David D. Yang
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Visiting Scholar 2007-2008<br />CDDRL Pre-Doctoral Fellow 2006 - 2007
David is our inaugural, and hopefully annual, fellow in CDDRL's new Democracy in Taiwan program. He is finishing a cross-country comparative study entitled The Social Basis of the Third Wave: Class, Development, and the Making of the Democratic State in East Asia. He looks in particular at late authoritarian Taiwan and contemporary Singapore. David is interested in the social basis of pro-democratic opposition movements and the political implications of various developmental strategies - corporatist versus pluralist, for example. David has been advised on his thesis by Lynne White, and Atul Kohli at Princeton, as well as Andy Nathan and Sheri Berman at Columbia and Barnard respectively. Before entering the doctoral program at Princeton, David completed an MBA in Economics and International Business at NYU, and a BSc in Computer Science at Brown.
The Afghan Success Story that Failed: How U.S. efforts to bring peace and prosperity to post-war Afghanistan are being derailed by insurgency, drugs, and corruption
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Pamela Constable is the deputy foreign editor of The Washington Post. Previously she covered South Asia for The Washington Post for several years from April 1999, with extensive coverage of Afghanistan as well as both India and Pakistan.n She continues to visit and report from Afghanistan.
Before arriving in New Delhi in 1999, Constable worked for The Post from 1994 to 1998 covering immigration and Hispanic affairs in the Washington area, and reported from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti and Cuba.
Prior to joining The Post, Constable worked for The Boston Globe as deputy Washington bureau chief and foreign policy reporter from June to September 1994. From 1983 until 1992, she was The Globe's roving foreign correspondent, Latin America correspondent and diplomatic correspondent. During this time she reported from Haiti, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and Brazil, as well as in Washington.
Her latest book is Fragments of Grace: My Search For Meaning in the Strife of South Asia. She is the co-author with Arturo Valenzuela of A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet and has written articles for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Current History and other publications. She was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 1990 and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for coverage of Latin America in 1993. Constable is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received a B.A. from Brown University.
CISAC Conference Room
Pamela Constable
The Washington Post
Speaker
Conferences
Michael Mcfaul, Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, comments on the political situation in Thailand
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News
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Explaining the apathetic response of the U.S. administration towards the military coup in Thailand, Michael A. McFaul noted that "nobody wants to go to bat for Thaksin. He's just an odious figure." The problem with this approach, he added, is that "democracy's not about picking winners and losers, it's about defending institutions."
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Democracy and the Muslim World
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Anwar Ibrahim was deputy prime minister of Malaysia in the 1990s. He also served as Malaysia's minister of finance. A sharp disagreement with then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad led to Anwar's dismissal, prosecution--many would say outright persecution--and imprisonment.
Upon regaining his freedom, Anwar took up his current role as an opposition voice. He is currently a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Since his release he has also held lectureships at St. Anthony's College (Oxford) and the School of Advanced International Studies (Johns Hopkins). He has advised the World Bank on questions of governance and accountability. Recently he was appointed honorary president of AccountAbility, a London-based organization that advocates socially responsible business practices.
This event is co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Forum at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
Bechtel Conference Center
Anwar Ibrahim
Former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Finance Minister
Speaker
Conferences
What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable
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In his trenchant analysis, Stephen Biddle ("Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon," March/April 2006) argues that the escalating violence in Iraq is not a nationalist insurgency, as was the Vietnam War, but rather a "communal civil war" and that it must therefore be addressed by pursuing a strategy different from "Vietnamization": if the United States were simply to turn over responsibility for counterinsurgency to the new Iraqi army and police forces, it would risk inflaming the communal conflict, either by empowering the Shiites and the Kurds to slaughter the Sunnis or by enabling a Trojan horse full of Sunni insurgents to penetrate the multiethnic security forces and undermine them.
Biddle is right in many respects. First, Iraq is already in the midst of a very violent civil conflict, which claims 500 to 1,000 lives or more every month. Second, this internal conflict has become primarily communal in nature; as Biddle writes, it is a fight "about group survival." It pits Sunnis against Shiites, in particular, but also Kurds against Sunnis and, more generally, group against group, with smaller minorities coming under attack on multiple fronts. Third, as Biddle warns, the current moderate-intensity communal war could descend into an all-out conflagration, with a high "risk of mass slaughter." Thus the United States cannot in good conscience withdraw from Iraq abruptly -- and doing so would not even be in the United States' national interest -- because that would remove the last significant barrier to a total conflagration.
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Journal Articles
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Foreign Affairs
Greater China's Innovative Capacities: Progress and Challenges
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.
Tsinghua University, Beijing
Workshops
Civil war definition transcends politics
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Commentary
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Is the conflict in Iraq a civil war or not? Debate over this question is largely political. James D. Fearon sets aside politics to explain the meaning of civil war and how it applies to Iraq.
Does the conflict in Iraq amount to a civil war? In many ways, the public debate over this question is largely political. Calling Iraq a "civil war" implies yet another failure for the Bush administration and adds force to the question of whether U.S. troops still have a constructive role to play.
