David Pressman is an American human rights lawyer and former aide to United States Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Pressman served as an advisor to Secretary Janet Napolitano and Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. Recently he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council at the White House, where he coordinates the Government's efforts to prevent and respond to mass atrocities, genocide, and war crimes.

Pressman also advises a number of highly-visible individuals on foreign policy and related advocacy strategies. A 2008 Los Angeles Times article referred to him as George Clooney's "consigliere." With George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Jerry Weintraub, Pressman co-founded Not On Our Watch, a leading advocacy and grantmaking organization focused on raising awareness about mass-atrocities.

Taiwan’s special municipality elections have been viewed by many as the “mid-term” for the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, bearing important political significance for the 2012 presidential election. In this special seminar, Professor Yun-han Chu, one of the leading political scientists in Taiwan and also President of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, will analyze the recent special municipality elections and their implications for Taiwan’s future political trends. Professor Chu will provide firsthand information about these recent election campaigns and what they reveal about the state of democracy in Taiwan. In analyzing the election results, he will also shed light on how the race for the presidency in 2012 is shaping up.

Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He serves concurrently as president of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Professor Chu received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy and democratization. He is a three-time recipient of the Outstanding Research Award from Taiwan’s National Science Council. He currently serves on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of East Asian Studies and Journal of Democracy. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of eleven books. Among his recent English publications are Crafting Democracy in Taiwan (Institute for National Policy Research, 1992), Consolidating Third-Wave Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), China Under Jiang Zemin (Lynne Reinner, 2000), and The New Chinese Leadership (Cambridge University Press, 2004). His works have also appeared in some leading journals including World Politics, International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Asian Survey.

In this special seminar, Professor John F. Copper will introduce his new book on Taiwan during the Chen Shui-bian era. This is one of the very first books in the western scholarship assessing the process of democratization in Taiwan during the Chen Shui-bian presidency and after. The speaker will delineate and evaluate the factors that produced the Taiwan political miracle up to 2000, when Chen was elected president and Taiwan’s democratization was reportedly consolidated with a change in ruling political parties and a president that was said for the first time to represent Taiwan’s majority. Several key factors the local population in particular considered important to the democratization process, such as economic growth, political reform, ethnic relations, freedom of the press, and clean government, will be carefully assessed in this talk.    

John F. Copper is the Stanley J. Buckman Distinguished Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of more than twenty books on Asia and international affairs. He has testified several times before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee and its Sub-committee on Asia and Pacific Affairs. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the East West Center from 1983 to 1989, and was the recipient of the International Communications Award in 1997. 

Roberto is one of the leaders of Venezuela's student democracy movement.  This past April, at The World Movement for Democracy in Jakarta, Roberto received the International Democracy Award on behalf of student movement leaders in Venezuela.  WMFD provided the following commentary on Venezuela's student movement: "The student reaction to the TV closing and referendum to amend the constitution was motivated not by political ideology or partisan politics, but by the notion that "in democracy all sides should be welcome."  Despite government provocation and calls for physical attacks on students, the movement continues to focus on the peaceful promotion of democracy by training observers to monitor elections and encouraging young people to register to vote.