China’s contemporary legal reform is characterized by the coexistence of two ideologies, professionalism and populism, in legal discourses and law practice. The conflicts between the two ideologies are best characterized in the trial of Li Zhuang during the anti-crime campaign in Chongqing in 2009-2011. In this case, the fate of an individual criminal defense lawyer was linked with the broadest legal policies and the highest-level political struggles in the Chinese state. By a scholarly analysis of the Li Zhuang case, this study demonstrates that, although populism remains an intimidating force in China’s legal practice, professionalism has gained the support from a wider range of legal professionals, state officials, and the public through the media and professional mobilization.

This is a SCP-CEAS co-sponsored event. 

Abstract:

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Abstract:

Lucan Way will present the initial findings of his new book project (co-authored with Steven Levitsky, Harvard University), "Revolutionary Struggle and Authoritarian Durability after the Cold War." The project examines why some authoritarian leaders are capable of surviving severe economic crises, large-scale protest, or serious electoral challenges while others are not. We focus on how legacies of violent revolutionary struggle have shaped the capacity of regimes across the globe to deal with crises at the end of the Cold War, when autocrats faced their most serious challenges. Most interpretations of durability focus on the flow of benefits or patronage to top regime officials. By contrast, we will argue that patronage alone is not a very effective source of elite cohesion. Institutionalized patronage may ensure elite cooperation during normal times, but it often fails to do so during crises. The most cohesive regimes, we contend, complement patronage with nonmaterial ties. In particular, we argue that the identities, and social and organizational ties forged during periods of sustained, violent, and ideologically-driven conflict serve as a critical source of cohesion---and durability---in authoritarian regimes

About the speaker:

Lucan Way is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on democratic transitions and the evolution of non-democratic rule in cross-regional perspective. He is best known for his work on hybrid or competitive authoritarian rule. His book, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War" (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. He has also published in articles in Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative and International Development, World Politics, as well as a number of area studies journals and book chapters. Most recent articles include "Deer in Headlights: Incompetence and Weak Authoritarianism" in Slavic Review and "Beyond Patronage: Violent Struggle, Ruling Party Cohesion and Authoritarian Durability" (with Steven Levitsky) in Perspectives on Politics. He is completing a book: Pluralism by Default and the Sources of Political Competition in the Former Soviet Union and is beginning a new project exploring the impact of violent revolutionary origins on authoritarian durability after the Cold War. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and is in residence at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law for the fall of 2012.

Please note venue changed to Oksenberg Conference Room

Coverage of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) all too often focuses solely on nuclear proliferation, military parades, and the personality cult around its leaders. As the British ambassador to North Korea, John Everard had the rare experience of living there from 2006, when the DPRK conducted its first nuclear test, to 2008, just before Kim Jong Il’s stroke. While stationed in Pyongyang, Everard’s travels around the DPRK provided him with numerous opportunities to meet and converse with North Koreans.

Only Beautiful, Please, Everard's new book, goes beyond official North Korea to unveil the human dimension of life in that hermetic nation. In it, Everard recounts his impressions of the country and its people, his interactions with them, and his observations on their way of life. He provides a picture as well of the life of foreigners in this closed society, considers how the DPRK evolved to its current state, and discusses the failure of current approaches to tackle the challenges that it throws up. The book is illustrated with striking and never-before-seen photographs taken by Everard during his stay in North Korea.

About the Speaker

During his twenty-seven year career as a British diplomat, John Everard worked in a variety of countries and was appointed ambassador twice (to Belarus and to Uruguay) before undertaking his final assignment as British ambassador to North Korea. Everard is now a consultant for the UN and resides with his wife in New York City.

Why are transfers from younger to older generations generous in some societies and not in others? For example, people in northeast Japan tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents and invest more in their children's education than those in the southwest. Communities in the northeast tend to be small and isolated compared to those in the southwest. This paper argues that differences in intergenerational dependence are due to demographic variation in community networks. This analysis of sustainability of intergenerational transfers posits a game theoretical model of overlapping generations in which breadwinners make transfers to their parents and children. A novel feature of the model is that there is a local community that may supply information about its members' past behaviors. I demonstrate that an efficient level of intergenerational transfers can be sustained if neighbors "gossip" about each other. As an implication, my theory suggests that individuals in a close-knit community prefer lower levels of social protection. Empirical results from Japan support this argument: Individuals who interact with their neighbors tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents, spend more on their children’s education, and demand less from the government than those who do not interact with their neighbors.      

Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.

The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:

• Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
  As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?

• How are higher education systems globalizing?
  What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?

• How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
  What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?

• What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
  What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion 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 the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is 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.

