Today is the last day of the Year of the Tiger in Vietnam. Tomorrow is the Year of the Cat (while in China it is Year of the Rabbit).

There was so much talk about Vietnam being an Asian Tiger in the past. Now, there is a growing concern about the country getting into the "middle-income trap." There is a real risk that the country might turn out to be just a cat and not a tiger.

The Party is aware of that threat and is struggling to find the right path to accelerated prosperity for the people while maintaining political monopoly.

This talk will be from the perspective of a man on the ground and will try to separate the smoke from the fire and find the heat.

Mr. Kien Duk Trung Pham is currently the Chairman of Red Bricks Group, a private investment firm. He is the founder of the Vietnam Foundation and the Vice Chairman of the VietNamNet Media Group, the leading multi-channel media company in Vietnam. Prior to VietNamNet he was the founding executive director of the Vietnam Education Foundation.

In business, Mr. Pham was a market development executive in Fortune 500 companies as well as an entrepreneur in technology and consulting startups. In government, he served in the executive branch under Presidents Reagan and Bush, as well as in the U.S. Senate. He has established nonprofit foundations to assist college students, orphans, and the handicapped in Vietnam. Mr. Pham is publicly recognized for his leadership and management abilities.

Mr. Pham is active in international affairs. In 1986, he was chosen a Young Leader by the American Council on Germany, and in 1992 a U.S.-Japan Leadership Fellow by the Japan Society. In 1993, he was elected as a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a participant in the American Assembly. Mr. Pham was the founder and chairman of the Vietnam Forum Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit organization that provides college scholarships, schools, and orphanage support in Vietnam. He was also a Board member of the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped, a leading humanitarian program to help war victims. In 1996, Mr. Pham was a recipient of the "Never Fear, Never Quit" Award.

Mr. Pham grew up in Saigon, Vietnam. In 1977, at the age of 19, he led his family on a high sea escape and came to the United States where they settled in Colorado. Mr. Pham became a factory worker, learned English, and later attended college on scholarship. He received a BS in marketing and international business from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and won a scholarship to study in England. His graduate degrees, earned concurrently at Stanford University, include an MBA in international and organizational management, an MA in international economics, and a special diploma in public policy management. In 1990, Stanford University named Mr. Pham among of the "Most Outstanding Alumni" in the school's 100 years of history. Mr. Pham is former White House Fellow and a recipient an honorary JD degree from Pfeiffer University.

FSE Fellow David Lobell presented his work on climate impacts on crop production at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara, CA.

Roz Naylor will present a seminar on "China's Seafood Marketplace--Our Common Future (Aquaculture and Feed Use in China" as part of the 2011 Seafood Summit: Responsibility without Borders?.

As a sociologist who works on the conjunction and conflicts between political, economic and cultural-cognitive networks, Eiko Ikegami has been conducting research on long-term social processes that underlie and perpetuate modern Japanese social
relations with a number of different topics. It is from this long-term view point, that Ikegami offers a distinctive angle to articulate the grave difficulties that contemporary Japanese capitalism is facing. She expresses the social significance of the current radical transformation of Japanese capitalism as a historic turning point in redirecting institutions of Japanese trust and justification. For example, she investigates developments in popular consciousness of egalitarian views that clung to the myth that "we all are in the middle strata" and of distinctive gender roles closely linked to the particular style of Japanese capitalism. Ikegami considers these institutional transformations not only as a postwar product, but in a critical way as the result of path dependent developments of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization for more than a century. Using keywords such as uncertainty, networks, trust, and justification, her talk will present a bold synthesis that outlines the long-term process of institutionalization that produces mutually connected socio-cultural-cognitive systems in which the distinctive Japanese style of capitalism has been embedded.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Ikegami was a journalist for the Japan Economic Journal (Nikkei or Nihonkeizai Shinbun) before she moved to the US. Ikegami is currently Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research in New York. Ikegami's book, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1995), has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and is widely considered the definitive statement on the subject. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), won five book awards in various fields including the Distinguished Contribution Book award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the John Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, which cited the work as "the most important book on Japan to have appeared in recent years." In 2003, Ikegami was elected Chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the ASA.

