Stanford University

Malaysia at the Crossroads: Race-based Politics, the Emergence of a Multiracial Alternative and the Road Ahead

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Although its people are mainly Muslim, Malaysia is notably diverse.  Many communities of faith live together in relative harmony.  Yet ethnic tensions and decades of authoritarian rule have undermined national unity and a sense of shared purpose.  Since the watershed election of 2008, a revived political opposition and an active civil society have increasingly challenged the divisive politics of race and religion in Malaysia.  But severe obstacles still thwart full democratization and genuine pluralism. 

In his talk, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad will analyze the complexities of Malaysia’s race-based political system, the prospects of the country’s multiracial opposition, and what these dynamics imply for the future of democracy in Malaysia.

Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad was elected to the Selangor State Assembly in Malaysia in March 2008 as a candidate of the opposition People’s Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Rakyat).  His roles in Keadilan include membership in the party’s National Youth Executive Committee.  In 2006-08 he served as private secretary to Keadilan’s de facto leader at the time, Anwar Ibrahim. 

Nik Nazmi is a columnist at the Malaysian Insider and the founder of SuaraAnum.com, a web magazine for young Malaysians.  He has been widely published in, and interviewed by, Malaysian and international media.  He read law and earned his LLB (Honors) from King's College, University of London.  While in London he joined British Muslims in protesting the occupation of Palestine and the war in Iraq.  His undergraduate work was done at the UEM Foundation College in Selangor, where he was elected president of the Student Council.  His secondary education was at the Malay College of Kuala Kangsar, which has been called “the Eton of the East.”  During his student career, he was active in multiple extra-curricular settings, including Muslim and social-service organizations and English-language debating teams.  He was born in Malaysia in 1982.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad Selangor State Assemblyman and Political Secretary to the Chief Minister of Selangor, Malaysia Speaker
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Introduction to San Francisco City Hall

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Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Boyoung Shin Speaker
Wataru Ishii Speaker
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Asian Immigration to the United States

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Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Gary Mukai

616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall, C331
Stanford, CA 94305-6060

(650) 723-1116 (650) 723-6784
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Dr. Gary Mukai is Director of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). Prior to joining SPICE in 1988, he was a teacher in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, and in California public schools for ten years.

Gary’s academic interests include curriculum and instruction, educational equity, and teacher professional development. He received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from U.C. Berkeley; a multiple subjects teaching credential from the Black, Asian, Chicano Urban Program, U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education; a master of arts in international comparative education from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education; and a doctorate of education from the Leadership in Educational Equity Program, U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. 

In addition to curricular publications for SPICE, Gary has also written for other publishers, including Newsweek, Calliope Magazine, Media & Methods: Education Products, Technologies & Programs for Schools and Universities, Social Studies Review, Asia Alive, Education About Asia, ACCESS Journal: Information on Global, International, and Foreign Language Education, San Jose Mercury News, and ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies; and organizations, including NBC New York, the Silk Road Project at Harvard University, the Japanese American National Memorial to Patriotism in Washington, DC, the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco, the Laurasian Institution in Seattle, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and the Asia Society in New York.

He has developed teacher guides for films such as The Road to Beijing (a film on the Beijing Olympics narrated by Yo-Yo Ma and co-produced by SPICE and the Silk Road Project), Nuclear Tipping Point (a film developed by the Nuclear Security Project featuring former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell), Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo (an Academy Award-winning film about Japanese-American internment by Steven Okazaki), Doubles: Japan and America’s Intercultural Children (a film by Regge Life), A State of Mind (a film on North Korea by Daniel Gordon), Wings of Defeat (a film about kamikaze pilots by Risa Morimoto), Makiko’s New World (a film on life in Meiji Japan by David W. Plath), Diamonds in the Rough: Baseball and Japanese-American Internment (a film by Kerry Y. Nakagawa), Uncommon Courage: Patriotism and Civil Liberties (a film about Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II by Gayle Yamada), Citizen Tanouye (a film about a Medal of Honor recipient during World War II by Robert Horsting), Mrs. Judo (a film about 10th degree black belt Keiko Fukuda by Yuriko Gamo Romer), and Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story (a film by Regge Life about a woman who lost her life in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami). 

He has conducted numerous professional development seminars nationally (including extensive work with the Chicago Public Schools, Hawaii Department of Education, New York City Department of Education, and school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County) and internationally (including in China, France, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, and Turkey).

In 1997, Gary was the first regular recipient of the Franklin Buchanan Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, awarded annually to honor an outstanding curriculum publication on Asia at any educational level, elementary through university. In 2004, SPICE received the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for its promotion of Japanese studies in schools; and Gary received recognition from the Fresno County Office of Education, California, for his work with students of Fresno County. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for the promotion of mutual understanding between Japan and the United States, especially in the field of education. At the invitation of the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea, San Francisco, Gary participated in the Republic of Korea-sponsored 2010 Revisit Korea Program, which commemorated the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War. At the invitation of the Nanjing Foreign Languages School, China, he participated in an international educational forum in 2013 that commemorated the 50th anniversary of NFLS’s founding. In 2015 he received the Stanford Alumni Award from the Asian American Activities Center Advisory Board, and in 2017 he was awarded the Alumni Excellence in Education Award by the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Most recently, the government of Japan named him a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays.

