In popular discourse, variations on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis have cited cultural differences to explain conflicts ranging from Hindu-Muslim violence in India to the Rwandan genocide. Few scholars take these accounts seriously. Culture differences are multiple and ubiquitous. Were they sufficient causes of conflict, the world would have undergone far more inter-group violence than has in fact occurred. Social scientists have instead focused on a far wider range of reasons, including skewed distributions of material resources and the political mobilization of group identities by rival elites.

Yet those who are involved in or affected by such conflicts often describe or explain them in cultural terms, and this affects how the conflicts evolve. The empirical divisions expressed by a supposedly “ethnic” conflict can also change, as can the material issues involved, such that whatever first led to the conflict may no longer be relevant. In this process, global and local fears and narratives can intersect. Drawing on quantitative evidence and case studies from Southeast Asia, Graham K. Brown will explore how and why these shifts occur.

Graham K. Brown directs the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath. He has held research positions with Oxford University, and with the Consumers Association of Penang, Malaysia. His many publications include a chapter on Malaysia in The Political Function of Education in Deeply Divided Societies (2011). His current work focuses on the interactions between inequality, identity, and security, with particular reference to Southeast Asia.

Despite the many benefits of democracy, some scholars believe that introducing elections in ethnically divided states can lead to the politicization of identity and to ethnic conflict. Yet few scholars have explored what compels politicians to mobilize around identity in the first place. In search of an answer, Jeremy Menchik and George Washington University doctoral student Colm Fox compiled the only known dataset of campaign advertisements—over 5,000 political banners, posters, and stickers—across hundreds of electoral districts in the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, Indonesia. They coded these advertisements for the use of religious, ethnic, nationalist, party, and regional symbols in order to then explain their variation. Their findings shed light on how “politics works” in a new Muslim democracy and suggest that parties, including Islamists, are strategic about their use of identity appeals. Menchik will illustrate this and other findings with ample recourse to visual images.

Dr. Jeremy Menchik is a 2011–12 Shorenstein Fellow. His PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison drew on two years of field research to explain variations in religious and political tolerance in Indonesia during the twentieth century. He has been a Luce Scholar at Columbia University and a visiting fellow at the State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta. He is working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation: Tolerance Without Liberalism: Islamic Institutions in Twentieth Century Indonesia.

Co-sponsored with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford University.

Venue Changed to the Philippines Conference Room

In 1992, Cambodia became a United Nations (UN) protectorate—the first and only time the UN tried something so ambitious. What did the new, democratically-elected government do with this unprecedented gift? Cambodians today live in the grip of a venal government that refuses to provide even the most basic services without a bribe. Nearly half of the Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A malnourished populace still lives as Cambodians did 1,000 years ago, while government officials are the only overweight people in a nation where the hungry waste away. These conditions have not, however, dissuaded the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from acceding the Cambodian regime's desire to chair ASEAN in 2012. Prof. Joel Brinkley will turn an unsparing analytical eye on these and related aspects of Cambodian history, political economy, and foreign policy.

Joel Brinkley joined Stanford in the fall of 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. At the Times he served as a reporter, editor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent. At Stanford, he writes a weekly column on foreign affairs that appears in some 50 newspapers and web sites in the United States and around the world. He also writes on foreign affairs for Politico, and maintains an active public-speaking career. His research interests include American foreign policy and foreign affairs in general. Over the last 30 years, he has reported from 46 American states and more than 50 foreign countries. The latest of his five books is Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land (2011), already lauded by a reviewer in The American Interest as a "compelling" and "revealing tale of delusion and corruption" told with "panache."  Copies of the book will be available for sale at the talk.