Cas Mudde is a senior lecturer and vice-chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp. He is also the co-founder and convener of the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy. Mr. Mudde is the co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Extremism & Democracy book series, which has covered topics such as terrorism in the United States, extremism and terrorism, freedom of speech, and extreme right activists. His current project is a research monograph entitled Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. From January through June of 2006, Mr. Mudde has been a Fulbright EU Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Comparative European Studies and the Department of Political Science of Rutgers University. He is teaching an undergraduate course on "Radical Right Politics in Western Democracies" as well as leading a series of workshops on "Contentious and Extreme politics" for graduate students.

Mr. Mudde received his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Leiden. Prior to joining the University of Antwerp in July 2002, he taught at the Central European University and the University of Edinburgh. Additionally, Mr. Mudde has held visiting positions at New York University, Univerzita Karlova, University Jaume I, and the University of California Santa Barbara.

On May 20-21, 2006, the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) of Stanford University and the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy (CISTP) of Tsinghua University will co-sponsor a workshop in Beijing, China, with the collaboration of Zhongguancun Science Park and the Industrial Technology Research Institute. The English version of the proceedings will be published by SPRIE.

Theme and Topics

The theme is the progress in and challenges to Greater China's innovative capacities. The workshop will include discussions of key drivers of innovative capacity: the inputs, processes, institutions, management strategies and outputs, including evidence of innovative capacities as demonstrated in new products, processes, services or business models.

The workshop will focus on information technology and telecommunications, focusing on development within and linkages among Mainland China and Taiwan, plus Singapore and Silicon Valley. Workshop sessions will include:

Statistical indicators

Corporate R&D: Multinational and domestic firms

University and research institute R&D

Science and technology human resources

Regional innovation

New technologies and business models

Papers invited include case studies of products and of firms, analysis of trends and cross-industry or cross-regional comparisons.

Workshop Format

Attendance at the two-day workshop will be by invitation only. More than twenty papers will be presented and discussed by a group of international scholars; panel participants will include senior industry leaders and government policy makers. The workshop format will facilitate discussions.

Sonja Schmid is a social science research associate at Stanford University. Having received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, she is now a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and affiliated with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford. Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. She is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. In addition, she is involved in an international research project on Cold War Technopolitics and Colonialism, where she works on Soviet technology transfer to Central and Eastern Europe. Her research interests also include risk communication, and the popularization of science and technology, subjects on which she has published in the past.

The United Nations Secretariat--the main part of the UN bureaucracy directly under the Secretary-General--has arguably changed or been challenged more than any other part of the UN system in recent years, with more and more mandates and rising expectations. Though much attention has been given to the reform of the Security Council, and though Washington has made UN 'management reform' a core pillar of its UN policy since the Oil-for-Food scandal, the UN Secretariat has nevertheless proved singularly impervious to even the common sense suggestions for improvement. In many ways, there is a greater gap today than at any time in the past between what the Secretariat does, what it's meant to do, and the capacity it has. Why has improvement been so difficult and what have been the recurrent mistakes of UN reform efforts? With the election of a new Secretary-General due in late 2006, can we think about the UN bureaucracy in a different and more practical way?

Thant Myint-U is a visiting senior fellow at the International Peace Academy. He is also a senior advisor to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council and a Fellow of the Cambridge University Centre for History and Economics.

From 2000-2006 he worked in the United Nations Secretariat, first for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and then for the Department of Political Affairs (DPA). From 2004-5 he was Chief of DPA's Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political and in 2005-6 he was a Senior Political Officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In 2004 he was also a member of the Secretariat of the Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

Thant Myint-U has also served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, with UNTAC in Cambodia in 1992-3 and with UNPROFOR and UNMIBH in the former Yugoslavia from 1994-6. In 1994 he was the UN's senior spokesman in Sarajavo.

From 1994-1999 Thant Myint-U was a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where he researched and taught Asian and British imperial history. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1988, his master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1992 and his PhD in history from Cambridge University in 1996.

He is the author of several published and broadcast works, including two books: The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps: Remembering Burma's Past (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006 forthcoming).

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

David Hafemeister is a Science Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (2005-6). He is also Professor (emeritus) of Physics at California Polytechnic State University. He spent a dozen years in Washington as Professional Staff Member, Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Governmental Affairs (1990-93 on arms control treaties at the end of the Cold War), Science Advisor to Senator John Glenn (1975-77), Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Benson and Deputy-Under Secretary Nye (1977-78), Visiting Scientist in the State Department's Office of Nuclear Proliferation Policy (1979), the Office of Strategic Nuclear Policy (1987) and Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences (2000-02). He also held appointments at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and the Lawrence-Berkeley, Argonne and Los Alamos national laboratories. He was Chair of the APS Forum on Physics and Society (1985-6) and the APS Panel on Public Affairs (1996-7). He has written/edited ten books and 140 articles and was awarded the APS Szilard award in 1996.

Jacob N. Shapiro is a graduate student in political science at Stanford University and a homeland security fellow at CISAC. He is also an associate at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy and teaches on terrorist financing at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research focuses on the organizational dynamics of terrorist groups. His current projects use economic and sociological organization theory to examine the interactions between individual motivations and organizational structure in covert groups. As a Naval Reserve officer he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Warfare Development Command. Prior to attending Stanford, he served on active duty at Special Boat Team 20 and onboard the USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968). He received his BA with honors in political science from the University of Michigan.

About the speaker: Achin Vanaik, fellow and board member of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam is one of the most important analysts of contemporary Indian politics. The author of The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (1990), The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (1997) and Globalization and South Asia (2004.)

Vanaik has served on the board of directors of GreenPeace (India), and as an assistant editor for The Times of India. He writes regularly for the Economic and Political Weekly, The Times and The Telegraph and has written extensively on the nuclear question in south Asia.

Dr. Vanaik's lecture is co-sponsored with the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.