What Does Academic International Relations have to do with Making Policy?
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, 2nd floor, Encina Hall East
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, 2nd floor, Encina Hall East
During the Meiji period, the ancient ball game of kemari-in which participants use their feet to keep a small ball aloft-and its few remaining enthusiasts received governmental support as part of performative efforts to connect the new modern state with an authentically "Japanese" past. Most commonly remembered as a favorite pastime of Heian court nobles, kemari has been played by modern aficionados adorned in "traditional" costumes throughout the 20th century at numerous state events. These athletic performances repeatedly have reconnected Japan for outside observers and its own citizens with an image of perduring tradition and cultural uniqueness. In this paper, I will explore how kemari has been reconsidered and celebrated for a different purpose in recent years. Efforts by the Japan Football Association (JFA) to first secure and then ensure the success of the 2002 World Cup co-hosted with South Korea occasioned a new role for kemari. In the years leading up to the World Cup, government authorities, JFA officials, and kemari supporters have positioned kemari as the oldest precursor to the modern game of association football or soccer. Through an examination of the often carefully choreographed museum exhibitions, media releases, and public stagings of kemari produced around and during the World Cup, I will contemplate the ways that history is used to claim legitimacy and authenticity in the present. I will consider ideas about the relationship between past and present inherent in claims by scholars from Japan and elsewhere, who have contributed to contemporary narratives of continuity and connection between kemari and modern soccer. Lastly, I will suggest how new understandings of kemari may be altering individuals' understanding of Japaneseness and Japan's place in, and relationship with the rest of the world.
Oksenberg Conference Room, Third Floor South, Encina Hall
Dr. Myron Cohen spoke earlier this year at the UN on AIDS in China. He has been very active in organizing medical research on AIDS in China and only recently returned from a conference held there in November on the subject.
Philippines Conference Room, Third Floor, Cemtral Wing, Encina Hall
Okimoto Conference Room, Third Floor, East Wing, Encina Hall
Ground Floor Conference Room (E008), Encina Hall, East Wing
Ground Floor Conference Room (E008) Encina Hall, East Wing
Ground Floor Conference Room (E008), Encina Hall, East Wing
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.
Ground Floor Conference Room (E008), Encina Hall, East Wing
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Dean Emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as Dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising. Formerly the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, from 2001–2006 Peter’s research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, and he has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).
A Vice Chair of the Boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Peter also serves on the Boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.
With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the PhD Excellence Initiative, a predoctoral fellowship program in economics that identifies high-achieving students with the deepest commitment to economic research and prepares them for the rigors of pursuing a PhD in the field. For his leadership of the PhD Excellence Initiative, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association. Peter received his PhD in economics from MIT and Bachelor’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.
About the speaker: Ethan Segal is an SSFJS Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Stanford. His dissertation, an economic history of medieval Japan, is based on research he conducted while a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tokyo. His other areas of research and publication include proto-nationalism, historical methodology, and textbooks narratives in the U.S. and Japan.
Oksenberg Conference Room, Third Floor South, Encina Hall
About the speaker: Michelle Li received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in May 2000 with a major in pre-modern Japanese literature and minors in pre-modern Chinese and Japanese religions with an emphasis on Buddhism, and pre-modern Japanese history. Her focus in recent years has been on the grotesque and other modes of representation centered on the physical body in ancient and medieval Japanese literature. She is especially interested in the places in texts where religion, history, and literature meet. Her dissertation, Unfinalized Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Setsuwa Literature, which she is currently revising as a book, develops a theory of the grotesque in short tales from the Konjaku monogatari shu and other collections of short tales compiled between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. She is also presently expanding her understanding of the grotesque by exploring how an aesthetic similar to the grotesque in setsuwa functions in Japanese literature from other genres and historic periods. Her next major project after completing this work will be a cross-disciplinary study of ancient and medieval wet nurses who, in addition to having great psychological impact on individuals, were politically and economically significant. In addition to her years at Princeton, her academic background includes a master's degree from Ochanomizu University in Tokyo in modern Japanese literature, particularly from the Meiji and Taisho periods. She has also lived and studied in Beijing. The first time, in 1989, was during the student protests and military crackdown by the government in and around Tiananmen Square. It was a significant period of her personal life as well as she met future husband, Jiayi, then. Chinese language and culture, including Chinese tale literature and its relationship to Japanese tale literature, remain side passions of hers.
Oksenberg Conference Room, Third Floor South, Encina Hall