Mr. Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning to the Prime Ministership in 2013. As Prime Minister, Mr. Rudd led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis. Australia's fiscal response to the crisis was reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major advanced economy not to go into recession. Mr. Rudd is also internationally recognized as one of the founders of the G20 which drove the global response to the crisis, and which in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into a second global depression.

As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the US and Russia in 2010. He also initiated the concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia Pacific Community to help manage deep-routed tensions in Asia by building over time the institutions and culture of common security in Asia. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a 20% mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. Mr. Rudd launched Australia's challenge in the International Court of Justice with the object of stopping Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. Mr Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its current non-permanent seat on the United Nation’s Security Council and the near doubling of Australia's foreign aid budget.

Mr. Rudd remains engaged in a range of international challenges including global economic management, the rise of China, climate change and sustainable development. He is on the International Advisory Panel of Chatham House. He is a proficient speaker of Mandarin Chinese, a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and funded the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He was a co-author of the recent report of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Global Sustainability – “Resilient People, Resilient Planet" and chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States. He also remains actively engaged in indigenous reconciliation.

The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University. On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917.  Tooze advances a powerful explanation of why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States and the Pacific. These lectures will present an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world today.

Titles and venues are listed below.

Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”
Recent events in Ukraine pose the question, is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? This lecture will address the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I. In light of current events the lecture will focus on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk - the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine - and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after. Returning to the period 1917-1923 suggests sobering conclusions about the stability of the order that we have taken for granted since 1991.

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”
Having established itself in the 19th century as the financial center of the world, Europe's sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing trans-Atlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe but the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world. But, to this day there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of the disaster. Was it American leadership or a failure of cooperation that was to blame? This lecture will argue the case for a revised and historicized version of the hegemonic failure thesis. The absence presence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe's fate.

Friday, May 2, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center
Followed by a reeception, 5:30 pm - 6:15 pm
“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”
Until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. And yet the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed as they were by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, tended to ignore this evident fact, focusing instead on workers and business-men, politicians and soldiers. This lecture will illustrate how brining the peasantry back in has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the Bloodlands to the wider world.

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

Due to venue capacity,

RSVP's for this event have been closed. 

See the livestream here

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This event is co-sponsored with

The Stanford Institute

for Economic Policy Research

Doors open at 11:30a.m.

Complimentary valet parking available

For security reasons:
   ~No backpacks or oversized purses will be allowed
   ~All persons subject to search
   ~No food or beverages allowed inside the room

   ~RSVPs for this event are required and will be strictly enforced at check-in

Born in Paris in 1956, Christine Lagarde completed high school in Le Havre and attended Holton Arms School in Bethesda (Maryland, USA). She then graduated from law school at University Paris X, and obtained a Master’s degree from the Political Science Institute in Aix en Provence.

After being admitted as a lawyer to the Paris Bar, Christine Lagarde joined the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie as an associate, specializing in Labor, Anti-trust, and Mergers & Acquisitions. A member of the Executive Committee of the Firm in 1995, Christine Lagarde became the Chairman of the Global Executive Committee of Baker & McKenzie in 1999, and subsequently Chairman of the Global Strategic Committee in 2004.

Christine Lagarde joined the French government in June 2005 as Minister for Foreign Trade. After a brief stint as Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, in June 2007 she became the first woman to hold the post of Finance and Economy Minister of a G-7 country. From July to December 2008, she also chaired the ECOFIN Council, which brings together Economics and Finance Ministers of the European Union.

As a member of the G-20, Christine Lagarde was involved in the Group's management of the financial crisis, helping to foster international policies related to financial supervision and regulation and to strengthen global economic governance. As Chairman of the G-20 when France took over its presidency for the year 2011, she launched a wide-ranging work agenda on the reform of the international monetary system.

In July 2011, Christine Lagarde became the eleventh Managing Director of the IMF, and the first woman to hold that position.

Christine Lagarde was named Officier in the Légion d'honneur in April 2012. A former member of the French national team for synchronized swimming, Christine Lagarde is the mother of two sons.

This is a keynote speech open to the public during the Sixth Annual Koret Conference on "Engaging North Korea: Projects, Challenges, and Prospects."

The North Korean nuclear threat has now been with us for more than a quarter century.  Our policy of "strategic patience" seems more patient than strategic as the US waits for Pyongyang to meet certain preconditions before we return to the bargaining table.  But North Korea continues to develop both its nuclear weapons and missile systems, and there are no negotiations in sight.  What alternatives are there to our current approach?  If so, what might those look like?

Ambassador Bosworth is a former career diplomat, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Tunisia. Most recently, he served as U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy for the Obama administration. 

The opening up of Myanmar (Burma) and the steps undertaken taken toward political reform in that formerly isolated dictatorship have been among Asia's most dramatic and least expected events.  But the establishment of full democracy is still on the agenda and faces many challenges.  How willing is the current government in Burma to allow a full and free exercise of political rights, including media freedom?  A panel of experts, including Aung Zaw, the editor and founder of The Irrawaddy and this year's recipient of the Shorenstein Award for Journalism in Asia, will address that question in discussing "Burma's Democracy:  How Real?"

Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) is pleased to announce Aung Zaw as the 2013 recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award. Zaw has been selected for his leadership in establishing independent media in Myanmar (Burma) and his dedication to integrity in reporting on Southeast Asia.

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Aung Zaw

Aung Zaw is the founding editor-in-chief and executive director of The Irrawaddy, an independent Burmese media organization operating in Myanmar and northern Thailand. Zaw has been an active campaigner for democratic reform in Burma/Myanmar over the last two decades. He was awarded the 2010 Prince Claus Fund Award for journalism along with two journalists from Iran and Cuba – and is recognized for his active dedication to achieving democratic governance in Burma and his work to uphold press freedom.

Zaw studied Botany at Rangoon University. As a student activist in Burma, he was part of the 1988 protests in Rangoon against the Burmese military regime of General Ne Win. He was arrested and detained for a week in Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison where he was severely tortured during interrogation about his pro-democracy activities. Upon release Aung Zaw continued to work with the resistance movement until the military staged a coup in September that year and he was forced to leave the country for neighboring Thailand.

Two years later, Aung Zaw founded the Burma Information Group (BIG) in Bangkok, to document human rights violations in Burma. He began to write political commentaries for national newspapers in Thailand and internationally, and in late 1993 launched The Irrawaddy News Magazine in Bangkok, covering Burma affairs. He worked in Bangkok for two years producing The Irrawaddy Magazine until relocating to the more secure position in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand.

In February 2012, Aung Zaw was able to return to his homeland for the first time in more than 20 years for a temporary visit as an independent journalist. By the end of 2012, The Irrawaddy was able to establish a media and news office in central Yangon, returning to Burma/Myanmar to practice independent journalism, whilst retaining a regional office in Thailand.

In 2013, the government lifted ban on The Irrawaddy and other exiled websites, the Irrawaddy English magazine and the Irrawaddy Dateline Current Affairs TV program is available for audiences in Myanmar. Aung Zaw writes for New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Time, The Guardian, Bangkok Post, The Nation and several publications in the Europe. His interviews have also appeared on CN, BBC and Al Jazeera. He is the author of the Face of Resistance and is a recent Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, School of Journalism.

Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow for International Studies at CISAC, joins a panel discussion hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations about tensions in the Asia Pacific. The Jan. 28 event covered disputed islands in the East China and South China seas, their impact on U.S. interests, and recommendations for U.S. policy in terms of preventing military escalation in the region and how to respond if prevention fails.

Watch the event here.