Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
Hard Choices offers a most rewarding perspective on how Southeast Asian states straddle the ongoing tensions among three rarely compatible goals—security, democracy, and regionalism. Empirically rich and topically diverse, [the book] is broad in scope and full of deep analytic insights. It will be appreciated well beyond Southeast Asia." — T. J. PEMPEL, University of California, Berkeley
Southeast Asia faces hard choices. The region’s most powerful organization, ASEAN, is being challenged to ensure security and encourage democracy while simultaneously reinventing itself as a model of Asian regionalism.
Should ASEAN’s leaders defend a member country’s citizens against state predation for the sake of justice—and risk splitting ASEAN itself? Or should regional leaders privilege state security over human security for the sake of order—and risk being known as a dictators’ club? Should ASEAN isolate or tolerate the junta in Myanmar? Is democracy a requisite to security, or is it the other way around? How can democratization become a regional project without first transforming the Association into a “people centered” organization? But how can ASEAN reinvent itself along such lines if its member states are not already democratic?
How will its new Charter affect ASEAN’s ability to make these hard choices? How is regionalism being challenged by transnational crime, infectious disease, and other border-jumping threats to human security in Southeast Asia? Why have regional leaders failed to stop the perennial regional “haze” from brush fires in democratic Indonesia? Does democracy help or hinder nuclear energy security in the region?
In this timely book—the second of a three-book series focused on Asian regionalism—ten analysts from six countries address these and other pressing questions that Southeast Asia faces in the twenty-first century.
“In this delightful volume, a diverse, fresh, and talented group of authors shed new light on Southeast Asia and speak engagingly to wider scholarly questions. Emmerson's introduction sets the tone for an unusually creative edited collection.”
—Andrew MacIntyre, Australian National University
“In Hard Choices, Donald Emmerson has brought together a remarkable group of leading young scholars to write on Southeast Asian regionalism from political-security, economic, and sociological perspectives. His introductory chapter defines the dimensions of regionalism on which the other contributors elaborate in a series of fine essays examining ASEAN’s past, present, and alternative futures. Hard Choices is a landmark study that will be consulted for years to come by scholars and practitioners. Highly recommended.”
—Sheldon Simon, Arizona State University
Examination copies: Desk, examination, or review copies can be requested through Stanford University Press.
Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia
U.S. efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East have long been paralyzed by the "Islamist dilemma"-a fear that Islamist parties will be the prime beneficiaries of any democratic opening, and prove both hostile to American foreign policy goals internationally and to democratic liberties domestically. This fear is much exaggerated, argues Shadi Hamid of the Project on Middle East Democracy, and the U.S. can establish an acceptable modus vivendi with Islamist democratic movements without compromising either its vital security interests or its commitment to democracy.
In video taken October 14, during a debate with former CIA Director James Woolsey, CDDRL Director Michael A. McFaul attacks the idea that America invaded Iraq solely to promote democracy. McFaul argues that, except in a few rare instances, the United States has never invaded a country unless there was a national security concern.
McFaul and Woolsey also discuss mistakes made in the Iraq War and argue whether or not it was beneficial for either America or Iraq. Woolsey believes a "failure" of the Bush Administration was giving Iraq a "constitution that we [the U.S.] drafted."
The event was sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, McFaul debated former CIA Director James Woolsey on international security and how it factors into each presidential campaign's plans for the country. McFaul is a foreign policy advisor to Sen. Barack Obama; Woolsey is an advisor to Sen. John McCain.
An international conference will be convened on February 11-12, 2008 at Stanford University at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center to examine the role of high school history textbooks in the formation of historical memory regarding the events of the Sino-Japanese and Pacific wars and their outcome. Shorenstein APARC researchers have looked at the treatment of those events, in the period from 1931-1951, in the most widely circulated high school history textbooks (national and world history), including those used in college preparatory course, in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Translations of those textbooks into English have been prepared for use by historians and other scholars, allowing a comparative study of how historical memory is being shaped in the school systems.
The conference will have three main goals: first it will ask historians to comment and analyze the treatment of history in those textbooks, comparing it to accepted historical understanding. Second, it will look at the process of textbook writing and revision – in some cases (China and Taiwan particularly), the main textbooks have undergone significant revision recently and our data set includes the old and new versions of history textbooks in use in schools. Third, the conference will examine how the formation of divided memories impacts international relations in East Asia and between the United States and Asia and how this effort to understand this process may aid the goal of reconciliation.
The proceedings of this conference will be the basis of an edited volume, including comparative excerpts from the textbooks themselves, to be published by an academic press in the United States and hopefully in Asia as well. Participants will be asked to prepare a written paper for presentation and for publication.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
At the root of current Middle Eastern foreign policy debates on topics ranging from Iran to Iraq to Israel, is a more fundamental challenge for American policy makers: how to combat the general mistrust citizens of the Arab and Muslim world have of the United States. In his new paper, Shadi Hamid suggests that U.S. support for many of the region's more repressive regimes plays an important -- and counter-productive -- role in its efforts to bring peace and stability to the region.
Pascal Lamy has served as Director-General of the World Trade Organization since September 2005.
Previously, he was the Trade Commissioner of the European Union in Brussels from 1999 to 2004.
From 1994 until 1999, he served as Director-General of the team responsible for restructuring the Credit Lyonnaise.
The beginnings of Mr. Lamy’s career are marked by time spent in civil service at the French Finance Ministry, the Inspection Générale des Finances, and the Treasury Department.
He later became adviser to Economics and Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, and to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. From 1984 to 1994, Mr. Lamy worked in Brussels as chief of staff to Commission President, Jacques Delors.
A member of the French Socialist Party, Mr. Lamy is also politically active in the Mouvement Europeen. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’Honneur and has been honored with several international orders of merit.
THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY ICA
CISAC Conference Room
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Conventional wisdom holds that the United States and the European Union pursue vastly different strategies to promote democracy around the globe. The U.S. is often perceived to rely on coercion, while the EU employs "soft power." This project completed a book demonstrating that American and European strategies to spread democracy display far more similarities than differences. For the first time, leading European and American experts systematically compare U.S.
