Details to follow shortly. Please check back soon.

Apparel export quotas that defined the worldwide garment trade for four decades ended on 1 January 2005. Trade data since then suggest that production has shifted from Southeast Asia to China. For the most developed countries in Southeast Asia, the loss of the garment industry will be a tolerable inconvenience. But it will devastate countries whose economies depend on such exports. An extreme example is Cambodia, three-fourths of whose exports are apparel. Are the threads from which these poor economies hang about to break? Is this industrys migration out of Southeast Asia inevitable and irrevocable? What, if anything, can governments and companies in the region do?

Geoffrey Stafford earned his PhD in political science (1998) and an MA in Southeast Asian studies (1996) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing his dissertation, Globalization Amid Diversity: Economic Development Policy in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia 1987-1997, he joined a large retailer to work on issues of corporate social responsibility in the global garment-manufacturing arena. In that capacity he is now analyzing the effects of quota termination on the world apparel industry. He has taught the politics of Southeast Asia at the University of San Francisco.

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.