FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
For the last two decades, Soviet and the Russian leaders worked with Western leaders to integrate the former Soviet empire, and above all else Russia, into the western community of states. Disputes over NATO expansion, the wars in Chechnya, or the bombing campaign against Serbia periodically slowed the process of integration. Nonetheless, leaders in both Russia and the West never let the long-term economic, security, and even ideological benefits of integration be jeopardized by these intermittent disagreements.
Chang's presentation seeks to understand the emergence and evolution of social movements during the 1970s in South Korea. During the authoritarian years when Korea was ruled by Park Chung-Hee, various social groups participated in the movement to restore democracy and ensure human rights. Their activism was instrumental to democratic changes that took place in the summer of 1987 and they continued to play an important role even after democratic transition. Utilizing the novel Stanford Korea Democracy Project Datasets, Chang traces the increasing diversification of South Korea's democracy movement in the 1970s.
Chang is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology at Stanford University. Chang's paper "Differential Impact of Repression on Social Movements" won the Robert McNamara Paper competition from the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the Goldsmith Paper Award from the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. He has published papers in Sociological Inquiry, Journal for Korean Studies, and Asian Perspective. Chang graduated from University of California, Santa Cruz where he double majored in psychology and religious studies. He received masters degrees in Sociology from both UCLA and Stanford University, and in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School.
Philippines Conference Room
The talk will explore conceptions of nation and national identity in both North Korea (DPRK) and South Korea (ROK) and the ways in which the two Koreas demonstrate areas of convergence and divergence in this all-important arena. While many Koreans still claim to be unified by primordial bonds of blood, language, and culture, differing ideals and priorities in the ROK and the DPRK have the potential of pushing the two Korea's further apart.
Larsen teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of North and South Korea, East Asia, and the world, at the George Washington University. His book, Tradition, Trade and Empire: The Qing Empire and Choson Korea, is forthcoming. He has published, presented, and commented on a variety of contemporary issues including North Korea, nationalism and elections in South Korea, and Sino-Korean relations. He has appeared on ABC, MSNBC, VOA, the Canadian Broadcast System, and Al Jazeera. Dr. Larsen is the director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University. He received his PhD in history from Harvard University.
Philippines Conference Room
The BP Foundation has awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development to support research on modern energy markets. The foundation is funded by BP, one of the world's largest energy companies.
The gift follows the BP Foundation's initial grant of $1.8 million over three years, which was pledged in 2004 in support of the program.
"BP's support has allowed our program to study the world's most pressing energy problems, such as global warming, energy poverty and the prospects for the world oil market," said program director and Stanford law Professor David G. Victor. "In addition to BP Foundation support, we learn from BP's experience as an energy company because they operate in all the markets where we do research--such as in China and India."
"BP Foundation believes the work undertaken at Stanford deals directly with global issues that are key to meeting the world's growing energy needs," said Steve Elbert, chairman of the BP Foundation. "The drive to research and implement strategies to further understand today's energy markets is important work, and we are proud to partner again with Stanford."
The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, concentrates on the legal, political and institutional dimensions of how societies derive value from energy. The BP Foundation grant is part of a rapid expansion of Stanford's research and teaching on energy issues, much of which focuses on the technical aspects of energy systems.
All of the program's research is public and published openly, including on its website. The gift from the BP Foundation, as well as all similar gifts to support the program's research, includes special provisions that assure the research program's independence in setting its research agenda.
The agreement with Stanford is one in a series of BP partnerships with universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and China, representing a total commitment of more than $600 million. The program at Stanford complements work on similar topics at Princeton University, Tsinghua University and Imperial College, among others.
Founded in 2001, the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development focuses on the "political economy" of modern energy services--the interaction of political, institutional and economic forces that often dominate energy markets. It collaborates with the Stanford Law School and other university departments and schools, including economics, engineering and earth sciences. About half of the program's resources are devoted to research partnerships in key developing countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Program researchers have examined the emergence of a global business in natural gas, reforms of electric power markets and the supply of modern energy services to low-income rural households in developing countries.
The program's other major sponsor is the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., a research consortium that includes most of the world's largest electric companies.
Two countries with a common and ancient civilization, India and Pakistan, celebrated 60 years of independence from colonial rule this week. At the time of independence, both countries were in danger of collapsing from internal and external threats. This greatly influenced both countries' subsequent turn toward centralism - in India's case, statism, and in Pakistan's case, army rule.
For four decades, both statism and army rule seemed irreversible. This was despite failures across the board: In both countries, territory was lost and the economy stagnated. Resources were spent on developing nuclear weaponry and on dealing with the Kashmir insurgency, which was fostered by Pakistan and repressed by India. What was left was often wasted through corruption. By 1990, it was common for Pakistan to be labeled a failed state and India, perhaps more damningly, a failed democracy.
Pakistan's army and feudal landlords, who shared political power via an informal coalition throughout the first 40 years, deserve most of the blame for Pakistan's failures. They carved up the economy among themselves, and let the poor survive by growing food and providing simple services to the rich. India's greater failures hid these strategies from national or global attention. Pakistan even overtook India for a while until Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's nationalizations of the 1970s brought them on par again.
Pakistan, a day older than India, but with an even younger population, seems to have aged more poorly over the past two decades. As the Indian economy picks up speed on the back of the 1991 reforms, India is on its way to becoming a global player in services and acquiring as formidable a reputation as China for job creation. The IT sector alone creates three new jobs every minute of each working day. In the four statistics that really matter - literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality rates and the female-to-male ratio - only in the last does Pakistan perform better than India and that, too, marginally. In the others, it is substantially worse.
