FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Democratic Gridlock on Taiwan: Domestic Sources and External Implications
This is a Special Seminar within the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program (co-sponsored with Shorenstein APARC).
Richard Bush is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. The Center serves as a locus for research, analysis, and debate to enhance policy development on the pressing political, economic, and security issues facing Northeast Asia and U.S. interests in the region.
Bush came to Brookings in July 2002, after serving almost five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the mechanism through which the United States Government conducts substantive relations with Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.
Dr. Bush began his professional career in 1977 with the China Council of The Asia Society. In July 1983 he became a staff consultant on the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. In January 1993 he moved up to the full committee, where he worked on Asia issues and served as liaison with Democratic Members. In July 1995, he became National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates the analytic work of the intelligence committee. He left the NIC in September 1997 to become head of AIT.
Richard Bush received his undergraduate education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did his graduate work in political science at Columbia University, getting an M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He is the author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America's relations with Taiwan.
Philippines Conference Room
Democracy's True Cost
About the Speaker:
Sheri Berman is Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests focus on issues of comparative political development, European politics and history, globalization, social theory, and history of the Left. Some of her recent publications include: "The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Ideological Dynamics of the Twentieth Century" (2006, Cambridge University Press); "Violence, Conflict, and Civil Society," Mittelweg, Spring 2006 (academic paper); "Islamism, Revolution, and Civil Society," Perspectives on Politics, 1, 2, June 2003 (academic paper). Berman received her B.A. (1987) from Yale, and M.A. (1990) and PhD. (1994) from Harvard.
About the Event:
The best way to understand how stable, well-functioning democracies develop is to analyze the political trajectories such countries have actually taken. For the most part, this means looking at Western Europe and North America. When we look carefully at these cases we see that the political backstory of most democracies is one of struggle, conflict and even violence. Problems and even failures did not mean that democracy would be impossible to achieve some day; in fact, they can in retrospect often be seen to be integral parts of the long-term processes through which non-democratic institutions, elites, and cultures were delegitimized and eventually eliminated, and their democratic successors forged. An important reason many do not seem to realize this is because of a lack of historical perspective: contemporary analysts often ignore or misread the often messy and unattractive manner in which the current crop of stable democracies actually developed. Understanding past cases better is thus a crucial step toward putting today's democratization and democracy promotion discussions into proper intellectual and historical context.
CISAC Conference Room
Martyr Narratives of the Spanish Civil War
Cosponsored with the Iberian Studies Program, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, and the Department of History.
Noël Valis is a Professor of Spanish at Yale University. She previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Georgia. Her areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to modern Spanish culture.
She has published 19 books and numerous articles in PMLA, Novel, Romanic Review, Hispanic Review, Modern Age, MLN, Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and other journals and essay collections. In May 2004 she was elected President of the Twentieth-Century Spanish Association of America. She is the recipient of both an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006-07, for the book project, Body Sacraments: Catholicism and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative.
She received her B.A. from Douglass College and her Ph.D. in Spanish and French from Bryn Mawr College.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Kristin C. Burke
Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Kristin Burke is currently assisting Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, program director, in work on the American and Korean media project, an ongoing research endeavor that examines Korean and American media coverage of the U.S.-ROK alliance and North Korea. The media project will culminate in the publication of a volume and the convening of a conference in spring, 2007.
Prior to joining the Korean Studies Program at Shorenstein APARC, Ms. Burke was an associate at AALC, Limited Company (formerly Armitage Associates) in the Washington, DC area, where she focused on US foreign policy and security policy in East Asia. Ms. Burke holds a BA in International Relations and MA in Sociology from Stanford University.