A year has passed since the Japanese government embarked on the new economic policy package called “Abenomics” with three “arrows”: aggressive monetary easing, flexible fiscal policy, and a growth strategy. The package is designed to bring the Japanese economy out of 20 years of stagnation and 15 years of deflation, and put it on a sustainable growth path. How effective has the policy package been during the first year of the Abe administration?  Will it succeed in bringing sustainable growth to Japan?  Professor Takatoshi Ito, a prominent expert on the Japanese economy, tackles these questions.

Takatoshi Ito, Professor at Faculty of Economics and Dean of Graduate School of Public
Policy, University of Tokyo, has taught extensively both in the United States and Japan,
including at University of Minnesota, Hitotsubashi University, and Harvard University.
He held visiting professor positions at Harvard University (1986-87 and 1992-94), Stanford
University (as National Fellow; 1984-85); Columbia Business School (fall semester, 2009),
and Tun Ismail Ali Chair Professor at University of Malaya (summer semester, 2008). His
public sector experiences include Senior Advisor in the Research Department, IMF
(1994-97); Deputy Vice Minister for International Affaires at Ministry of Finance
(1999-2001); and a member of the Prime Minister’s Council of Economic and Fiscal
Policy (2006-08). He is an author of many books including The Japanese Economy (MIT
Press), The Political Economy of the Japanese Monetary Policy (MIT Press), and
Financial Policy and Central Banking in Japan (MIT Press), and more than 50
refereed academic journal articles on international finance and the Japanese economy,
including ones in American Economic Review and Econometrica. He has distinguished
academic and research appointments such as President of the Japanese Economic
Association in 2004; Fellow of Econometric Society, since 1992; Research Associate at
National Bureau of Economic Research since 1985; and Faculty Fellow, Centre for
Economic Policy Research, since 2006. His research interest includes capital flows and
currency crises, microstructures of the foreign exchange rates, and inflation targeting. He
contributes frequently op-ed columns and articles to Financial Times, Nihon Keizai Shinbun,
Mainichi Shinbun, and Toyo Keizai Weekly.

By any measure, China’s economy and defense budget are second only to those of the United States. Yet tremendous uncertainties persist concerning China’s military development and national trajectory, and areas with greater information available often conflated misleadingly. Fortunately, larger dynamics elucidate both areas. Particularly since the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, China has made rapid progress in aerospace and maritime development, greatly facilitating its military modernization. The weapons and systems that China is developing and deploying fit well with Beijing’s geostrategic priorities. Here, distance matters greatly: after domestic stability and border control, Beijing worries most about its immediate periphery, where its unresolved disputes with neighbors and outstanding claims lie primarily in the maritime direction. Accordingly, while it would vastly prefer pressuring concessions to waging war, China is already capable of threatening potential opponents’ military forces should they intervene in crises over islands and maritime claims in the Yellow, East, and South China Seas and the waterspace and airspace around them. Far from mainland China, by contrast, it remains ill-prepared to protect its own forces from robust attack. Fortunately for Beijing, the non-traditional security focus of its distant operations makes conflict unlikely; remedying their vulnerabilities would be difficult and expensive. Despite these larger patterns, critical unknowns remain concerning China’s economic development, societal priorities, industrial efficiency, and innovation capability. Dr. Erickson will examine these and related issues to probe China’s development trajectory and future place in the international system. 

The views expressed by Dr. Erickson are his alone, and do not represent the policies or estimates of any organization with which he is affiliated.

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson is an Associate Professor in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a core founding member of the department’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI). He is an Associate in Research at Harvard University’s John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (2008-). Erickson also serves as an expert contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report (中国实时报), for which he has authored or coauthored 25 articles. In spring 2013, he deployed in the Pacific as a Regional Security Education Program scholar aboard USS Nimitz (CVN68), Carrier Strike Group 11.

Erickson received his Ph.D. and M.A. in international relations and comparative politics from Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a B.A. in history and political science. He has studied Mandarin in the Princeton in Beijing program at Beijing Normal University’s College of Chinese Language and Culture and Japanese language, politics, and economics in the year-long Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University.

Erickson’s research, which focuses on Asia-Pacific defense, international relations, technology, and resource issues, has been published widely in English- and Chinese-language edited volumes and in such peer-reviewed journals as China Quarterly, Asian Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Orbis, Asia Policy (forthcoming January 2014), and China Security; as well as in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, Joint Force Quarterly, China International Strategy Review (published in Chinese-language edition, forthcoming in English-language edition January 2014), and International and Strategic Studies Report (Center for International and Strategic Studies, Peking University). Erickson has also published annotated translations of several Chinese articles on maritime strategy. His publications are available at <www.andrewerickson.com> and <www.chinasignpost.com>.