Politics aside, however, the definition of civil war is not arbitrary. For some -- and perhaps especially Americans -- the term brings to mind all-out historical conflicts along the lines of the U.S. or Spanish civil wars. According to this notion, there will not be civil war in Iraq until we see mass mobilization of sectarian communities behind more or less conventional armies.
But a more standard definition is common today:
1) Civil war refers to a violent conflict between organized groups within a country that are fighting over control of the government, one side's separatist goals, or some divisive government policy.
By this measure, the war in Iraq has been a civil war not simply since the escalation of internecine killings following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, but at least since the United States handed over formal control to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.
Here's why: Although the insurgents target the U.S. military, they are also fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to believe that if the United States were suddenly to withdraw its forces, they would not continue their battle to control or shape the government.
Political scientists who study civil war have proposed various refinements to this rough definition to deal with borderline cases. One issue concerns how much killing has to occur -- and at what rate.
2) For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.
Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).
The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.
This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.
And there's another twist to the terminology:
3) If the conflict in Iraq becomes purely a matter of violence between Sunni and Shiite communities driven by revenge and hatred rather than by political goals, many political scientists would say that it is something other than civil war.
Almost no one, for example, calls the Hindu-Muslim violence in India a civil war.
A civil war has to involve attempts to grab power at the center of government or in a given region, or to use violence to change some major government policy.
In Iraq's case, however, the vacuum of power at the center means that communal violence will inevitably be tied to struggles for political power and control.
A final complication concerns the nature of international involvement. Some argue, for example, that the war in Bosnia should be seen as an interstate war rather than a civil war, since the Bosnian Serb forces were armed and directed largely by Belgrade. Post-Mobutu violence in Congo is often termed a civil war, even though fighters have been closely tied to armies from neighboring states.
4) A conflict may be both a civil and an interstate war at the same time.
The Vietnam War, for instance, clearly comprised both a civil war in the South and an interstate war involving the North, the South and the United States.
Iraq may be moving in this direction. The United States and Britain are already openly involved, and such neighboring countries as Iran and Syria are more covertly involved. Not that it matters to the people dying there, but the next debate here may turn on whether what is already a civil war in Iraq should be viewed as an interstate war as well.
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Democracy Promotion and the Presidential Elections in Belarus
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Trygve Olson is a political and public affairs professional who brings nearly twenty years of experience, working on five continents, to his profession. He has served in his present capacity since January 2001, and also served as IRI's Resident Program Officer in Lithuania in 1997.
Prior to rejoining IRI in 2001, Mr. Olson was a founding partner in the grassroots lobbying, political consulting and public affairs firm Public Issue Management, LLP. While a partner at Public Issue Management, Trygve managed a number of high profile grassroots lobbying campaigns for clients in the aviation, technology, and healthcare sectors. For two years he co-managed the grassroots side of a national campaign on behalf of several of America's largest technology companies and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Also during this prior Mr. Olson served as the primary campaign consultant to a coalition that was victorious in the 2000 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections.
A native of Wisconsin, Trygve worked in the Administration of then-Governor Tommy Thompson and also ran a number of Congressional, State Senatorial and State Legislative campaigns during the early and mid 1990's. Over the course of his career in politics, Mr. Olson has worked on in excess of 100 campaigns for all levels of public office from the local to national level. Since first volunteering for IRI in 1995 -- when he went to Poland to run a get out the vote campaign for young people -- Mr. Olson has helped advise political parties and candidates in numerous countries throughout the world including nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Serbia.
Trygve is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He currently makes his home in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife, Erika Veberyte, who serves as the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Speaker of the Lithuanian Parliament.
Encina Basement Conference Room
Trygve Olson
Belarusian Country Director
Speaker
International Republican Institute
Seminars
Adversaries and Partners: The Impact of the Cross-Straits Economic Relationship on the Development of the Taiwanese and Chinese Economies
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The Chen administration has attempted to deal with the growing economic and technological links across the Taiwan Straits through confrontation with and coercion against Taiwanese businesses with investments in the People's Republic of China. These attempts have done little to stop the flow of capital and knowledge from Taiwan to China, but this failure is not necessarily bad for Taiwan even as it is a boon for China. This talk will address in which sectors and in what ways the flow of Taiwanese business activities to China have been beneficial or detrimental to each economy. Looking forward, the talk will also attempt to answer how further integration will benefit each side.
Douglas Fuller has spent over ten years researching technological development in East Asia. Most recently, he completed a doctorate at MIT in political economy. The topic of his thesis was technological development in China's IT industry. For this and previous research, he has interviewed IT firms in Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China and the US. He has published articles in Industry and Innovation and other peer-reviewed journals.
A wine and cheese reception will follow the seminar.
This is the inaugural seminar of the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program and it is co-sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center.
Philippines Conference Room
Doug Fuller
SPRIE Postdoctoral Fellow
Speaker
Seminars