He is an editorial board member of the journal, Education About Asia; advisory board member for Asian Educational Media Services, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; board member of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Alumni Association of Northern California; and selection committee member of the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award, U.S.–Japan Foundation. 

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Gary Mukai Speaker
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Minds for Sale

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Cloud computing is not just for computing anymore: you can now find as much mindshare as you can afford out in the cloud too -- a new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace. What are some of the issues arising as armies of thinkers are recruited by the thousands and millions?  A fascinating (and non-scare-mongering) view is offered of a future in which nearly any mental act can be bought and sold.

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and served as its first executive director from 1997-2000.

Zittrain's research includes digital property, privacy, and speech, and the role played by private "middlepeople" in Internet architecture. He has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom. He has wriiten a book  The Future of the Internet- And How to Stop It.

Education: Harvard Law School, J.D.; Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, M.P.A.; Yale University, B.S. Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence

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Wallenberg Theater

Jonathan Zittrain Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society Speaker Harvard Law School
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Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Wi(l)der West? A Transatlantic Perspective on the European Periphery from the Balkans and Turkey to Russia

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In recent years, the United States and its European Union partners have often diverged in their policy outlooks towards the wider European periphery—the diverse region stretching from the Balkans and Turkey, to the Westernmost former-Soviet republics and Russia. Whether a temporary hiatus or a more profound strategic divergence, this state of affairs reflects a departure from the mission of extending peace, freedom and prosperity to the European continent that the two sides have pursued in the post-Cold War period.

Fabrizio Tassinari, PhD, is Head of Foreign Policy and EU Studies Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels and at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS in Washington, DC. He has written extensively on European security and integration. His book, Why Europe Fears Its Neighbors, was published on September 30, 2009.

 

Event Synopsis:

Dr. Tassinari's talk draws upon his recent book, "Why Europe Fears its Neighbors" (Praeger Security International, 2009), which attempts to survey and quantify the many challenges facing Europe with respect to its borders. Tassinari describes Europe's position toward neighbor countries as being influenced by the threat of immigration. He describes a "security-integration nexus" in progress since 1945, involving a gradual economic opening of Europe's borders to promote stability. While the EU today maintains to some degree its enlargement policy toward Turkey and the Western Balkans, other border-region states are classified under a "European neighborhood policy" with no prospects for EU membership. Recent policy discourse has decoupled security concerns from integration. The neighborhood approach, undermines EU policy by keeping neighbor states at too great a distance.

Next Tassinari offers Turkey and Russia as case studies. The debate within Turkey is leaning away from EU membership as the primary path toward modernization. Recent dialogue focuses less on meeting technical standards for EU membership and more on reckoning with issues of religion, identity and history within Turkey. With regards to Russia, in the past decade the country has become more assertive abroad and moved away from cooperation with the EU, preferring not to be grouped with countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia in the EU's approach to foreign policy.

In addressing the transatlantic relationship, Dr. Tassinari reflects that the US and EU have long disagreed about EU membership for Turkey, the direction of state building in the Balkans, and integration of some of Europe's neighbor states into NATO.

Finally, responding to the question of whether this divergence comes from a conflict over the "European power constellation" or rather is simply the result of issue-specific philosophical differences, Dr. Tassinari offers three arguments:

  1. Strategic: EU policy reflects multi-level integration, wherein countries can be "more than partners and less than members." Tassinari believes even countries with no prospect for membership should be integrated as much as possible. 
  2. Normative - in reality, the US and EU share goals for Europe's "neighborhood" - promoting democracy, human rights, and other values. Despite this, each side's initiatives are viewed with suspicion by the other. 
  3. Institution - US policymakers buy in to the EU enlargement policy, with its firm commitments and well-rehearsed conditionality process, and don't see alternative policies such as the "neighborhood" approach as being useful. 

A Q&A session following the talk raised such issues as: Will the EU’s problems with “deepening” its relationships with neighbors hurt its prospects for “widening” through enlargement? What are the reasons for the mixed signals to Turkey from the EU? Do arguments about the EU’s denial of Turkey’s membership being based on racism hold any merit? If the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, what cross-border policy areas will remain the prerogative of nation-states and which might fall under EU Commission jurisdiction?

 

CISAC Conference Room

Fabrizio Tassinari Head of Foreign Policy and EU Studies Unit, Danish Institute for International Studies Speaker
Seminars

Communist Eastern Europe: A Ponzi Scheme?

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Twenty years ago, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded – not with a bang, but with a whimper. In circumstances eerily reminiscent of our own day, the establishments in Eastern Europe had borrowed large huge amounts of money (in hard currency), which they had no way to pay back (except by taking more hard currency loans). As the loan crisis deepened, they did . . . nothing.

Stephen Kotkin teaches history and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000" (new edition 2008).

Jan T. Gross also teaches history at Princeton. He is the author of the acclaimed "Neighbors" (2001) and, most recently, "Fear" (2006).

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for European Studies.

Oksenberg Conference Room

Stephen Kotkin Professor of History and International Affairs, Princeton University Speaker
Jan Gross Professor of History, Princeton University Speaker
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