In his recent book, Daniel Kliman argues that the years following September 11, 2001, have marked a turning point in Japan's defense strategy. Utilizing poll data from Japanese newspapers as well as extensive interview material, he chronicles the erosion of normative and legal restraints on Tokyo's security policy, and he notes that both Japanese elites and the general public increasingly view national security from a realpolitik perspective. Japan's more realpolitik orientation has coincided with a series of precedent-breaking defense initiatives: Tokyo deployed the Maritime Self-Defense Force to the Indian Ocean, decided to introduce missile defense, and contributed troops to Iraq's post-conflict reconstruction. Kliman explains these initiatives as the product of four mutually interactive factors. In the period after 9/11, the impact of foreign threats on Tokyo's security calculus became more pronounced; internalized U.S. expectations exerted a profound influence over Japanese defense behavior; prime ministerial leadership played an instrumental role in high-profile security debates; and public opinion appeared to overtake generational change as a motivator of realpolitik defense policies. However, the author rebuts those who exaggerate the nature of Japan's strategic transition. Evaluating potential amendments to Article 9, he demonstrates that Tokyo's defense posture will remain constrained even after constitutional revision. Dan will discuss his recent book and his research.

Daniel M. Kliman is pursuing a Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was a Fulbright Fellow in the Faculty of Law at Kyoto University. While there he prepared a book manuscript for publication with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He has been affiliated with the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C., the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in California, and the Institute for International Policy Studies in Tokyo.

Matthew Rojansky is a JD candidate at Stanford Law School and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His research focuses on international law and security, counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation. He is currently conducting a study of UN Security Council legitimacy in the global counter-terrorism context, and developing a theory of network-based attribution for internationally wrongful acts. He has worked for the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and private law firms, where he has worked on international trade and IP litigation.

He received an AB in Soviet history from Harvard University. Next year, he will serve as a clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Kent Eaton is Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A political scientist by training, Dr. Eaton is interested in political institutions and comparative political economy. He is the author of Politicians and Economic Reform in New Democracies and Politics beyond the Capital: The Design of Subnational Institutions in South America. Currently Dr. Eaton is conducting research on police reform and on the relationship between decentralization and security in Latin America.

Singapore's general elections in 2006 are unlikely to shake the country's legendary political stability. Despite repeated predictions over decades that the long-ruling People's Action Party (PAP) would falter, opposition parties and dissident groups have made little headway. Cherian George will offer a counter-intuitive reason for this situation: deliberate self-restraint in the use of violence by the state against its opponents. Since the 1980s, modes of repression in Singapore have grown increasingly subtle and sophisticated. Thanks to "calibrated coercion," the PAP has been able to neutralize opposition with minimum political cost. The study of authoritarian regimes would benefit from more nuanced attention to the methodology of coercion. It is time for analysts to stop treating coercion as if it were not problematic - a black box that need not be taken apart. Or so, based on Singapore's case, Prof. George will argue.

Cherian George is the author of Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore (2006) and Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control (2000). After completing his PhD in communication at Stanford in 2003, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, Singapore. He is now deputy head of the journalism program at Nanyang Technological University.

Nancy Peluso will discuss how "political forests" originated in colonial-era Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and how they have been maintained over at least a century and a half of broader political-economic change. She will argue that forests were produced and normalized in Southeast Asia through political categories embedded in the law, scientific and public practice, colonial and post-colonial empires of forestry, and the insurgencies and emergencies of the Cold War era. This required the sometimes violent separation of the components of agrarian environments. From the fact that forests can be shown to be not only biological but also historical and political in nature she will draw important implications for conservation, development, and "green governance."

Nancy Lee Peluso is program director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics at UC - Berkeley, where she teaches courses in political ecology and studies forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. She is the co-editor of Violent Environments (2001) and Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (1996) and the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (1992) and many journal articles and book chapters. She is presently finishing a book manuscript whose working title is "Ways of Seeing Borneo: Territoriality, Violence, and the Production of Landscape History". She is an associate editor of Global Environmental Politics and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Her PhD is from Cornell University.

The US-ROK alliance has come under increasing strains in the past few years. Often this is attributed to emotion: a naive young generation of Koreans or perhaps resentment over Apollo Ohno's victory in the past winter Olympics. However, the strains arise from deeper, more enduring reasons. One factor that is not often discussed is how China's rise is affecting the US-ROK alliance. South Korea, once again, is caught between powers much larger than itself. There are no easy answers, but an understanding of the real pressures on the Korean peninsula is a way to begin.

David Kang is associate professor of government, and adjunct associate professor and research director at the Center for International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He has scholarly interests in both business-government relations and international relations, with a focus on Asia. At Tuck he teaches courses on doing business in Asia, and also manages teams of MBAs in the Tuck Global Consultancy Program that conduct in-country consulting projects for multinational companies in Asia.

Kang's book, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002), was named by Choice as one of the 2003 "Outstanding Academic Titles". He is also author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (co-authored with Victor Cha) (Columbia University Press, 2003). He has published scholarly articles in journals such as International Organization, International Security, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Foreign Policy.

Poverty, inequality, and corruption plague the Philippines six decades after independence. Of the past five presidents, only one took office and left it without military intervention, and he was a general. In his controversial book, A Country of Our Own (2004), David Martinez describes the Philippines as a failed state. The country in his eyes comprises five regions ("nations"): Cordillera, Luzon, The Visayas, Mindanao, and Bangsamoro. He proposes holding legally binding referenda in each of these places to determine whether those who live there wish to remain inside the Philippines or form their own independent country. In a conversation moderated by Stanford's Don Emmerson, Martinez and the Filipinist scholar Lela Noble will examine arguments and evidence relevant to a crucial question: Is the nation-state project still valid for the Philippines?

David C. Martinez was born in the Philippines. At law school in Silliman University he was a medal-winning debater. He became an activist lawyer, was briefly detained when then-President Marcos declared martial law, fled the Philippines, and eventually reached the US, where he now resides. His essays have appeared in the Philippines Free Press among other publications, and he is a prize-winning author of fiction and poetry as well.

Lela Noble has written extensively on the Philippines. Her authored or edited books include Organizing for Democracy: NGOs, Civil Society, and the Philippine State (1998); Philippine Policy toward Sabah: A Claim to Independence (1977), and her articles have appeared in such journals as Asian Survey and Solidarity. From 1996 to 2002, she was dean of the College of Social Sciences at San Jose State. Her PhD is from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.