Lyushun Shen earned his doctorate in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He started his career at the School of Law, University of Maryland before deciding to become a professional diplomat.  He has enjoyed a distinguished career serving Taiwan in its overseas missions in America and Europe, including in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Geneva and Brussels.  Prior to his current appointment he was Taiwan’s representative to the European Union. His publications include:  “The Republic of China’s Perspective on the US Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988” (The Chinese Yearbook of International Law and Affairs, 1989), The Issue of US Arms Sales and Peking’s Policy toward Taiwan (Taipei, 1986), “Is Peking’s Claim over Taiwan Internationally Recognized?” Monograph Series of the Asia and World Forum (Taipei, 1984), “The Washington-Peking Controversy over US Arms Sales to Taiwan: Diplomacy of Ambiguity and Escalation” (The Chinese Yearbook of International Law and Affairs, 1982), and “The Taiwan Issue in Peking’s Foreign Policy during the 1970’s, A Systematic Review” (The Chinese Yearbook of International Law and Affairs, 1981).

In this special event, Vice Foreign Minister Shen will reflect on the century-long relationship between the Republic of China and the United States, and address the future prospects and challenges of this relationship. 

Daniel Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  His research focuses on ethnic politics, research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His work investigates, among other topics, the sources of ethnic identification and the political, social and economic outcomes that ethnicity affects-coalition-building, voting, collective action, public goods provision, and economic growth-with special attention to the mechanisms through which it has its impact. His methodological approach is to find creative ways to maximize leverage for making strong descriptive and causal claims, through the use of experiments (in the lab, in the field, and occurring "naturally"), new data sources (including the re-appropriation of data collected for other purposes), and the adoption of techniques from other disciplines such as satellite geography, public health, and behavioral economics.

His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains why and when politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. He has received several awards for his work, including the Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (2006 and 2010), the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (2008), the Michael Wallerstein Award for the best article in Political Economy (2008), the best book award from the African Politics Conference Group (2006), and the Sage Award for the best paper in Comparative Politics presented at the APSA annual meeting (2004). He has been a Harvard Academy Scholar (1995-98), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2001-02), a Carnegie Scholar (2003-05) and, this year, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2010-11). He currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics, PS, and the Annual Review of Political Science. He is the co-founder of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE). He received his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from Harvard University. Before moving to MIT, he taught for twelve years at UCLA.

Stephen Stedman joined CISAC in 1997 as a senior research scholar, and was named a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC and professor of political science (by courtesy) in 2002. He served as the center's acting co-director in 2002-03. Stedman is the former director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and is a director of 'Managing Global Insecurity,' a joint project with Stanford, New York University and the Brookings Institution. 

Stedman's research addresses the future of international organizations and institutions, an area of study inspired by his work at the United Nations. In 2003, he was recruited to serve as the research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The panel was created by then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to analyze global security threats and propose far-reaching reforms to the international system. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to remain at the U.N. as an assistant secretary-general to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to CISAC.

Before coming to Stanford, Stedman was an associate professor of African studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. In 1993, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, where he studied the negotiations for a new constitution. He was an election observer in Angola in 1992 and in South Africa in 1994. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations on issues of peacekeeping in civil war, light weapons proliferation and conflict in Africa, and preventive diplomacy.

Stedman has taught courses on international conflict management, war in the 20th century, and the Rwandan genocide. In 2000, Scott Sagan and he founded the CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. From 1997 to 2003, Stedman and his wife, Corinne Thomas, were the resident fellows in Larkin House, the second largest all-frosh residence. Stedman received his PhD in political science from Stanford in 1988.