India's high rates of economic growth in recent years raise the prospect that her developmental needs can be addressed. Evidence, however, requires a nuanced approach to resolving the development issues. The panelists will address these complexities, including factors behind improvement in economic indicators in the face of some continuing challenges.

Co-sponsored by Consulate General of India and the Stanford Center for South Asia

In addition to his Ministry of Finance work, Thomas Mathews is also a member of the Indian Administrative Service.

K.P. Nayar has nearly 40 years of experience as a journalist, and has served as a visiting scholar at Oxford University, the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

About the Seminar

There are more than 120 million Chinese gamers, and nearly every one of them plays online games. Online games are a primary source of entertainment in China, and Chinese online game operators are the companies that enable the fun. These companies have built expertise in a unique market and have set their sights on global expansion.

Come hear Lisa Cosmas Hanson, Managing Partner of Niko Partners, The Leader in Asian Video Game Market Intelligence^TM, discuss the innovation, excellence and possible points of weakness of the leading Chinese online game operators as they embark upon the quest of taking their talents to the rest of the world.

The seminar will address the following questions:

• Who are the leading Chinese online game operators?
• What was their impetus for growth and innovation?
• In what ways are these companies leading their global competitors?
• In what ways are these companies lagging their global competitors?
• What is the history and potential future for foreign game companies in China's online games market and for Chinese companies overseas?

About the speaker

Lisa Cosmas Hanson is the managing partner and founder of Niko Partners, The Leader in Asian Video Game Market Intelligence^TM. Her responsibility includes client relations, research and analysis, business development, operations and partnerships. Lisa founded Niko Partners in 2000 and has since developed expertise on the Chinese and Southeast Asian online games industries that has benefited Niko's clients, companies that are global leaders in game publishing, game services, hardware and investments.

Lisa has spent 17 years honing her experience in management positions and in the roles of Asian and specifically Chinese market research analyst, Asian and Chinese market entry consultant, Japanese equities analyst, and U.S.-Japan economic policy analyst. She has been a well-regarded speaker on global technology markets for many years.

Lisa has lived and worked in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Tokyo and London, and makes frequent trips to Shanghai and Beijing for Niko Partners. Her past U.S.-based international business roles included extensive travel throughout Asia and Europe. Lisa speaks Japanese and is studying Mandarin. She earned an MA in international economic policy from American University in Washington, D.C., and a BA in political science and international affairs from the University of California, Los Angeles. She believes in peace through intercultural understanding, hence she volunteers her time for AFS Intercultural Programs, a leading global student exchange program organization.

Europe dominated the 19th century. The 20th century saw the rise of the United States. Will the 21st century be "the Chinese Century"? Using a series of Harvard Business School Cases, this lecture will explore production, consumption, and education for China's new middle class, and think about China's future, in the light of its past.

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Chairman of the Harvard China Fund.

A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby's work examines China's business, economic, and political development in an international context. He has written on the evolution of modern Chinese business (state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; relations across the Taiwan Strait; and China's relations with Europe and America. His current projects include case studies of contemporary Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States.

This talk is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS).

Daniel Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  His research focuses on ethnic politics, research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His work investigates, among other topics, the sources of ethnic identification and the political, social and economic outcomes that ethnicity affects-coalition-building, voting, collective action, public goods provision, and economic growth-with special attention to the mechanisms through which it has its impact. His methodological approach is to find creative ways to maximize leverage for making strong descriptive and causal claims, through the use of experiments (in the lab, in the field, and occurring "naturally"), new data sources (including the re-appropriation of data collected for other purposes), and the adoption of techniques from other disciplines such as satellite geography, public health, and behavioral economics.

His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains why and when politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. He has received several awards for his work, including the Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (2006 and 2010), the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (2008), the Michael Wallerstein Award for the best article in Political Economy (2008), the best book award from the African Politics Conference Group (2006), and the Sage Award for the best paper in Comparative Politics presented at the APSA annual meeting (2004). He has been a Harvard Academy Scholar (1995-98), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2001-02), a Carnegie Scholar (2003-05) and, this year, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2010-11). He currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics, PS, and the Annual Review of Political Science. He is the co-founder of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE). He received his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from Harvard University. Before moving to MIT, he taught for twelve years at UCLA.

Stephen Stedman joined CISAC in 1997 as a senior research scholar, and was named a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC and professor of political science (by courtesy) in 2002. He served as the center's acting co-director in 2002-03. Stedman is the former director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and is a director of 'Managing Global Insecurity,' a joint project with Stanford, New York University and the Brookings Institution. 

