The Honorable Alejandro Toledo was democratically elected President of Peru from July 2001-July 2006.

He was born in a small and remote village in the Peruvian Andes, 12,000 feet above sea level. He is one of sixteen brothers and sisters from a family of extreme poverty. At the age of six, he worked as a street shoe shiner and simultaneously sold newspapers and lotteries to supplement the family income.

Thanks to an accidental access to education, Dr. Toledo was able to go from extreme poverty to the most prestigious academic centers of the world, later becoming one of the most prominent democratic leaders of Latin America. He is the first Peruvian president of indigenous descent to be democratically elected in five hundred years.

He received a BA from San Francisco University in Economics and Business Administration. From Stanford University, he received a MA in Economics of Human Resources, a MA in Economics, and a PhD in Economics of Human Resources.

He was born in a small and remote village in the Peruvian Andes, 12,000 feet above sea level. He is one of sixteen brothers and sisters from a family of extreme poverty. At the age of six, he worked as a street shoe shiner and simultaneously sold newspapers and lotteries to supplement the family income.

Thanks to an accidental access to education, Dr. Toledo was able to go from extreme poverty to the most prestigious academic centers of the world, later becoming one of the most prominent democratic leaders of Latin America. He is the first Peruvian president of indigenous descent to be democratically elected in five hundred years.

He received a BA from San Francisco University in Economics and Business Administration. From Stanford University, he received a MA in Economics of Human Resources, a MA in Economics, and a PhD in Economics of Human Resources.

This is the second lecture in a series of lectures Dr. Toledo will give. His final lecture will be on May 14th.

Jared Genser is an attorney in the global government relations group of DLA Piper US LLP in Washington, D.C. and President of Freedom Now (www.freedom-now.org), a non-profit organization that works to free prisoners of conscience worldwide through legal, political, and public relations advocacy efforts. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and in Winter 2008 will be an Adjunct Professor Law at the University of Michigan Law School teaching a seminar entitled "The UN Security Council in the 21st Century: Operations, Impact, and Reform." Genser was a 2006-2007 Visiting Fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy. His human rights clients have included former Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Aung San Suu Kyi, Desmond Tutu, and Elie Wiesel. Previously, Genser was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, the global strategy consulting firm. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University, a Master in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he was an Alumni Public Service Fellow, and a J.D., cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. He has published op-eds on human rights topics in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal Asia, International Herald Tribune, The Nation (Bangkok), The Independent (UK), and The Star (Johannesburg), among others.

Excerpt from page 4 of John R. Bowen's "If Citizenship is Political Community, then Which Communities Count? Borders and boundaries in France and Indonesia":

But these acts of invoking citizenship as participatory membership in order to support citizenship as the territorial state can open the door to other, alternative claims about political community, claims that challenge the postulates of territorial boundedness and legal uniformity.

It is these challenges to the national model that I wish to address, doing so by looking at some current developments in the two places where I continue to work, France and Indonesia. In France efforts to strengthen territorial control and internal uniformity have the upper hand, but they have encountered claims that cities should run their own affairs and that long-term residents must be fully incorporated into the political community. In Indonesia it is rather arguments based on participatory membership that are on the rise, and they draw on pre-national institutions of local control and Islamic norms; in turn, however, they are challenged by those in the state and the army who privilege a logic of the territorial state. The objects of debate are in some sense, mirror images - in France, external borders; in Indonesia, internal boundaries - but both debates concern the legitimacy of alternative ideas of political community.

About the Author

John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research explores broad social transformations now taking place in the worldwide Muslim community, including special emphasis on Muslim life in Indonesia. His research focuses on the role of cultural forms (religious practices, aesthetic genres, legal discourse) in processes of social change. In most of his work he has looked outward from a longterm research site in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia, to the broader transformations taking place in the Indonesian nation and elsewhere around the globe.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center