Her core research interest has been related to the question: How did a non-Western society such as Japan achieve its own version of modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries? More recently, Ikegami has been working on three distinct areas of research: a project on trust and uncertainty in Japanese capitalism; the completion of a book project on the Gion Festival, Community, Gender, and Shrine in Kyoto; and, funded by the National Science Foundation, Ikegami currently leads a team of one dozen graduate students in conducting ethnographic research of online communities using 3-D virtual worlds in Japan and in the U.S. Ikegami’s theoretical interests uniquely combine culture and network concepts with the literature of civil society, which has prompted an initiative in the form of a series of workshops in Paris (Sciences Po) and New York, to study the trajectories of civil societies in non-western settings.

Professor Chong Wook Chung will discuss Sino-Korean relations based on his experience working for the Korean government in Seoul and in Beijing. He will also interpret current developments in the trianglular relationship between Pyongyang, Seoul, and Beijing.

Professor Chung, a former ambassador to the People's Republic of China, is a distinguished professor at Dong-A University in Korea, and is currently teaching a course on Korea and East Asia in the Department of Government at Harvard University as the inaugural Kim Koo Visiting Professor. He has taught at many universities including American University, Claremont McKenna College, George Washington University, and Seoul National University. His book-length English publications include the book Maoism and Development (Seoul National University Press, 1980), and the co-edited volume Korea's Options in a Changing World (UC Berkeley Press, 1992).

Professor Chung holds a B.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. He was awarded the Yale Alumni Award in 2007.

This seminar is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.

The catastrophe unfolding in the Ivory Coast is due to the fact that the committed backers of both candidates are unwilling to accept anything other than complete vindication and victory by their man.  A substantial portion of the ordinary population would just like a resolution of the issue and peace, but because this is all tied to questions of land ownership, government support to different regions, and competing elite claims tied into increasingly strong ethnic and regional identities, a substantial portion also feel that it would be a disaster if their man were not president.  It is pretty obvious that Mr. Ouattara won, and that Mr. Gbagbo has been devious, even dishonest, for a long time. But simply giving the presidency to Mr. Ouattara would hardly solve the country's problem.  There has to be power sharing with various regions getting a cut of government programs, and a good bit of local autonomy if any kind of peace is to be achieved. 

Even if Gbagbo goes, some of those around him have to have a share of power.  The same is true for those who back Ouattara.  I think that personally Ouattara is a better man, but many of those around him are no better than those around Gbagbo.  There are local warlords in various parts of the north, for example, who are just as frightening as the "young patriots" who do the killing for Gbagbo in Abidjan.  To understand the difficulties facing this country requires some background to explain what happened when civil war broke out in 2002, and a discussion of why just making either Mr. Gbagbo or Mr. Ouattara president is not an ideal solution. 

An electoral victory by Mr. Ouattara was bound to produce a backlash by those who will not accept a northern Muslim president and who are afraid to lose everything if Mr.  Gbagbo goes.  Standing on legalisms and claiming that either side is cl!  early right gets us nowhere.  None of the contending political forces in this country have clean hands, including Mr. Bedie, the former president who threw his support to Mr. Ouattara in the second round of the election after coming in third in the first round. 

In some ways, even though it takes very specific local knowledge to understand what is happening, the tragedy in this country resembles the situation in quite a few other African cases as well.  Decades of poor governance and corruption have exacerbated ethnic and religious tensions, and too few of the leading politicians are willing to act for the greater good rather than for their own and their supporters' narrow interests.

Daniel Chirot, Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, has authored books about social change, ethnic conflict, Eastern Europe, and tyranny.  His most recent works are the co-authored Why Not Kill Them All?  about political mass murder (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 2010), and a short text on ethnic conflicts, Contentious Identities (Routledge, 2011).   He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism's decline, on entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, on ethnopolitical warfare, and on the economic history of Eastern Europe.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help in his research and writing from the US State Department, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.  He has done some work for, among others, the US Government, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Ford Foundation.  In 2003, 2004, and 2006 he did some consulting for CARE in Cote d'Ivoire.  He has also worked in Niger and elsewhere in West Africa.  In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on the study of African conflicts.  He has a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Sociology from Columbia.

Co-sponsored by The Center on African Studies

In this event, Dr. Jaeun Shin will discuss the historical and policy background of expanded private health insurance in South Korea. Looking at the public-private mix of health care financing and its impacts, Shin conducted a comparative study of thirty member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) during the period 1980 to 2007 to ask whether private health insurance can counterbalance limited government financing, high out-of-pocket payments, and the persistent financial deficit of South Korea’s National Health Insurance system.

