Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.

Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panelists:

Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.

Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.

Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).

For the last decade, China has been at the forefront of pushing for regional economic integration, e.g. ASEAN-China FTA, Hong Kong-China CEPA, and China-Taiwan ECFA. Could this process culminate into a movement toward a European Union-style economic bloc? What are the implications of this development for US economic welfare? US unions have long viewed the cheap goods from China as harmful to US workers; and some US economists have recently blamed the cheap credit from China for the 2008 implosion of the US financial system. The present escalation of Chinese and US rhetoric on the exchange rate is worryingly akin to the mutual pawing on the ground before the great leap forward at each other. What is the sensible solution? There is no sign that the impasse over the Doha Round of trade negotiations would be resolved in the medium-term.  It is very surprising that China has adopted a near hands-off approach on this issue because it has been the biggest beneficiary of the open multilateral trading system. Has China's failure to help strengthen the WTO framework emboldened protectionism, much to its own detriment and the world's? In this seminar, Professor Woo will examine China's strategy of external economic engagement, including the recently signed ECFA between Beijing and Taipei. Woo argues that part (and only part) of the reason why China does not already have a coherent strategy could be that its present governance institutions create disincentives to move quickly to embrace such a strategy.  

Wing Thye Woo is Professor of Economics at U.C. Davis, Yangtze River Scholar at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He has advised the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations. Professor Woo has published extensively, and his current research focuses on the economic issues of East Asia, international financial architecture, comparative economic growth, state enterprise restructuring, fiscal management, and exchange rate economics.

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.

This two day conference will examine the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to expand freedom and generate more pluralistic flows of ideas and information in authoritarian contexts. Through presentation of papers and panel sessions, three key themes will be explored:

• How individuals in authoritarian countries are using liberation technologies (particularly the internet and mobile phones) to expand pluralism and freedom.
• How authoritarian states are censoring, constraining, monitoring, and punishing the use of ICT for that purpose.
• How citizens and groups can circumvent authoritarian censorship and control of these technologies.

Discussion will focus on these challenges generally and also specific developments in countries such as China, Iran, Cuba, Burma, and North Korea, as well as Russia and selected Arab authoritarian regimes.

The conference is sponsored by the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford, in cooperation with the Hoover Institution.