There is no single reason for Pakistan's poorer performance. It turned as reformist as India in the 1990s. This has benefited some parts of its economy. For instance, the country adds over 2.5 million new cell phone users each month, or 1 for every second of the day. Though below India's rate of 2.7 new cell phone users per second, it is a much better ratio to the population.
Religious fervor is often accused, but has not - in either the subcontinent's history or in Pakistan's shorter one - been a barrier to development. Despite incidents such as led to the recent siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, theocratic parties have never received more than 15 percent of the popular vote - and that was three decades ago. Evidence within all the countries of South Asia provides proof of the proposition that the poor, regardless of faith or ethnicity, seek the means of development, particularly the acquisition of education. Muslims are no exception to this proposition. For instance, the first administrative district to reach 100 percent literacy in the subcontinent was the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram in the Indian state of Kerala.
Finally, one cannot simply blame performance on Pakistan not being a full democracy. The world abounds with more failed than successful democracies, while China provides the most stunning counterexample of a successful dictatorship. Pakistan's current state of governance - in which the military, the courts and parliament share power and the press is relatively free - has been achieved through decades of negotiation and may well be the best framework given its current stage of political maturity.
Yet, there is one difference that may be the real reason for Pakistan's backwardness, and it is now becoming evident - again, by comparison with India. It is linked to bad governance but does not always follow from the democratic tradition. The difference is, in a word, freedom. India provides a good example: The government used to decide how resources were spent, leaving citizens with few choices on careers, education and lifestyles - on participation in their nation's growth. Since the 1990s, the Indian state has worked hard to give its citizens more freedom. The result is an invigorated India.
Pakistan, meanwhile, has moved slowly on freedom. The state has withdrawn from the economy, but now grants favors selectively to the private sector, with the inevitable corollary of massive corruption and loss of freedom of action.
This suggests that Pakistan is only a crucial freedom step away from success. In reality, the immediate future does not look promising because the country's citizens do not have the political will to achieve real change. It is a sad commentary that Pakistan's choices for the next cycle of political rule look like bad ones: the continuation of the present system of quasi-military rule or its replacement with the destructive feudal forces that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif represent. Surely, Pakistan's citizens deserve much better - something worth pondering as their nation celebrates turning 60.
Reprinted with permission by The San Jose Mercury News.
Stanford Law School
Transatlantic Technology Law Forum
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
Siegfried Fina is co-director of the Stanford-Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (a joint venture of Stanford Law School and the University of Vienna School of Law) and an associate professor of European Union Law and Technology Law at the University of Vienna School of Law in Austria. His work focuses on the business-related and the technology-related law and policy of the European Union as well as on the legal aspects of the EU-U.S. trade and the economic governance issues of the transatlantic marketplace.
Until 2002, Fina was an associate professor of law at the Vienna University of Technology. He also is an adjunct associate professor of law at Danube University Krems in Austria. He is a member of the board of directors of the International Federation for European Law (FIDE) and a member of the European Union Studies Association of the U.S. and Austria. Fina received a JD and JSD from the University of Vienna School of Law. In addition, he received a Diploma in Business Administration from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, a Diploma in Political Science from the University of Vienna Department of Government and Political Science, and a post-graduate Diploma in International Studies from the University of Vienna.
Agriculture is the human enterprise most dependent on climate and natural resources, and is thus the sector that has the most to gain or lose from short- or long-run changes in the level or variability of climate. A growing literature seeks to understand the probable effects of climate change on agriculture, and improvements in our understanding of climate dynamics and crop response has begun to reduce some of the uncertainties inherent in projecting future impacts on agriculture. Nevertheless, there has been scant research conducted on the climate impacts on various crops and agroecosystems of central importance to the global poor. Furthermore, much of the existing literature assumes that farmers will automatically adapt to climate change and thereby lessen many of its potential negative impacts, taking for granted the monumental past efforts at the collection, preservation, and utilization of plant genetic resources on which much of farmer adaptation has historically depended.
Given potentially large changes in global temperature, regional precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events, we believe it is dangerous to assume that adaptation of cultivars will happen automatically. Extensive crop breeding that relies on access to genetic resources will almost certainly be required for crop adaptation under conditions of global climate change. Furthermore, substantial knowledge and insight is needed to gauge what types of diversity now exist in the gene banks, and what will be needed in the future. Fundamental questions remain to be addressed, for example: How are regional patterns of climate expected to change in the future, and how will these changes affect agro-ecosystems around the world? There are also several strategic investment issues to consider--which traits, which crops and which regions should be central to strategic decisions on ex situ genetic conservation? What steps should be taken to conserve the genetic diversity of the important but neglected minor crops where the number of accessions is currently low? Answers to these questions will be critical for promoting food security and ensuring human survival, and to date have received little or no attention in the scientific literature or broader policy arena.
This conference will seek to answer three main questions:
1) What and where are the largest threats to agro-ecosystems under future climate change? Here we will seek to identify both the nature and the location of the largest probable threats, a topic that to date has not been systematically undertaken for certain areas of interest.
2) Taken individually and together, what do these threats imply for crop genetic diversity on a regional or global level? I.e. which traits, which crops and which regions appear central to strategic decisions on ex situ genetic conservation?
3) What is the current state of genetic conservation with respect to these threats, and what does this imply about the sequencing of future efforts at ex situ conservation focus? For example, are there a set of minor crops important to food security that are both poorly represented in the gene banks and under great threat from future climate change?
Particular attention will be paid to those crops and cropping systems on which food insecure populations currently depend, and who would be least able to adapt in the absence of concerted public action to the contrary. We expect that this effort will be the first serious attempt to link crop genetic resource conservation to climate change and variability.
» A news article on recent investments being made by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, decisions which were informed by the Bellagio meeting.
Bellagio, Italy