This event is co-sponsored with CEAS and is part of the China under Xi Jinping series.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Shiri Krebs is a JSD Candidate at Stanford Law School, specializing in international criminal and humanitarian law. She was recently awarded the Christiana Shi Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in International Studies, and was also named the Zukerman Fellow, and Law and International Security Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Her doctoral dissertation focuses on war crimes investigations and fact-finding during armed conflicts. This interdisciplinary research project combines theories and methods from law, psychology, sociology and political science, including online survey experiments.

From 2005 to 2010 Shiri served as legal advisor on international law matters in the Chief-Justice's chambers, the Israeli Supreme Court. During that time she has taught public international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a teaching assistantship which granted her the Dean's award for excellent junior faculty members, as well as 'best teacher' award. After leaving the Supreme Court, Shiri joined the Israeli Democracy Institute as a researcher, working on 'Terrorism and Democracy' projects, and publishing frequent op-eds in various newspapers and blogs.

In September 2010 Shiri started her graduate studies at Stanford Law School. Her Masters thesis - an empirical analysis of preventive detention cases - was presented in several international conferences and has won the Steven M. Block Civil Liberties Award. 

In 2012, while working on her dissertation, Shiri was appointed as a Teaching Scholar at Santa Clara University School of Law, teaching international criminal law and international humanitarian law. She is currently serving as a Teaching Assistant for CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN).

Ifat Maoz is a Full Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism, former Head of the Smart Family Institute of Communications at the Hebrew University (2008-2013), Director of the Swiss Center and Graduate Program of Conflict Studies (on Sabbatical leave 2013-14) and holds the Danny Arnold Chair in Communication. Prof. Maoz is a social psychologist researching psychology and media in conflict and intergroup relations. She has been a visiting scholar at the Psychology Department of Stanford University (1996) and a senior research fellow at the Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College (2002-3, 2006-8). Her current main interests include psychological, moral and media-related aspects in conflict and peace-making, cognitive processing of social and political information, dynamics of intergroup communication in conflict, models of intergroup encounters, audience responses, and public opinion in conflict and peace making. On sabbatical leave, Stanford University, Department of Psychology.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: While the overall record of compliance with interstate territorial agreement since 1815 is quite high, Europe experienced a disproportionate share of treaty failures compared to other regions of the world. In Europe, treaties were frequently made and frequently broken; everywhere else, the dominant pattern has been for treaties to be rarely made and rarely broken. I argue that this pattern arose due to multilateral and hierarchical nature of border settlements in Europe, which was heavily influenced by the region’s great powers. Although great powers often imposed treaty terms on other states, enforcement was, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, actively undermined by their own actions. Using a new data set on interstate territorial conflicts and agreements, I show that the fates of border settlements in Europe were highly interdependent and vulnerable to contagion, either failing or succeeding en masse. By contrast, in other regions, where border settlements tended to be bilaterally determined, treaty failures were less likely to cluster in time. In addition to their implications for the study of treaty compliance and conflict contagion, these results speak to the promise and dangers of externally-imposed peace agreements.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Kenneth A. Schultz is professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His research examines international conflict and conflict resolution, with a particular focus on the domestic political influences on foreign policy choices. His most recent work deals with the origins and resolution of territorial conflicts between states. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2001), World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (with David Lake and Jeffry Frieden, Norton, 2013), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. He was the recipient the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association, and a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, given by Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Key human rights instruments and leading scholars argue that minority language rights should be treated as human rights, both because language is constitutive of an individual’s cultural identity and because linguistic pluralism increases diversity. These treaties and academics assign the value of linguistic pluralism in diversity. But, this paper demonstrates, major human rights courts and quasi-judicial institutions are not, in fact, prepared to force states to swallow the dramatic costs entailed by a true diversity-protecting regime. Outside narrow exceptions or a path dependent national-political compromise, these enforcement bodies continuously allow the state to actively incentivize assimilation into the dominant culture and language of the majority. The minority can still maintain its distinct language, but only at its own cost. The slippage between the promise of rights and their actual interpretation carries some important political and economic benefits, but the resulting legal outcome does not provide the robust protection of diversity to which lip service is paid.  Importantly, the assimilationist nature of the jurisprudence is not indifferent to human rights. However, instead of advancing maximal linguistic diversity as a preeminent norm, the regime that is applied by judicial bodies supports a different set of human rights, those protecting linguistic minorities from discrimination, and promoting equal access of the group to market and political institutions.  The result is a tension between two human rights values: pluralism and equality.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Moria Paz is a Law and International Security Fellow at CISAC. She was an affiliate at CISAC from February 2012-July 2013. Before joining CISAC, she was a Lecturer at Stanford Law School and the Teaching Fellow of the Stanford Program for International Legal Studies (SPILS). Her current research examines issues of state control and freedom of movement through the entry point of travel documents. Earlier work examined the intersection between minorities, language rights, and international law. Moria received her S.J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, she was awarded a number of fellowships, including at the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, The European Law Research Center, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.