Thailand has gone through an extraordinary six months. In October in the south, a protest by Muslims in Tak Bai triggered a deadly overreaction by security forces. Eighty-five people died by suffocation or crushing from being detained in army trucks. Many more were killed in December when a tsunami struck the country's west coast, devastating the local tourist industry. The poultry industry had already been badly hurt by avian flu. One might have thought that the government's popularity would have suffered from these events. Instead, in national parliamentary elections in February, the ruling Thai Rak Thai party of incumbent Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra won an unprecedented absolute majority of 377 out of 500 seats. No Thai prime minister had ever been reelected for a second consecutive term, and no Thai party had ever carried a democratic election by such a huge margin. Why? And with what implications for the future?

Kavi Chongkittavorn is assistant group editor of National Multimedia Group, publisher of the English language daily, The Nation. Before taking up this position, he was The Nation's bureau chief in Cambodia (1987-1989) and Vietnam (1989-1991). For more than two decades he has reported the news from Thailand and Southeast Asia. He served briefly as a special assistant to the secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (1994-1995). He also chairs the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, a Bangkok-based media freedom advocacy group.

From the outset, the transatlantic relationship has been more than a mere marriage of convenience. It encompasses a community of states, which are committed to common values, ideals and interests. Europe and North America can look back on a common cultural and intellectual history and they are bound together by a cultural affinity.

Transatlantic relations have benefited from the conscious decision made by the US not to withdraw from Europe in 1945, as it had done after the end of the First World War but, rather, to maintain a long-term presence. This injected an element of stability into Western Europe, which made it possible to tackle the European integration project.

Naturally, there are also conflicts of interests and areas of friction within this community of values. The transatlantic community has never been a perfect community of interests. We are each other's cousins, not identical twins.

Current contentious issues are not limited to the military action by the United States against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Europe and the U.S. also have divergent viewpoints on issues such as climate protection, the death penalty or relations with international organizations. However, leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic know that it is in everyone's interest to deal responsibly with such differences.

The visit by President Bush to Brussels and to Germany at the start to his second term as American president has helped to refocus the transatlantic relationship.

In 2007 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will be forty years old. Yet the most basic questions about it remain controversial. What exactly is it? An organization? A discourse? A regime? A concert? A community? A facade? None, one, some, or all of the above? Has it succeeded? Has it failed? Both? To what extent? How? Why? In the context of these uncertainties, this talk will explore three topics: (1) the controversy over whether ASEAN is, or is not, a "security community"; (2) the incompatibility of member sovereignty versus member democracy as principles of ASEAN cooperation; and (3) the implications of (1) and (2) for US-ASEAN relations. The talk will draw mainly on two sources: a paper that can be downloaded; and a March 2005 research-and-conferencing trip to Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

The Six Party Talks have failed to produce results, and the prospect of a negotiated settlement between the U.S. and North Korea appear to be dwindling rapidly -- North Korea has steadfastly refused to participate in any multilateral process; it says it now has a nuclear weapons and recently test fired a missile into the East Sea. These concerns exist amid current reporting that North Korea may at some point test a nuclear device. Philip Yun will discuss where he sees things going and talk about the prospects of a possible Bush policy based on a coercive diplomacy.

Philip Yun has had a career that encompasses politics, law, diplomacy, business, and now academia. Before joining Shorenstein APARC, Philip Yun was a senior executive of H&Q Asia Pacific, a premier U.S. private equity firm investing in Asia. From 1994 to 2001, he served as an official at the United States Department of State, during which he worked as a senior advisor to Winston Lord and Stanley Roth; served as a deputy head U.S. delegate to the Korea peace talks based in Geneva, Switzerland; and participated in high-level U.S. negotiations with North Korea, including trips to North Korea with Dr. William J. Perry and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Before entering government service, he practiced law at major firms in the U.S. and Korea.

Korea, where ancient East Asian civilization and modern Western civilization interact and conflicting political ideologies, economic systems, and social practices collide, presents a particularly interesting case of the phenomenology of the consequences of cultural conflict involving the problems of detraditionalization, cultural hybridization, and the discontinuous nature of globalization. How do traditional religious beliefs and practices survive in modern Korean society and how do they interact with modern values and lifestyles derived from the West,particularly the United States?

What happens to a society when a cultural tradition that has valued the Confucian virtues of frugality, temperance, service to the family and local community, and natural, segmented human relations regulated by a communal sense of propriety and order transforms into one in which individualism, hedonism, utilitarian egotism, and the unbridled pursuit of material achievements predominate? What should replace or supplement eroding traditional values? Attempting to answer these questions requires us to seriously reflect on the relation of traditional moral culture to the contemporary situation in Korea.

Dr. Chung has taught at a number of institutions,including Boston University's College of General Studies and in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.

He has published widely in both Korean and English,on social and ethical problems arising from East Asia's modern transformation. Dr. Chung has incorporated into his teaching and research the religious and social ethical problems involving globalization and encounters between civilizations with particular attention to Korea, East Asian religious traditions,and Christianity.

Buffet lunch will be provided to those who RSVP to Jasmin Ha at jaha@stanford.edu by Tuesday, May 10.

One of the most important scholarly issues in political economy during the last decade has been economic globalization.

A powerful case for the penetrating power of globalization on the nation states was the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which drove South Korea, once an exemplary success case of state-led economic development, to the brink of national bankruptcy.

The economic crisis and the following structural reform process of South Korea seem to clearly demonstrate the limit of state-centric developmental model and the converging effect of neoliberal capitalism even on a nonliberal state-led economy.

While recent scholarly discussions on the "globalization and the state" thesis have mostly focused on changes in the non-state actors or the state-market relationship, Ms. Jung draws our attention to the transformation of the state bureaucratic institutions.

In her talk, she uses South Korea as a critical case and traces the dramatic institutional changes of the Economic Planning Board (EPB) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) between 1994 and 1999. Ms. Jung unpacks the black box of why and how specific decisions on key bureaucratic institutional changes were made in Korea, tests how globalization affected the transformation process, and then analyzes the consequences of such changes for the role and authority of the South Korean state in economic development and reform.

Buffet lunch will be provided to those who RSVP to Jasmin Ha at jaha@stanford.edu by Tuesday, April 12.

Page Fortna is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars. She is the author of Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004), and has published articles in World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. She is currently working on a project evaluating the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars, as well as a project on long-term historical trends in war termination.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, she is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She has also been a visiting fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003). Before coming to Columbia, Fortna was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at CISAC. Her graduate work was done in the Government Department at Harvard University (Ph.D. 1998). Before graduate school, she worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

CDDRL Predoctoral fellow, Kevin Strompf will speak about his research into economic reform in South East Asia. Strompf is finishing his dissertation at Cornell University's Department of Government