Stressed by Strife: ASEAN from Pattaya to Preah Vihear
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The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is Asia’s most resilient regional organization. Its ambitious new charter aims to foster, in a dynamic but disparate region, a triply integrated region comprising a Political and Security Community, an Economic Community, and a Socio-Cultural Community. The charter’s debut under Thailand’s 2008-09 chairmanship of the Association was badly marred, however, by political strife among Thai factions, clashes on the Thai-Cambodian border, and border-crossing risks of a non-military kind. How have these developments affected ASEAN’s regional performance and aspirations? Are its recent troubles transitional or endemic? Do they imply a need for the Association to reconsider its modus operandi, lest it lose its role as the chief architect of East Asian regionalism?
Dr Thitinan Pongsudhirak is director of the Institute of Security and International Studies and an associate professor of international political economy at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is a prolific author, having written many op eds, articles, chapters, and books on Thailand’s politics, political economy, foreign policy, and media, and on ASEAN and East Asian security and economic cooperation. He has worked for The Nation newspaper (Bangkok), The Economist Intelligence Unit, and Independent Economic Analysis (London). His degrees are from the London School of Economics (PhD), Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (MA), and the University of California (BA). His doctoral study of the 1997 Thai economic crisis won the United Kingdom’s Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics—currently the only work by an Asian scholar to have been so honored.
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Thitinan Pongsudhirak
2010 FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor, Stanford University
Speaker
Seminars
Participatory Development in East Africa's Largest Slum: The Carolina For Kibera Story
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Carolina for Kibera (CFK) inspires and nurtures youth leaders in the slum of Kibera, Kenya through a unique model of participatory development. CFK recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it. CFK's long-term initiatives provide youth opportunities to learn and serve while addressing a wide range of community needs including healthcare, education, waste recycling and reduction, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, and girls' empowerment. CFK's model of participatory to fight abject poverty, and prevent ethnic, gender and religious violence has been internationally recognized, earning awards as a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation "Hero of Global Health" and the 2008 Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Reflections of Hope Award. CFK is a major affiliated entity of UNC based at the Center for Global Initiatives.
Salim Mohamed Salim Mohamed co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Carolina for Kibera for eight years. At the age of 16, he was involved in the development of MYSA - the largest youth sports program in Africa based in the Mathare slum of Nairobi. Salim has helped launch community based sports and development programs in Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria and presented at the International AIDS Conference. He serves as a director for Shoe 4 Africa, an advisor to Global Education Fund and a YES! facilitator. A TED Africa Fellow, he is currently pursuing a master's degree at the University of Manchester.
Rye Barcott While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001, Barcott founded CFK with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed. Barcott served five years in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. In 2006, he was named an ABC World News Person of the Year. A TED Fellow and member of the UNC Chancellor's Innovation Circle, Barcott is writing a book that juxtaposes community organizing and counter-insurgency (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).
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Rye Barcott
Founder (l)
Speaker
Carolina for Kibera (CFK)
Salim Mohamed
Co-Founder (r)
Speaker
Carolina for Kibera (CFK)
Conferences
Does the Law Have a Sense of Humor?
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Does the Law Have a Sense of Humor?
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Toleration and Politics
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Daniel Markovits is Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He has written articles on contract, legal ethics, distributive justice, democratic theory, and other-regarding preferences. Professor Markovits concentrates, in each area, on the ways in which legal orderings engage the human instinct in favor of sociality to sustain cooperation even among persons who pursue conflicting interests and endorse competing moral ideals. He finds respectful relations in surprising places, for example in contracts between self-interested buyers and sellers, litigation between adversary disputants, and political competition between partisan parties. In each case, Markovits argues, seemingly competitive interactions contain, in their immanent logic, forms of reciprocal recognition and respect. After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.
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Daniel Markovits
Professor of Law
Speaker
Yale Law School
Workshops
Does the Law Have a Sense of Humor?
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Albie Sach’s career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen, when as a second year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later, he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar at the age of 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws.
In 1966, he was forced into exile. After spending eleven years studying and teaching law in England, he worked for a further eleven years in Mozambique as law professor and legal researcher. In 1988, he was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Maputo by South African security agents, losing an arm and the sight in one eye.
After recovering from the attack, Justice Sachs devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990, he returned home and, as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC, took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.
In addition to his work on the Court, Justice Sachs has travelled to many countries sharing South African experience in healing divided societies. He is a prolific author in law and philosophy and is engaged in art and architecture.
