Anders Åslund joined the Institute for International Economics in 2006. He has served previously as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2003 and as codirector of the Carnegie Moscow Center's project on Economies of the Post-Soviet States. He joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate in October 1994. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. His work examines the transformation of formerly socialist economies to market-based economies. While the central areas of his studies are Russia and Ukraine, he also focuses on the broader implications of economic transition.

Åslund has served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is co-chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw.

He is the author of Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2001), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, 2d ed. (Cornell University Press, 1991), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985) and editor or coeditor of several books, including with CDDRL Director, Michael McFaul, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Motoo Noguchi is a professor at UNAFEI (United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders) in Tokyo, serving concurrently as senior attorney at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Legal Affairs Bureau.

He started his career as public prosecutor at the Ministry of Justice in 1985 and has accumulated considerable experience in criminal investigations and trials. He also has long experience in the provision of legal technical assistance for developing countries in Asia including Cambodia, firstly as professor at the Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice, then as counsel at the Asian Development Bank, and currently as professor at UNAFEI. Noguchi was appointed in May 2006 to be one of three international judges of the Appeals Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Trials by the government of Cambodia. The trial will bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge government accused of massacres in the 1970s. The United Nations created the tribunal in 2003 to try former Khmer Rouge Leaders.

Motoo Noguchi is a Graduate of University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law. He was a visiting scholar at University of Washington, Law School, USA from 1992-93 and a visiting professional at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands in 2005. He was a visiting fellow at Yale last fall and will be a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School during his stay at Stanford in January.

Feisal Istrabadi is Deputy Permanent Representative of the Iraqi Mission to the United Nations, which position he has held since 2004. In 2004 he was also appointed as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at the Iraqi Ministry for Foreign Affairs. As a legal advisor to the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. al-Istrabadi negotiated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 (June 2004). He was also a principal legal drafter of the Law of Administration of the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period, i.e. the transitional constitution of the country (2003-2004) and author of the bill of Fundamental Rights. Before engaging in the reconstruction of Iraq, Mr. al-Istrabadi had been a practicing barrister in the United States for 15 years, with approximately 70 jury and bench civil trials in federal and State courts, and numerous administrative hearings. He is a Senior Fellow for Legal Reform and Development in the Arab World, the International Human Rights Law Institute, College of Law, DePaul University, Chicago.

Ambassador Istrabadi holds a JD degree from Indiana University and a Master of Laws degree from Northwestern University.

Can there be such a thing as a democratic coup? Critics of the September 2006 seizure of power in Thailand say "no." To them the overthrow of an elected government has set back democracy. Others, including many inside Thailand, support the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as having ended a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Thai democracy, in their view, has been corrected not capsized. Who is right, and what does it mean for democracy in Thailand and beyond? Prof. Ockey will set the stage by reviewing and assessing five different explanations for the September event. He will stress the diversity of motives and interests among the coup's supporters. Prof. Winichakul will then offer a particular interpretation. He will portray the coup as a move by the Thai monarchy and an army general close to the palace that bodes ill for the future of democracy. SEAF Director Don Emmerson will moderate the discussion.

About the panelists:

Jim Ockey is the author of Making Democracy: Leadership, Class, Gender and Political Participation in Thailand (2004) and many articles on Thai politics. Before 2006 he taught at Canterbury University in New Zealand. His Ph.D is from Cornell University.

Thongchai Winichakul's publications include the prize-winning book, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (1994). In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. His Ph.D is from the University of Sydney

Robert Davidson is assistant professor of Spanish and Catalan at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from Cornell and an MA from Queen's University at Kingston. His research interests include theories of space, architecture, and Spanish cinema. He is currently working on hotel culture. He will be speaking about the Hotel Colon in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and a hotel in Sarajevo during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Professor Davidson has published on different aspects of Castilian and Catalan avant-gardes, cultural theory, and film. He is currently completing two book projects: Jazz Age Barcelona and Hotel: From Détente to Detention.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Alberto Alesina is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economics and the Taussig Research Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is a leader in the field of economics and has published extensively in all major academic journals in economics. His work has covered a variety of topics, including political business cycles, integration, stabilization policies in high inflation countries, and differences in the welfare state in the U.S. and Europe.

Professor Alesina is associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth. His most recent books are The Future of Europe: Reform and Decline, published by MIT Press in 2006, and Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference, published by Oxford University Press in 2004.

Abstract of Alberto Alesina's "Technology and Labor Regulations":

Many low skilled jobs have been substituted away for machines in Europe, or eliminated, much more so than in the U.S., while technological progress at the "top," i.e. at the high-tech sector, is faster in the U.S. than in Europe. This paper suggests that the main difference between Europe and the U.S. in this respect is their different labor market policies. European countries reduce wage flexibility and inequality through a host of labor market regulations, like binding minimum wage laws, permanent unemployment subsidies, firing costs, etc. Such policies create incentives to develop and adopt labor saving capital intensive technologies at the low end of the skill distribution. At the same time technical progress in the U.S. is more skill biased than in Europe, since American skilled wages are higher.

Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Political Economics group at the Graduate School of Business.