Anwar Ibrahim was deputy prime minister of Malaysia in the 1990s. He also served as Malaysia's minister of finance. A sharp disagreement with then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad led to Anwar's dismissal, prosecution--many would say outright persecution--and imprisonment.

Upon regaining his freedom, Anwar took up his current role as an opposition voice. He is currently a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Since his release he has also held lectureships at St. Anthony's College (Oxford) and the School of Advanced International Studies (Johns Hopkins). He has advised the World Bank on questions of governance and accountability. Recently he was appointed honorary president of AccountAbility, a London-based organization that advocates socially responsible business practices.

This event is co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Forum at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

In December 2005 leaders from 16 Asia-Pacific nations gathered in Kuala Lumpur for the first East Asia Summit (EAS). The US was conspicuous by its absence. Should Washington be concerned about being excluded from the process of building an East Asia community? Serious questions remain about the prospects for such a community and the intentions of its creators. Will the EAS and the Asian-only ASEAN Plus Three rival or complement broader frameworks that include the US, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation? How does one create avenues of interaction between East Asian and Asia-Pacific mechanisms to make them mutually supporting rather than mutually exclusive? Ralph Cossa will address these questions and draw the implications for US policy.

Ralph A. Cossa, in addition to running the Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu - a non-profit foreign-policy research institute affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC - is senior editor of its quarterly electronic journal, Comparative Connections. He is also a founding member of the Steering Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP), co-chairs the CSCAP International Study Group on Countering the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Asia Pacific, and belongs to the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) Experts and Eminent Persons Group.

On 26 December 2004, an earthquake and tsunami struck Aceh in the Indonesian archipelago, killing an estimated 130,000 people. The catastrophe was a catalyst for the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government to come together in Helsinki to seek an end to the nationalist/separatist conflict that had wracked the territory since the 1970s. GAM agreed to drop its demand for outright independence in exchange for a high level of genuine autonomy, while the Indonesian government made various concessions, including allowing the creation of local political parties in Aceh. Jakarta wanted to end a costly, debilitating, and seemingly endless conflict; encourage needed foreign investment in the oil and gas sector; and bring the military in Aceh under civilian control. GAM, in turn, realized that the war was unwinnable; the Acehnese people had suffered enough; and many of GAM's aims could be achieved by democratic means in Indonesia's reforming political system.

Based on his unique experience as an advisor to GAM during the 2005 talks, Prof. Kingsbury will outline the peace process, explain how agreement was achieved, and comment on Aceh's future inside Indonesia.

Damien Kingsbury is director of the Masters Program in International and Community Development at Deakin University. His many publications include The Politics of Indonesia (3rd ed., 2005); South-East Asia: A Political Profile (2nd ed., 2005); and Power Politics and the Indonesian Military (2003). He has a Ph.D. and an M.A. from Monash University and an M.S. from Columbia University. He is presently writing a book on political development.

Professor Kingsbury's talk is co-sponsored with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California - Berkeley

In Thailand in 1997 reformers drafted a new constitution. They hoped to trigger dramatic improvements in the country's political system. Analysts, activists, and politicians alike blamed many of Thailand's problems on shortcomings of a party system seen as dangerously weak and fragmented. Accordingly, the new charter was designed to strengthen political parties while reducing their number. These constitutional changes profoundly affected Thai politics, but not always in the ways or for the reasons that reformers had in mind. Have the changes improved or worsened the quality of democracy in Thailand? In addressing this question, Professor Hicken will highlight the unintended consequences of constitutional reform and the nature of governance under Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai Party.

Allen Hicken studies political institutions and policy making in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia. Countries he has worked in include Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Cambodia. Writing-in-progress includes a book manuscript, "Building Party Systems: Elections, Parties, and Coordination in Developing Democracies." He has published in the American Journal of Political Science and Electorial Studies, among other places. At Michigan he is affiliated with the university's Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Center for Political Studies. He earned his Ph.D in political science and Pacific studies from the University of California - San Diego.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has long been based on the principle of national sovereignty, including a norm against interference by one member state in another's domestic affairs. But some members would like to set aside the prohibition in cases such as Myanmar, whose military junta continues to repress Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy to the detriment of ASEAN's image in the West. Opposed to this view are the group's newest, poorer, more continental, and politically more closed members: Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and of course Myanmar itself. They want ASEAN to uphold national sovereignty and reaffirm non-interference. The prospect of Myanmar assuming the chair of ASEAN in 2006-2007 makes this controversery even more acute. Is ASEAN splitting up? Will a compromise be reached? And with what implications for the nature and future of ASEAN and its conservative faction?

Carlyle A. Thayer is the 2004-2005 C. V. Starr Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. He has written and lectured widely on Southeast Asian affairs. He has held positions at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (in Hawaii) and the Australian Defence College. His degrees are from the Australian National University (PhD), Yale University (MA), and Brown University (BA).

This is the 10th seminar of the 2004-2005 academic year hosted by the Southeast Asia Forum.

Apparel export quotas that defined the worldwide garment trade for four decades ended on 1 January 2005. Trade data since then suggest that production has shifted from Southeast Asia to China. For the most developed countries in Southeast Asia, the loss of the garment industry will be a tolerable inconvenience. But it will devastate countries whose economies depend on such exports. An extreme example is Cambodia, three-fourths of whose exports are apparel. Are the threads from which these poor economies hang about to break? Is this industrys migration out of Southeast Asia inevitable and irrevocable? What, if anything, can governments and companies in the region do?

Geoffrey Stafford earned his PhD in political science (1998) and an MA in Southeast Asian studies (1996) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing his dissertation, Globalization Amid Diversity: Economic Development Policy in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia 1987-1997, he joined a large retailer to work on issues of corporate social responsibility in the global garment-manufacturing arena. In that capacity he is now analyzing the effects of quota termination on the world apparel industry. He has taught the politics of Southeast Asia at the University of San Francisco.