Stedman's research addresses the future of international organizations and institutions, an area of study inspired by his work at the United Nations. In 2003, he was recruited to serve as the research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The panel was created by then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to analyze global security threats and propose far-reaching reforms to the international system. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to remain at the U.N. as an assistant secretary-general to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to CISAC.

Before coming to Stanford, Stedman was an associate professor of African studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. In 1993, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, where he studied the negotiations for a new constitution. He was an election observer in Angola in 1992 and in South Africa in 1994. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations on issues of peacekeeping in civil war, light weapons proliferation and conflict in Africa, and preventive diplomacy.

Stedman has taught courses on international conflict management, war in the 20th century, and the Rwandan genocide. In 2000, Scott Sagan and he founded the CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. From 1997 to 2003, Stedman and his wife, Corinne Thomas, were the resident fellows in Larkin House, the second largest all-frosh residence. Stedman received his PhD in political science from Stanford in 1988.

In February 2011, Thai and Cambodian troops again clashed on their common border over the status of the ancient Temple of Preah Vihear. Both sides suffered casualties, including deaths.  Since it began in 2008, the dispute has envenomed Thai-Cambodian relations. In Thailand a key factor behind the conflict has been the nationalist claim by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) that the temple belongs to Thailand. PAD’s campaign over the issue must be seen in the context of its successful mobilization of mass opposition to the government in power at that time. Prof. Puangthong R. Pawakapan will explain how the dispute arose, how it was aggravated by political rivalry inside Thailand, and what its future outcome and implications could be.

Puangthong R. Pawakapan is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Topics of her publications include Thai foreign policy and the Cambodia genocide. Her 1995 University of Wollongong PhD dissertation covered Thai-Cambodian relations in the 19th century. She has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, and has worked as a journalist and been active in non-governmental organizations in Thailand.

Jeff McMahan is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He works in normative and applied ethics, political philosophy, and legal theory and is the author of The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life and Killing in War. He has several other books forthcoming from Oxford University Press, including The Values of Lives and The Right Way to Fight a War.

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the 2005.

Betrayed
"In early 2007, George Packer published an article in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the Americans in Iraq, with little or no U.S. protection or security. The article drew national attention to the humanitarian crisis and moral scandal. Betrayed, based on Mr. Packer's interviews in Baghdad, tells the story of three young Iraqis - two men and one woman - motivated to risk everything by America's promise of freedom. Betrayed explores the complex relationships among the Iraqis themselves, and with their American supervisor, struggling to find purpose while a country collapses around them." (coultureproject.org, where Betrayed had it's world premiere in January 2008.)

The play is directed by Rush Rehm, an actor, director, and professor of drama and of classics who publishes in the areas of Greek tragedy and contemporary politics. Along with courses on ancient theater and culture, he teaches courses on contemporary politics, the media, and U.S. imperialism. Rehm also directs and acts professionally, serving as Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater (SST). An activist in the peace and justice movements, Rehm is involved in anti-war and anti-imperialist actions, and in solidarity campaigns with Palestine, Cuba, East Timor, and Central America.

On Thursday, May 19, Packer will be in conversation with Tobias Wolff (English, Stanford) and Debra Satz (Philosophy, Stanford).

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website

Aila M. Matanock is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford.  Her current research is on bringing militant groups into elections in conflicted states and, more broadly, on effective governance for minimizing conflict.  She is currently compiling an observational dataset on militant groups worldwide, while also conducting survey experiments, primarily in Colombia.  Before coming to Stanford, she was employed by the RAND Corporation to conduct research on terrorism and proliferation.  She received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, and also worked with the Belfer Center's Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory during that time.

Matthias Englert is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and a PhD student at the department of physics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His research during his stay at CISAC focuses primarily on the technology of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, the implications of their use for the nonproliferation regime, and on technical and political measures to manage proliferation risks.

Englert has participated in projects investigating technical aspects of the concept of proliferation resistance with topics including the conversion of research reactors, uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges, reducing plutonium stockpiles with reactor-based options,  spallation neutron sources and fusion power plants. Additional research topics have included fissile material stockpiles, fuel-cycles and accelerator driven systems.

Although a substantial part of his professional work recently has been technical he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies. Research interests include the dispute about Article IV of the NPT, the future development of the NPT regime, possibilities for a nuclear weapons-free world, preventive arms control, and the history and development of proliferation relevant programs. By studying contemporary theory in philosophy through the interaction of science, technology and society, Englert has acquired analytical tools to reflect on approaches describing or addressing the problem of ambivalent technology.

Englert is a vice speaker of the working group Physics and Disarmament of the German Physical Society (DPG) and a board member of the  German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and Security (FONAS).