The panel analyses of OECD Health Data from 2009 suggest that private health insurance financing is unlikely to reduce government spending on health care and social security. Also, Shin found little evidence that out-of-pocket payments will be replaced by private health insurance payments. Private health insurance payments, however, are found to have a statistically significant positive association with total spending on health care, which indicates that the coverage effect of private health insurance—in addition to national health insurance—may exceed the efficiency gain through the market competition that private insurers may deliver to the health care sector. These findings leave it unclear whether private initiatives in health care financing will be as effective as the policy advocates hope for, in dealing with the challenges of national health insurance in South Korea. Shin suggests that further studies of how public and private insurers, and providers and consumers interplay in response to  a given structure of private-public mix in financing are warranted to decide the right balance between private coverage and publicly provided universal coverage.

The session will focus on the social, political and economic changes that have been taking place in Turkey, and its implications for the U.S.-Turkey relations. Panelist will discuss Turkey’s EU process, shift in current Turkish foreign policy, the recent flotilla incident, and increasing trade and investment relations with neighboring countries.

Soli Ozel is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Istanbul Kadir Has University. He received his M.A. from School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Ozel taught at University of California- Santa Cruz, Johns Hopkins University, University of Washington, Hebrew University, and Bogazici University (Istanbul). Ozel's articles and op-eds appear in a wide variety of leading newspapers in Turkey and elsewhere around the world. Currently, he is a columnist for the Turkish Haberturk newspaper and a frequent contributor to The Washington Post. Most recently, he co-authored the report “Rebuilding a Partnership: Turkish-American Relations for a New Era.”
 
Abdullah Akyuz received his M.A. in Economics from the University of California-Davis and graduated from Wharton School's Advanced Management Program. He served as an economist on the Capital Markets Board (the Turkish equivalent of the SEC), Director and later Executive Vice-Chairman at the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE), Board Member of the ISE-Settlement and Custody Bank, Inc., and a member of the Turkish Treasury’s Domestic Borrowing Advisory Board. In 1999, Mr. Akyuz joined Turkish Industry and Business Association (TUSIAD) as President of  TUSIAD's Washington Representative Office.

RSVP: http://www.stanford.edu/group/mediterranean/feb_rsvp.fb

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum. Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and Turkish Student Association at Stanford.

Asian Biotech:  Ethics and Communities of Fate is the title of a new book that Prof. Ong has co-edited with Nancy N. Chen.  It offers the first overview of Asia’s emerging initiatives in the biosciences.  Its case studies include blood collection in Singapore and China; stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan; genetically modified foods in China; and clinical trials in India.  Such projects vary by country, as do the policies that are associated with them.  Discernible nevertheless is a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in Asian biotechnology.  Prof. Ong will also explore how political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences in Asia.  Copies of Asian Biotech will be available for signing and purchase at the talk.

Aihwa Ong studies how the interactions of capitalism, technology, politics, and ethics crystallize global situations, frame spaces of problematization, and generate situated solutions.  With these matters in mind, she has done field research in Southeast Asia, Southern China, and California.  A forthcoming volume is Worlding Cities:  Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.  Prior publications include Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (2nd ed., 2010); Privatizing China:  Socialism from Afar (co-edited, 2008); Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (co-edited, 2005); Flexible Citizenship:  The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999); Neoliberalism as Exception:  Mutations in Citizenshipand Sovereignty (2006); and Buddha is Hiding:  Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (2003).  Prof. Ong has received many awards and has lectured at universities around the world.  She chairs of the US National Committee for the Pacific Science Association.  Her 1982 PhD is from Columbia University.

The European Union is a construction “sui generis” and still a work in progress. To preserve Europe's reputation, the European Union needs a clear political narrative to replace the old slogans of “no more war” and “a single market and a single currency." This seminar will examine the European Union - the world’s biggest political experiment - including what role European leaders will play in policy issues like combatting climate change, fighting Third World poverty and managing the economic crisis.

Europe’s position as the world’s largest trade bloc, with nearly 40% of all international commerce, and the growing importance (Eurozone crisis notwithstanding) of the Euro in the world means the EU can set the agenda for negotiating a new global rulebook, provided its member-governments pull in the same direction.

Since 2005 Dr. Fischler has served as Executive Director of Franz Fischler Consult GmbH, where he is director of the eco-social forum and the Global Marshall Plan Initiative. He is also chairman of the RISE-Foundation, Brussels. Until 2010 he was a consultant for the Croatian government during EU membership negotiations, and he has served as a consultant for several other governments, and the OECD.