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

Eugene Mazo is a post-doctoral fellow and research scholar at CDDRL, a John M. Olin fellow in law and economics at Stanford Law School, and a fellow of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation (SCCN). Educated as both a lawyer and a political scientist, he specializes in the fields of law and democracy, law and development, and law and globalization. His work has appeared in scholarly journals and in popular media outlets such as the International Herald Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Washington Post.

Professor Mark Granovetter, Chair of the Department of Sociology at Stanford University will speak on his current research on corruption within the context of his project on the social construction of economic institutions, to be published by Harvard University Press.

Granovetter received his PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and his A.B from Princeton University. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1995, after being a member of the faculty at Northwestern University. In 1996 he received a Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa, from Stockholm University; he has been elected to the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars. He is a leading scholar in the area of economic sociology.