potentially volatile area, and assess the implications for the United States and other Asian powers.

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Michael Swaine joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate after twelve years at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in Chinese security and foreign policy, U.S.–China relations, and East Asian international relations. One of the most prominent U.S. analysts in Chinese security studies, he is the author of more than ten monographs on security policy in the region. At RAND, he was a senior political scientist in international studies and also research director of the RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy.

Swaine was appointed as the first recipient of the RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy Chair in Northeast Asian Security in recognition of the exceptional contributions he has made in his field.

Prior to joining RAND in 1989, Swaine was a consultant with a private sector firm; a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley; and a research associate at Harvard University. He attended the Taipei and Tokyo Inter-University Centers for Language Study, administered by Stanford University, for training in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.