Change in the structure of a political elite can offer a window into political change and transformation of a state socialist regime. Soyoung Kwon will present a study of the North Korean political elite, focusing on its composition between 1980 and 2004. Her research is based on a profile analysis of the social and career attributes of the Party Central Committee members. Dr. Kwon examines the changes to the North Korean political elite to see whether it displayed a similar pattern of change in the Soviet and Chinese elites. Her analysis compares the major characteristics of the political elites of the past 24 years in order to identify the level of elite diversification, changing group representation, and any structural adjustment in the elite group under the Kim Jong Il leadership.

Buffet lunch will be provided to those who RSVP to Jasmin Ha at jaha@stanford.edu by Tuesday, February 1.

Buffet lunch will be provided to those who RSVP to Jasmin Ha at jaha@stanford.edu by Tuesday, January 18.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is a doctoral candidate at Yale University and a CISAC social science fellow. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled "Between the Storms: An International History of the Second Indochina War, 1968-1973," for which she did multiarchival research in Vietnam, the United States, and Europe. She has two upcoming chapters in volumes on the First and Third Indochina Wars, to be published by the presses at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, respectively. She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Association for Asian Studies, and she serves on the executive committee of the Vietnam Studies Group. She received an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Paul Stockton is Associate Provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and is Director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Stockton is the Editor of Homeland Security (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2005). His research has appeared in Political Science Quarterly, International Security and Strategic Survey. He is Co-Editor of Reconstituting America's Defense: America's New National Security Strategy (1992). Mr. Stockton has also published an Adelphi Paper and has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James Lindsay and Randall Ripley, Eds., U.S. Foreign Policy After the Cold War (1997).

Mr. Stockton received a B.A. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 1986. Dr. Stockton served from 1986-1989 as Legislative Assistant to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Dr. Stockton was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship for 1989-1990 by the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. In August 1990, Dr. Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School. From 1995 until 2000, he served as Director of the NPS Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, Dr. Stockton founded and served as the Acting Dean of the NPS School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed Associate Provost in 2001.

Ariel (Eli) Levite is the Principal Deputy Director General of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC). Dr. Levite has extensive experience dealing with issues of nuclear proliferation as both a scholar and practitioner. Before that, Dr. Levite was a visiting fellow at CISAC, where he also served as co-leader of the CISAC Discriminate Force Project. His previous jobs include Deputy National Security Advisor (Defense Policy) and Head of the Bureau of International Security at the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

Dr. Levite has written and published extensively on issues of international security, strategy, and Middle East politics. His two most recent publications include "Never Say Never Again: Nuclear Reversal Revisited" in International Security, Winter 2002-03, and, co-authored with Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, "The Case for Discriminate Force" in Survival, Winter 2002-03. He holds a bachelor's degree from Tel-Aviv University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Kimberly Marten is a tenured associate professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and also teaches at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

She earned her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1991, and held both pre-doc and post-doc fellowships at CISAC. She has written three books: Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004), Weapons, Culture, and Self-Interest: Soviet Defense Managers in the New Russia (Columbia University Press, 1997), and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton University Press, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. Her numerous book chapters and journal articles include a Washington Quarterly piece in Winter 2002-3, "Defending against Anarchy: From War to Peacekeeping in Afghanistan," as well as op-eds in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.

In May 2004 she was embedded for a week with the Canadian Forces then leading the ISAF peace mission in Kabul. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS). Her current research asks whether warlords and gangs can be changed from potential spoilers to stakeholders in state-building processes.