Steve Radelet is Senior Advisor for Development in the Office of the Secretary of State. From 2002 to 2010 he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where his work focused on economic growth, poverty reduction, foreign aid, debt, and trade. He served as an economic advisor to the Government of Liberia from 2005-2009, and was founding co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia from 2000 to 2002. From 1990 to 2000, he was on the faculty of Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and a lecturer on economics and public policy.  He is the author of Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way and Challenging Foreign Aid: A Policymaker's Guide to the Millennium Challenge Account, and co-author of Economics of Development, a leading undergraduate textbook. He served as resident advisor to the Ministry of Finance in Indonesia (1991-95) and The Gambia (1986-88), and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Western Samoa.

Brian Levy currently is Head of the Bank's Governance and Anti-Corruption Secretariat in the World Bank - from where co-ordinates implementation of the Bank Group's GAC strategy. He is the author of Governance Reform: Bridging Monitoring and Action (World Bank, 2007), which builds on his 2006 work on governance monitoring featured in the 2006 Global Monitoring Report, Mutual Accountability: Aid, Trade and Governance . He worked in the World Bank's Africa Vice Presidency from 1991 to 2003 on the challenges of strengthening the institutional underpinnings of African development, for the last four years as sector manager of the Africa Public Sector Reform and Capacity Building Unit. He was a member of the core team which produced the World Bank's 1997 World Development Report, The State in a Changing World.  He has published numerous books and articles on the interactions between public institutions, the private sector and development in Africa, East Asia, and elsewhere, most recently editing (jointly with Sahr Kpundeh) the volume, Building State Capacity in Africa (World Bank Institute, 2004) Prior to joining the Bank he was assistant professor in development economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He completed his Ph.D in economics at Harvard University in 1983.

The European Union’s efforts to export its model of regional integration have often been contrasted with the persistently top-down character of the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations.  Few, however, have examined the actual pattern of interest representation inside ASEAN and the extent to which it has been influenced by EU norms. 

The findings are surprising:  Neither has the EU actively promoted its essentially liberal-pluralist brand of interest representation in Southeast Asia, nor have ASEAN elites been inclined to adopt it, notwithstanding domestic pressures to make the Association more “people-centered.”  ASEAN elites have instead equipped the organization with a top-down, state-centered political culture with corporatist and organicist features reminiscent of Europe before World War II.

Jürgen Rüland is a professor of political science at the University of Freiburg, whose Southeast Asia Program he chairs with support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.  He also heads the Advisory Council of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (Hamburg).  Together with Christl Kessler, he was awarded the William Holland Prize for the best article published in Pacific Affairs in 2006.  His research interests include Southeast Asian regionalism, interactions between different regions, and processes of cultural appropriation.  He will be at Stanford from September through December 2010

Richard Goldstone served on South Africa's Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court from 1990 to 1994. During the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy, Goldstone headed the Goldstone Commission investigations into political violence in South Africa. He was credited with playing an indispensable role in the transition and became a household name in South Africa, attracting widespread international support and interest. Goldstone's work investigating violence led to him being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. On his return to South Africa he took up a seat on the newly-established Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2009, Goldstone led an independent fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the Gaza War.

James Campbell's research focuses on African American history and the wider history of the black Atlantic. He is particularly interested in the long history of interconnections and exchange between Africa and America, a history that began in the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade and continues into our own time.  In recent years, his research has moved in the direction of so-called “public history," the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts, not only in textbooks and academic monographs but also in historic sites, museums, memorials, movies, and political movements.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics. His scholarship focuses on the interplay of law, ethics, and politics in modern society. His current research is concerned with the material and moral preconditions of liberal democracy in America and abroad.

This lecture will describe North Korea as seen from the inside - its people, their aspirations and fears, and what it is like to live amongst them.

With frequent appearances on BBC discussing North Korea, Mr. Everard, former British Ambassador to North Korea, 2006-2008, brings extensive knowledge of North Korea, China and South America to APARC.  He served as British Ambassador to Uruguay in 2001-2005, and was head of the Political Section in Beijing 2000-2001.  He was responsible for political relations with the troubled states of West Africa and managed mutinational efforts to restore democracy to Bosnia, 1995-1998.  He became the youngest British Ambassador to Belarus in 1993.

During his fellowship at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Mr. Everard will hold seminars related to his research project on North Korean life and society and will be involved in various projects on Korea.  He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Asia Research Centre of London School of Economics.

Mr. Everard studied French, German and Chinese at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and studied Chinese history and economics at Bejing University. He holds an MA from Manchester Business School.

Did Jordan's general elections, called forth after parliament's dissolution a year earlier, introduce new hope for democratic reform in an increasingly autocratic kingdom?  The panel of speakers at this research seminar will address the aftermath of the parliamentary contest of November 2010, assessing broad trends in this critical state following the November elections.

The Muslims of South Asia made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than the region’s Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were relatively less likely to use large-scale and long-living economic organizations, and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this paper also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families, and they were ill-suited to profit-seeking business. Whereas Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint family enterprises, Muslims tended to use ephemeral Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions. He has just completed a book, The Long Divergence (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2010), on the role that Islam played in the economic rise of the Middle East and, subsequently, in the institutional stagnation that accompanied the region's slip into a state of underdevelopment. Some of the archival work on which this book was based will be published, also in 2010, as a ten-volume bi-lingual set entitled Kadı Sicilleri. Among Kuran's earlier publications are Private Truths,(Harvard University Press, Işığında 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Ekonomik Yaşam / Economic Life in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul, as Reflected in Court Registers Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification 1995) and Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press, 2004), each translated into several languages, including Turkish.

Link to paper:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1656038

The new Philippine president, Benigno Aquino III, has inherited a Supreme Court packed with his predecessor's appointees.  The highly politicized appointment process has weakened the independence of the judiciary and shows the impact of bad governance and the power of vested interests.  Marites Dañguilan Vitug will address these issues and their larger implications as President Aquino vows to fight corruption and prosecute former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for her alleged ill-gotten wealth.  Copies of Shadow of Doubt will be available for signing and sale by the author following her talk.

Marites Dañguilan Vitug is a prize-winning author and journalist.  Her latest title is Shadow of Doubt: Probing the Supreme Court (2010).  Other works include Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao (with Glenda Gloria, 2000) and Jalan-Jalan: A Journey through EAGA (with Criselda Yabes, 1998).  Asiaweek named Jalan-Jalan one of the best books on Asia published that year.  Ms Vitug won the Philippine National Book Award in journalism for her first book, Power from the Forest: The Politics of Logging (1993).  In addition to publishing widely on Philippine issues, she chairs the advisory board of Newsbreak.

Born in New York in 1977, Nir Rosen has been reporting from Iraq since April of 2003 and has spent most of the last seven and a half years in Iraq. He recently returned from a trip to seven provinces in the country. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Mexico, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Turkey and Egypt. He has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and most major American publications. He has filmed documentaries. He is a Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. His new book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World, is about occupation, resistance, sectarianism and civil war from Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan.

Philip Keefer is a Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Since receiving his PhD in Economics from Washington University at St. Louis, he has worked continuously on the interaction of institutions, political economy and economic development. His research has included investigations of the impact of insecure property rights on economic growth; the effect of political credibility on the policy choices of governments; and the sources of political credibility in democracies and autocracies. It has appeared in journals that span economics and political science, ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the American Review of Political Science, and has been influenced by his work in a wide range of countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, México, Perú, Pakistan and the Philippines.