Bechtel Conference Center
Albie Sachs
Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Speaker
Lectures
The Origins of Authoritarianism in Pakistan
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What ails the Pakistani polity? Since its emergence from the detritus of the British Indian Empire in 1947, it has witnessed four military coups (1958, 1969, 1978 and 1999), long periods of political instability and a persistent inability to consolidate democratic institutions. It also witnessed the loss of a significant portion of its territory (East Pakistan) in 1971 following the brutal suppression of an indigenous uprising in the aftermath of which some ten million individuals sough refuge in India. The flight of the refugees to India and the failure to reach a political resolution to the crisis precipitated Indian military intervention and culminated in the creation of the new state of Bangladesh.
Pakistan's inability to sustain a transition to democracy is especially puzzling given that India too emerged from the collapse of British rule in South Asia. In marked contrast to Pakistan, it has only experienced a brief bout of authoritarian rule (1975-1977) and has managed to consolidate democracy even though the quality of its democratic institutions and their performance may leave much to be desired.
A number of scholars have proffered important explanations for Pakistan's failure to make a successful transition to democracy. This essay will argue that all the extant explanations are, at best, partial and incomplete. It will then demonstrate that the roots of Pakistan's propensity toward authoritarianism must be sought in the ideology, organization and mobilization strategy of the movement for the creation of Pakistan.
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Let's hear from the democracies on Iran, Larry Diamond and Abbas Milani argue in the <i>New York Times</i>
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As the presidential electoral turmoil in Iran continues, pitting supporters of challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President Obama has gotten it right, Larry Diamond and Milani say, "by signaling America's support for peaceful protest, human rights, and the rule of law." More explicit language, or action, would only play into the hands of Iran's conservative elements. But the world has more than 100 other democracies, Diamond and Milani note, arguing "It is time that their voices were heard and their actions felt in Tehran."
Notices of the demise of Iran’s Green Revolution are premature. Without question, the tyrannical triumvirate — Ayotallah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard — have dealt a crippling blow to the popular movement protesting their electoral coup of June 12.
Thousands of Iranians have been arrested and savagely tortured — from street protesters to election campaign organizers for Mir Hussein Moussavi, the likely victor in that contest. Many are now being forced to “confess” to having been agents of the United States or Britain.
We have seen this play before, not simply in Iran but in other tyrannies that suppressed mass movements for democratic change with massive violence and terror.
But Iran in 2009 is not China in 1989, Burma in 1990 or Belarus in 2006. The crisis in the Islamic Republic has exposed and widened massive cracks within the ruling elite. Such divisions are always a sign of an impending crackup of dictatorship.
Despite the rush to bury Iran’s reformist movement as another lost cause, Iran remains at a possible political tipping point. Democracies around the world have a duty — not simply to themselves, but to their strategic interests — to weigh in. They must not be deterred by threats to shun talks over Iran’s nuclear program.
President Obama has gotten it right by signaling America’s support for peaceful protest, human rights and the rule of law. More explicit language, not to mention action, would only play into the hands of the most cynical and vicious conservative elements in Iran. Moreover, with no diplomatic ties and all but no trade with Iran, there is little more the U.S. could do right now to pressure the regime.
But there are over 100 other democracies in the world. It is time that their voices were heard and their actions felt in Tehran.
Britain shares with the U.S. the handicap of a past history of negative interference in Iran. But Britain has diplomatic and economic ties to the regime, and breaking or suspending those will weaken Ayatollah Khamenei and his reactionary allies.
Moreover, Britain can have a unique kind of impact in Iran: For more than a century, Iranians have believed in the omnipotence of the “British hand” in the affairs of their country. Any indication that Britain is no longer willing to do business with the Islamic regime will hearten the Iranian people and undermine the regime’s aura of invincibility.
Germany, France and Italy are major trading partners with Iran. They have little history of colonial interference in Iranian affairs. Their decision to refuse to recognize the Ahmadinejad regime would have an immense effect. More compelling still would be a similar declaration from the entire Group of 8 at its impending summit.
The smaller and less powerful democracies can also have an impact. It would be preposterous for Iranian hardliners to attribute ulterior strategic motives to actions by the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada or Slovenia. If a coalition of such countries were to condemn the crackdown, call for a release of political prisoners and demand full respect for human rights — and back up these positions with a downgrading of diplomatic and trade ties — this would send a powerful message to both sides in Iran.
Many democracies around the world, including the above, have diplomatic ties with Iran. It is important that they maintain their embassies in Tehran. But they should now refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s government.
The most powerful coalition of democracies in the world, the 27-member European Union, is now debating whether to withdraw their ambassadors from Tehran in protest over the detention of the British Embassy’s Iranian personnel.
The withdrawal of E.U. ambassadors would send a stunning message to the Iranian hardliners that coups and bloody suppression of peaceful protests carry a heavy price in international standing.
With the simple diplomatic act of denying legitimacy — something nearly all democratic forces in Iran are now asking of the world — the democracies of the world can give a needed boost to the forces of democratic change in Iran and earn the lasting gratitude of a movement that will eventually triumph.
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