The Center for the Study of the Novel is pleased to present a discussion of Professor Joseph Slaughter's new book, Human Rights Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law.  Prof. Slaughter (Columbia) will be in conversation with Prof. Saikat Majumdar (Stanford) and Prof. Michael Rubenstein (UC Berkeley) in the Terrace Room of the English Department (Building 460, Room 426) on Friday, November 20th, at 3:30 pm.  A reading selection from this book is available as a pdf by email request and in hard copy on the second floor of the English Department, under the grad mailboxes.

Human Rights Inc is, in Simon Gikandi's words, "one of the most intense and intelligent reflections on the relation between the novel and human rights....a model of how students and scholars of literature can respond to the great humanitarian crisis of our time and transform the culture of human rights itself."

Joseph Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His many publications include articles on the narrative foundations of human rights in Human Rights Quarterly, "Humanitarian Reading" in Humanitarianism and Suffering, torture and Latin American literature in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, ethnopsychiatry, Nigerian literature, and globalization in African Writers and Their Readers, colonial narratives of invoice in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, city space and the national allegory in Research in African Literatures, human rights, multiculturalism, and the contemporary Bildungsroman in Politics and Culture, a short story translation of Argentine Elvira Orphée's "Descomedido" in The Southwest Review, as well as a co-authored article on contemporary epistolary fiction and women's rights in Women, Gender, and Human Rights. His essay, "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law," appeared in a special issue on human rights of PMLA (October 2006) and was honored as one of the two best articles published in the journal in 2006-7; another, "The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality," was named a winner in the Interdisciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at UCLA in 2004. He has co-edited a special issue on "Human Rights and Literary Form" of Comparative Literature Studies.

Dongwook Kim's research interests include the politics of human rights; international law and organizations; transnational activism; policy diffusion; event history and count models

Bethany Lacina is a Hewlett Pre-Doctoral Fellow at CDDRL and a PhD candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science.  She is also affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.  Next fall, she will begin an assistant professorship at the University of Rochester.

Despite its frequent military coups, Thai democracy was practically a textbook case of successful transition during the 1980s and 1990s. A so-called "semi-democracy" during 1980-88 gave way to a fully elected civilian leadership whose corrupt government laid the conditions for a putsch in February 1991. As the coup makers institutionalized their power through the political party and electoral systems, a popular uprising put the military back in the barracks in May 1992. Following an organic five-year constitution-drafting process, the promulgation of the reform-driven 1997 Constitution appeared to cross the threshold between transition and consolidation. But the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party changed all that. The Thaksin regime was paradoxically corrupt and abusive of power on the one hand but delivered the goods from its populist platform through policy innovation on the other. Thaksin triumphed at the polls in 2001 and again, by a landslide, in 2005. In the same year, a Bangkok-based "yellow-shirt" movement campaigned against his graft and abuse, laying the groundwork for Thailand's latest putsch in September 2006. Thai politics has been murky and topsy-turvy since. Thaksin's opponents from the military, palace, Bangkok's middle class, royalist political parties, swathes of civil society, and the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy are now in charge, fronted by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Democrat Party-led coalition government. Yet this anti-Thaksin coalition is unable to put the lid on the pro-Thaksin "red shirts" as the remarkable reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej enters its twilight. Thai democracy and monarchy are increasingly enmeshed. Its road ahead towards a workable constitutional monarchy that is consistent with democratic development will have much to say about the democratization in developing countries. It is a crucial case that could build or sap the momentum of democratization and democracy promotion elsewhere.

Dr. Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) and Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. He has authored a host of articles, books and book chapters on Thailand's politics, political economy, foreign policy, media and ASEAN and East Asian security and economic cooperation. He is frequently quoted and his op-eds have regularly appeared in international and local media. Dr. Thitinan has worked for The BBC World Service, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Independent Economic Analysis (IDEA) and consulting and research projects related to Thailand's macro-economy and politics. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics where he won the United Kingdom's Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics. Dr. Thitinan has lectured at a host of universities in Thailand and abroad, and is currently a visiting scholar with the FSI-Humanities Center and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

About the talk:

Korea's National System of Innovation (NSI) is characterized by a group of 'strong large firms and weak small firms'--innovative large firms able to exploit technological and market opportunities abroad, and laggard small firms. Under the liberalized environment that emerged rapidly after the 1990s financial crisis, coordination and networking of innovative actors and resolution of mismatches in the system of innovation have become urgent issues in Korea's bid to become active in knowledge generation and to effectively utilize technology from abroad.

