Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He serves on the boards of the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and Digital Democracy. Patrick was previously the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. He has consulted for several international organizations on numerous crisis mapping and early warning projects in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Patrick is completing his PhD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His dissertation focuses on the the impact of information and communication technologies on the balance of power between repressive regimes and popular movements. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute's (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School.

For years, Japanese economists and public officials described regional development in East Asia as a unitary thing, something akin to a flock of flying geese -- with Japan as the lead goose, transferring capital and technology to its slower neighbors. But times have changed. For one thing, China is now the biggest bird in East Asia. So what has happened to the traditional "flying geese" pattern of development, and how has this impacted Japan?

Walter Hatch is an associate professor of government and the director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights at Colby College in Maine. He is the author of Asia's Flying Geese: How Regionalization Shapes Japan (Cornell UP, 2010), co-author of Asia in Japan's Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge UP, 1996), and the author and co-author of numerous articles on the politics and political economy of East Asia, especially Japan and China. He is now editing a book about NGOs and civil society in China, and working on his own new book about the way in which war memories continue to haunt international relations in East Asia. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2000.

Alison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights.  A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Law School.   She served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and as Vice-Chair of the Department of Political Science.  In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide).  Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford), which received the 2006 USC Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creativity in Research.  Her book co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets, Multicultural Jurisprudence:  Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense was published in 2009 (Hart) and featured in the California Bar Journal (February issue).  Another collection, Cultural Diversity and Law:  State Responses from Around the World, co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets and Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, was published in 2010 (Bruylant).  Cultural Law:  International, National, and Indigenous, co-authored with James Nafziger and Robert Paterson, was also published 2010 (Cambridge).  Two of her essays appeared in a special issue of Judicature on cross-cultural jurisprudence (March-April 2009) and another on this topic in The Judges' Journal of the American Bar Association (Spring, 2010).  Her current project is a study of the jurisprudence of names. 

Professor Renteln has collaborated with the United Nations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  She lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences.  She has often taught seminars on the rights of ethnic minorities for judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers. During the past few years she participated on panels on cross-cultural justice at the meetings of the American Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the North American South Asian Bar Association, the American Society of Trial Consultants, and others.  She served on several California civil rights commissions and the California committee of Human Rights Watch.  She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the American Society of International Law, the Law and Society Association, and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.

Beth Simmons is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. She received her PhD. from Harvard University in the Department of Government. She has taught international relations, international law, and international political economy at Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard. Her book, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years, 1924-1939, was recognized by the American Political Science Association in 1995 as the best book published in 1994 in government, politics, or international relations. She has worked at the International Monetary Fund with the support of a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship (1995-1996), has spent as year as a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (1996-1997), and a year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2002-2003). She currently serves as Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Her new book entitled Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics is forthcoming this year (2009) from Cambridge University Press. Simmons was elected in April 2009 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Karen Alter's current research investigates how the proliferation of international legal mechanisms is changing international relations.  Her book in progress, The New Terrain of International Law: International Courts in International Politics provides a new framework for comparing and understanding the influence of the twenty-four existing international courts, and for thinking about how different domains of domestic and international politics are transformed through the creation of international courts.     

Alter is author of: The European Court's Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), andEstablishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. (Oxford University Press, 2001) and more than forty articles and book  chapters on the politics of international law and courts.  Recent publications investigate the politics of international regime complexity,  how delegation of authority to international courts reshapes domestic and international relations, and politics in the Andean Community's legal system.

Professor Alter teaches courses on international law, international organizations, ethics in international affairs, and the international politics of human rights at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Alter has been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Howard Foundation research fellow and an Emile Noel scholar at Harvard Law School. Her research has also been supported by the DAAD and France's Chateaubriand fellowship. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation where she is an associate scholar of the Center on Law and Globalization, Northwestern University's School of Law, Harvard University's Center for European Studies, Institute d'Etudes Politiques, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartiges Politik, Universität Bremen, and Seikei University. Fluent in Italian, French and German, Alter serves on the editorial board of European Union Politics and Law and Social Inquiry and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kathryn Sikkink is a Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Minnesota.  She has a M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.  Her publications include Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America;  Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck);  The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp); Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms (co-edited with Sanjeev Khagram and James Riker); and Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina.  Her book Activist Beyond Borders was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, and the International Studies Association Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations.  Her newest book The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2011. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, and has received a Guggenheim fellowship for her research on human rights prosecutions in the world. She is a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Association for Arts and Sciences, and a member of the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, and International Organization. 

Her current research interests focus on the influence of international law on domestic politics, especially in the area of human rights, transnational social movements and networks, and on the role of ideas and norms in international relations and foreign policy. With the support of the Twentieth Century Fund, she is currently involved in a research project on the international human rights idea and the evolution and effectiveness of human rights policies, especially in Latin America.

Natan Sachs is a CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research interest is on the formation of political cleavages and especially the politics of religious identity, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He is also interested in the use of experiments in comparative politics and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia, using experimental methods.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and with the advent of a new Japanese government, the long-simmering concept of an East Asian Community (EAC) has come to a boil. Trilateral discussions among China, Japan, and South Korea--the "Plus Three"--have accelerated, including early steps toward formation of a trilateral free trade area. The Obama administration has responded with new interest in regionalism, including discussion of new trans-Pacific trade agreements and a bid to join the budding East Asia Summit process. In November 2010, the trans-Pacific APEC will convene in Japan, and the next annual meeting, in 2011, will take place in Hawaii.

This period could shape the future of regionalism in East Asia, but many questions have yet to be answered. Will former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's initiative to build a new regional order on the core of Japan-China-ROK ties bear fruit? How does this concept of an EAC compare to other visions of regional integration, from APEC to the ASEAN-plus process? Will the ASEAN member nations cede leadership of the drive for tighter integration to Northeast Asia? Will the gravitational power of China's booming economy overwhelm concerns about its political system, military nontransparency, and possible ambition for regional hegemony? What role will the United States seek to play in Asian regionalism, and what will Asia's response be?

On September 9 and 10, 2010, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University convened the second Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue. This distinguished gathering discussed the latest research into the course of regionalism across several dimensions: regional vs. trans-Pacific trade and production networks; traditional and nontraditional security; the intersection of historical memories and national cultures in forging, or thwarting, a new regional identity; and possible futures for the regional order and how it might interact with other transnational institutions.

The goal of the Dialogue was to facilitate discussion, on an off-the-record basis, among scholars, policymakers, media, and other experts from across Asia and the United States, and to establish trans-Asian networks that focus on issues of common concern.

The first Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue was held September 10-11, 2009, in Kyoto, on the theme of "Energy, Environment, and Economic Growth in Asia."