Apparel export quotas that defined the worldwide garment trade for four decades ended on 1 January 2005. Trade data since then suggest that production has shifted from Southeast Asia to China. For the most developed countries in Southeast Asia, the loss of the garment industry will be a tolerable inconvenience. But it will devastate countries whose economies depend on such exports. An extreme example is Cambodia, three-fourths of whose exports are apparel. Are the threads from which these poor economies hang about to break? Is this industrys migration out of Southeast Asia inevitable and irrevocable? What, if anything, can governments and companies in the region do?

Geoffrey Stafford earned his PhD in political science (1998) and an MA in Southeast Asian studies (1996) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing his dissertation, Globalization Amid Diversity: Economic Development Policy in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia 1987-1997, he joined a large retailer to work on issues of corporate social responsibility in the global garment-manufacturing arena. In that capacity he is now analyzing the effects of quota termination on the world apparel industry. He has taught the politics of Southeast Asia at the University of San Francisco.

Page Fortna is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars. She is the author of Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004), and has published articles in World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. She is currently working on a project evaluating the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars, as well as a project on long-term historical trends in war termination.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, she is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She has also been a visiting fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003). Before coming to Columbia, Fortna was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at CISAC. Her graduate work was done in the Government Department at Harvard University (Ph.D. 1998). Before graduate school, she worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

The panelists will discuss the history and future of India-Pakistan relations, focusing on the most persistent conflict between the two neighboring countries, Kashmir. Since 1947 both countries have defied numerous international attempts at resolution and in 1998 entered its most dangerous phase when both India and Pakistan became nuclear powers.

Rafiq Dossani, senior research scholar at Shorenstein APARC, is responsible for developing and directing the South Asia Initiative. Dossani earlier worked for the Robert Fleming Investment Banking group, first as CEO of its India operations and later as head of its San Francisco operations. He has also been the Chairman and CEO of a stockbroking firm on the OTCEI exchange in India, the Deputy Editor of Business India Weekly, and a professor of finance at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book is Telecommunications Reform in India, published in spring 2002 by Greenwood Press.

Dossani holds a B.A. in economics from St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, India; an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India; and a Ph.D. in finance from Northwestern University. He is currently undertaking projects on business process outsourcing (with the support of the Sloan Foundation), innovation and entrepreneurship in information technology in India, the institutional phasing-in of power-sector reform in Andhra Pradesh, and security in the Indian subcontinent.

Henry S. Rowen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Management at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and a member of Stanford's Asia/Pacific Research Center. He was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the U.S. Department of Defense from 1989 to 1991. He was also Chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. Rowen served as President of the RAND Corporation from 1967 to 1972 and was assistant director, U.S. Bureau of the Budget, from 1965 to 1966. He is a member of the Defense Department's Policy Board.

Rowen is an expert on international security, economic development, Asian economics and politics, as well as U.S. institutions and economic performance. His current research focuses on economic growth prospects for the developing world, political and economic change in East Asia, and the tenets of federalism.

This is the first lecture in ICC's CURRENT AFFAIRS series presented in collaboration with Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.