Lim shall discuss the characteristics of and changes in the Korean NSI, a system which has experienced a radical shift to adapt to the global environment after the 1997 financial crisis. His 3-year research project on the Korean NSI is part of an international research project published as Small Country Innovation Systems (Edward Elgar).

About the speaker:

Chaisung Lim has focused his research on management of technology in catching up with advanced country firms in his capacity as leader of the Research Institute for Global Management of Technology for Catching Up (GMOT). He has participated in committees and project teams providing consultation on industrial and technology policies for the Korean and Turkish Governments. He is currently a Professor at the Miller School of MOT and the MOT/MBA program at Konkuk University, Seoul. He received the PhD in Technology Management at SPRU at the University of Sussex. He previously worked for the industrial analysis division of the Korea Development Institute, a leading think tank in Korea.

This talk provides an overview of deliberative democracy projects conducted by the Center for Deliberative Democracy and its partners in China, Northern Ireland, Brazil, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland and other countries as well as on a European-wide basis. The projects all involve scientific random samples deliberating about policy choices and providing the before and after results as an input to policy making. The talk will focus particularly on the challenges of conducting such projects when they are intended as a precursor to further democratization or when there is ethnic conflict.

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science. He is also Director of Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy and Chair of the Dept of Communication.

He is the author of a number of books including Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (1991), The Dialogue of Justice (1992 ), The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy (1995). With Bruce Ackerman he is co-author of Deliberation Day (Yale Press, 2004). His new book When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation will be published by Oxford University Press in fall 2009.

He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® - a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. Professor Fishkin and his collaborators have conducted Deliberative Polls in the US, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Bulgaria, China, Greece and other countries.

Fishkin has been a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge as well as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Fishkin received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.

The global nuclear order is changing. Concerns about climate change, the volatility of oil prices, and the security of energy supplies have contributed to a widespread and still-growing interest in the future use of nuclear power. Thirty states operate one or more nuclear power plants today, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), some 50 others have requested technical assistance from the agency to explore the possibility of developing their own nuclear energy programs. This surge of interest in nuclear energy - labeled by some proponents as ‘the renaissance in nuclear power' - is occurring simultaneously with mounting concerns about the healthy of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the regulatory framework that constrains and governs the world's civil and military- related nuclear affairs. The question then arises: is it possible to have nuclear power without nuclear proliferation? The answer is not clear, for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are exceedingly complex and interrelated. Dr. Sagan will outline the current state of nuclear power and nuclear proliferation, before examining the weaknesses and promise of existing research on the subject. He argues that a key aspect of ensuring a safe nuclear future will be the strengthening of the NPT through "shared responsibility" for disarmament.

Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000) and the editor of Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2009). His most recent publications include "The Case for No First Use," Survival (June 2009) and "Good Faith and Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations" in George Perkovich and James A. Acton (eds.) Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (Carnegie Endowment, 2009).

Allen S. Weiner is senior lecturer in law and co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law at Stanford Law School. He is also the co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. His expertise is in the field of public international law and the foreign relations law of the United States. He is a seasoned international lawyer with experience in such wide-ranging fields as national security law, the law of war, international dispute resolution, and international criminal law. His current scholarship focuses on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. For more than a decade he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State, serving as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser and as legal counselor at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague. In those capacities, he advised government policy-makers, negotiated international agreements, and represented the United States in litigation before the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal and the International Court of Justice. He teaches courses in public international law, international conflict resolution, and international security matters at Stanford Law School. He received a BA from Harvard College and a JD from Stanford Law School.