Burma (Myanmar) has been under military rule since 1962. It is the least free country in Southeast Asia by the latest Freedom House ranking of political rights and civil liberties. The current junta's leader, Senior General Than Shwe, has made Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arguably the best known political prisoner in the world. In August-September 2007, following steep hikes in fuel prices, scores of protesters marched in silence and were dispersed or arrested. The protests spread beyond the capital and included at least one by Buddhist monks--a significant development in a largely Buddhist country. Meanwhile, delegates to a national convention convened by the regime completed guidelines for a future constitution. This step on a supposed road map to democracy was criticized by some observers as a ploy to institutionalize army control. Others treated the guidelines less skeptically on the grounds that even regime-favoring rules might be used to nudge the country toward reform, and were thus better than no rules at all.

How should outsiders respond to these conditions? With policies of isolation? Or of engagement? Which of the two logics is more powerful: that isolation will deprive the junta of needed support and thus help spark democratization? Or that engagement will expose the country to liberalization and thus incrementally undermine the regime? Is there a mixed logic worth implementing between these extremes? Or have the mounting protests inside Burma opened a crucial window of opportunity that replaces these alternatives with a radical new logic of carpe diem:that outsiders should actively intervene in support of the opposition and in favor of regime change now? Not to mention the junta's own rationale for retaining power: that military rule is preferable to any alternative.

Maureen Aung-Thwin, while working on Burma at the Open Society Institute (founded by financier/philanthropist George Soros), is an active member of the Asia Committee of Human Rights Watch. She is a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation, which oversees the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. She received a BA from Northwestern University and did graduate work at NYU.

Zarni, while researching democratic transition at Oxford, has been active in "Track II" negotiations with the Burmese junta. In 1995 he founded the Free Burma Coalition, which favored sanctions. Later his position evolved toward engagement. He edited Active Citizens under Political Wraps: Experiences from Myanmar/Burma and Vietnam (2006). He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Co-sponsored with the Asia Society Northern California and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC-Berkeley.

Vietnam has become the newest "Asian tiger." The US played a leading role in negotiating Vietnam's January 2007 entry into the World Trade Organization and the 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement. Requirements in these treaties have accelerated the pace of economic and legal policy reforms in Vietnam. Combined with other initiatives, the reforms are giving rise to the domestic institutions, economic policies, governing procedures, and rule of law needed to grow a market economy, facilitate the fledgling private sector, and rationalize the state sector. US foreign assistance has been intensively involved in this effort. The effects of these changes have been felt in faster growth, increased trade, more foreign and domestic investment, and continued poverty alleviation. Within this context, the seminar can address an especially difficult and complex question: How might these reforms, and the changes they have foster, affect the political development of the country?

Steve Parker recently returned from nearly six years in Vietnam, where he served as the project manager for the STAR-Vietnam Project--the first major USAID-funded technical assistance program in post-war Vietnam. In that context he worked with the prime minister's office in Hanoi to help more than forty government agencies make the changes needed for Vietnam to implement the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) and accede to the World Trade Organization. His latest writing is a "Report on the 5-Year Impact of the BTA on Vietnam's Trade, Investment and Economic Structure." Previously he worked as an economic specialist for the US government and the Asia Foundation, and was posted to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Japan with USAID, the Asian Development Bank, and the Harvard Institute for International Development.

Co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for International Development.

In recent years the largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, has seen the growth of contrary trends: a peaceful movement for democracy led and supported mostly by Muslims but also incidents of terrorism and signs of paramilitarism linked mainly to radical Islamists. Prof. Hefner will examine the role of Indonesia's Islamic madrasas in both cases, assess the likely future of Indonesian Muslim politics, and explore the implications of Indonesia's experience for the wider Muslim world.

Robert W. Hefner has directed the program on Islam and civil society at Boston University since 1991. He has conducted research on religion and politics in Southeast Asia for over three decades, and has authored or edited a dozen books and several major policy reports. His most recent books include, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (edited with Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University Press, 2007); ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton, 2005); and Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, 2000). He is the invited editor of the sixth volume of the forthcoming New Cambridge History of Islam, Muslims and Modernity: Society and Culture since 1800, and is now writing a book for the Carnegie Corporation on Islamic education and democratization in Indonesia.

Security has been a priority for regionalism in Southeast Asia since well before ASEAN's inception in 1967. Democracy has not. But as Southeast Asia has become at least formally more democratic, some members of the Association have begun to question its original commitment to respecting the national sovereignty of its members and not criticizing abuses within their borders. The stage is now set for a reconsideration of democracy as a legitimate regional concern.

There are at least three (non-mutually-exclusive) ways in which democracy could become a higher priority for ASEAN: (i) instrumentally, if regional elites are sufficiently convinced that a lack of democracy inside a given country makes the larger region insecure; (ii) normatively, to the extent that these elites value transparency, accountability, and the protection of rights and freedoms as regional ends in and of themselves; and (iii) externally, to the extent that such elites are subjected to pressures from domestic and/or foreign actors to make democracy a regional priority.

This conference, and the subsequent volume, will review and assess these possibilities with particular reference to how democracy may be related to security in Southeast Asia. If security is a benefit of democracy, the instrumental case is made. Normatively, security can be enlarged to incorporate democracy as a matter of "human security," to cite an increasingly popular concept. Security-democracy linkages can also be drawn by external actors with democratizing agendas -- governments outside the region as well as activists inside it.

How do security and democracy interact in Southeast Asia? Can and should democracy become a regional priority in Southeast Asia? Why, or why not, to what extent, and with what policy implications -- and recommendations? These are the core questions that the conference and the book will try to answer.

Conference cosponsor: Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.