Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats
The post-World War II fabric of global security, designed and maintained by the United States, has dangerously frayed. Built for a different age, current international institutions are ill-equipped to address today's most pressing global security challenges, ranging from climate change and nuclear proliferation to civil strife and terrorism.
Revitalizing the institutions of cooperation will require a new conceptual foundation for global security. The "national sovereignty" of the twentieth century must give way to "responsible sovereignty"-a principle requiring nations not only to protect their own people, but also to cooperate across borders to safeguard common resources and tackle common threats. Achieving this will require American leadership and commitment to a rule-based international order.
In Power and Responsibility Bruce Jones, Carlos Pascual, and Stephen Stedman provide the conceptual underpinnings for a new approach to sovereignty and cooperation. They present ideas for the new U.S. administration, working with other global powers, to promote together what they cannot produce apart-peace and stability. Recommendations follow more than a year of consultations with policymakers and experts all over the world. They reflect the guidance of the Managing Global Insecurity Project Advisory Group, composed of prominent figures from the United States and abroad. They call for the new president and key partners to launch a 2009 campaign to revitalize international cooperation and rejuvenate international institutions.
As Washington prepares for a presidential transition, the time has arrived for a serious rethinking of American policy. For the United States, this is no time to go it alone.
Reckoning with the Past: Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia
This colloquia will bring several scholars to Stanford to discuss the "history problem" in a series of lectures analyzing the ways in which past conflict has or has not been addressed and resolved in contemporary Asia. Examining issues of memory and forgetting, guilt and innocence, apology and restitution from diverse social science perspectives, our speakers investigate the handling of the violent past both within and between countries in contexts ranging from international diplomacy to the broadcast media to mass education.
Defeating Islamist Radicalism: Building a Global Counter-extremism Network
C. Holland Taylor is an expert on Islam and the process of Islamization in Southeast Asia, having lived, studied and worked in the Muslim world, from Iran to Indonesia, over a period of more than four decades.
Mr. Taylor established LibForAll Foundation (www.libforall.org) in 2003, together with former Indonesian president Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, whom the Wall Street Journal has called "the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world" and "easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism." Under their leadership, LibForAll has grown into the leading NGO developing and operationalizing successful counter-extremism strategies worldwide.
Their inspiration lay in the heroic example of President Wahid's own 16th century Javanese ancestors, whose deft use of soft and hard power defeated Muslim extremists, and guaranteed freedom of religion for all Javanese, two centuries before the Bill of Rights led to the separation of church and state in the U.S.
Based on lessons derived from this struggle, LibForAll is forging a Global Rahmatan lil ‘Alamin ("Blessing for All Creation") Counter-Extremism Network of top Muslim opinion leaders in the fields of religion, education, pop culture, government, business and the media, who are joining to proclaim, with one voice, that radical Islam has no theological validity, and thereby mobilize the "great silent majority" of moderate, peace-loving Muslims to reject the extremists' ideology of hatred and violence.
This strategy has resulted in a number of world-class achievements, causing Wall Street Journal foreign columnist Bret Stephens to proclaim: "LibForAll is a model of what a competent public diplomacy effort in the Muslim world should look like."
In his presentation, Mr. Taylor will explain key elements of LibForAll's ground-breaking strategy and present examples of world class achievements, including: a "musical jihad" against religious hatred and terrorism; development of the first part of a unique 26-episode counter-extremism television/video series (Ocean of Revelation); and convening an historic religious summit where top Muslim leaders condemned the evils of Holocaust denial - generating worldwide publicity that effectively countered the December 2006 Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.
Mr. Taylor's work with LibForAll follows a career as a successful entrepreneur and global telecom executive, during which he served as CEO of USA Global Link, and was credited by numerous leading publications as one of the essential catalysts in the deregulation of the global telecommunications industry.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
The Tamogami Affair: History and Security in Northeast Asia
Reckoning with the Past: Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia
Is it possible to come to terms with the violent past and foster reconciliation with former foes, what are the obstacles and how can they be overcome? These are some of the questions we are asking in the "Divided Memories and Reconciliation" project. This colloquia will bring several scholars to Stanford to discuss the ‘history problem' in a series of lectures analyzing the ways in which past conflict has or has not been addressed and resolved in contemporary Asia. Examining issues of memory and forgetting, guilt and innocence, apology and restitution from diverse social science perspectives, our speakers investigate the handling of the violent past both within and between countries in contexts ranging from international diplomacy to the broadcast media to mass education.
In November of 2008, the head of the Japanese air self defense force, General Tamogami Toshio, resigned in a swirl of controversy over an essay he wrote entitled "Was Japan An Aggressor Nation?" The essay argued that Japan's seizure of Korea and of northern China was a legal act and that it had pursued a moderate policy of modernization in its colonial rule of Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, superior to the colonial rule of the Western imperial powers. General Tamogami also argued, in his published essay, that Japan's war with the United States was a result of being "ensnared in a trap that was carefully laid by the United States to draw Japan into a war." What is the story behind this controversial incident? What does it mean when a senior Japanese military officer holds such views of the wartime past? What are the implications of this for Japan's security relations with its neighbors and the United States?
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel C. Sneider
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Daniel C. Sneider is a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford. His own research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea. Since 2017, he has been based partly in Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, where he is working on a diplomatic history of the creation and management of the U.S. security alliances with Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. Sneider contributes regularly to the leading Japanese publication Toyo Keizai as well as to the Nelson Report on Asia policy issues.
Sneider is the former Associate Director for Research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. At Shorenstein APARC, Sneider directed the center’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, a comparative study of the formation of wartime historical memory in East Asia. He is the co-author of a book on wartime memory and elite opinion, Divergent Memories, from Stanford University Press. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, of Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, from Routledge and of Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, from University of Washington Press.
Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. He is the co-editor of Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, distributed by Brookings Institution Press, 2007; of First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier, 2009; as well as of Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration, 2010. Sneider’s path-breaking study “The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under the Democratic Party of Japan” appeared in the July 2011 issue of Asia Policy. He has also contributed to other volumes, including “Strategic Abandonment: Alliance Relations in Northeast Asia in the Post-Iraq Era” in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options, Korea Economic Institute, 2008; “The History and Meaning of Denuclearization,” in William H. Overholt, editor, North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019; and “Evolution or new Doctrine? Japanese security policy in the era of collective self-defense,” in James D.J. Brown and Jeff Kingston, eds, Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, Routledge, December 2017.
Sneider’s writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. He is frequently cited in such publications.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent. His twice-weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective was syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the Mercury News. From 1990 to 1994, he was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Prior to that he was a correspondent in India, covering South and Southeast Asia. He also wrote widely on defense issues, including as a contributor and correspondent for Defense News, the national defense weekly.
Sneider has a BA in East Asian history from Columbia University and an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.