Thomas Hegghammer is the Zukerman fellow at CISAC for 2012-2013 and senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in Oslo. He has previously held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Harvard, Princeton and New York Universities. Thomas studies militant Islamism with a particular focus on transnational jihadi groups. His book Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge 2010) won the silver medal of the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council of Foreign Relations. He also co-authored Al-Qaida in its own Words (Harvard 2008) and The Meccan Rebellion (Amal Press 2011). His other publications include academic articles for International Security and theJournal of Peace Research, op-eds for the New York Times and the Guardian, and reports for the International Crisis Group and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He has commented widely in international media and has testified in parliamentary hearings on terrorism legislation in Canada and Denmark.  

Thomas currently works on two main research projects, one on the Islamist foreign fighter phenomenon and the other on socio-cultural practices (rituals, music, etc) in terrorist groups. He is in the process of completing two books: a monograph about the jihadi ideologue Abdallah Azzam and an edited volume about “jihad culture”, both for Cambridge University Press. While at CISAC, he will begin work on a new comparative study of socio-cultural practices in terrorist groups of different ideological persuasions.

This research aims to better understand the impact of the Matlab health interventions by using panel data to control for unobservables and understand the dynamics and long-term effects of these programs. Heterogeneity in the fertility response to the family planning program is analyzed, using sequential fertility to isolate the family planning program from other interventions and examine heterogeneity based on time-varying characteristics. The link between childhood measles vaccination and school enrollment is examined using instrumental variables, and is motivated by the hypothesis that by avoiding the long-term health effects of a disease, vaccinated children are higher-achieving. Both analyses generate interesting findings that are not captured using the traditional methodologies and outcomes of program evaluation.

Julia Driessen, PhD, is an assistant professor of health policy and management in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics. In 2011 Dr. Driessen received her PhD in Economics from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include program evaluation and the links between health interventions and socioeconomic status, with an emphasis on heterogeneity of program effects as well as long-term outcomes. Recent research has analyzed the schooling effects of childhood measles vaccination and variation in the fertility response to a family planning program in Bangladesh. Her primary new interest since arriving at Pitt is the clinical and financial effects of electronic medical records in developing countries.

The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL, the Center for African Studies and its Africa Table Lecture Series and Student Anti-Genocide Coalition STAND are honored to host Abbé Benoît Kinalegu and Ida Sawyer for this special seminar.

Congolese activist Abbé Benoît Kinalegu works to document and expose abuses by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and rehabilitate its victims.

The LRA is a rebel armed group that has terrorized civilians for years, first in Uganda and now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. It is known for extreme brutality, and stands accused of killings, rapes, cutting off people’s lips and limbs, and looting. But it’s perhaps most notorious for abductions of adults and children to serve as soldiers, laborers, or sex slaves. Since 2008, the LRA has killed more than 2,600 civilians and abducted more than 4,000 others.

As head of the Catholic Church’s Peace and Justice Commission in northern Congo’s Haut-Uele District, Kinalegu helped create an Early Warning Network in which local activists report LRA attacks and movements by high-frequency radio. These offer advance warning to UN workers, humanitarians, and local communities in the LRA’s path. Kinalegu is also setting up a rehabilitation center to help some of the most traumatized children who escaped from the LRA and who now need to find their families and try to restore a normal life.

Kinalegu was one of the main advocates for the adoption in 2010 of the Obama administration’s LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, and he has become a powerful voice urging the international community to bring LRA commanders to justice.

Human Rights Watch has worked with Kinalegu on numerous joint research and advocacy projects, and his organization is a steering committee member of the Congo Advocacy Coalition, which Human Rights Watch coordinates. In October 2011, Kinalegu’s organization and Human Rights Watch co-led a workshop in Dungu, northern Congo, with more than 30 civil society activists from across the LRA-affected regions of central Africa. Participants shared experiences and developed a common position on mobilizing regional and international pressure to end LRA depredations.

Human Rights Watch honors Abbé Benoît Kinalegu for his commitment to protecting civilians and ending the threat posed by the LRA.

Ida Sawyer is Congo researcher and advocate in the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch in Kinshasa, Congo's capital, where she has been based since October 2011. Hired as Goma-based Congo researcher in January 2008, Ida has conducted research across Congo and in areas of northern Congo and neighboring countries affected by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). She is one of the main researchers and authors of six Human Rights Watch reports and dozens of press releases and public letters. Ida also conducts outreach with local civil society groups. Ida came to Human Rights Watch from Cairo, where she worked as a freelance journalist. Her previous Great Lakes experience includes work for Care International and the Charity for Peace Foundation in Northern Uganda, as well as research in Congo on the cross-border dynamics of natural resource exploitation. She holds a master's in International Affairs, specializing in Human Rights, from Columbia University.