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.

After more than 30 years under the strong leadership of Suharto, Indonesians saw three weak and not always legitimate presidents come and go: B. J. Habibie (1998-99), Abdurrahman Wahid (1999-2001), and Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001-2004). Democratization went forward. Yet Indonesians increasingly longed for a stronger

government that could deliver on its promises, including economic development. In 2004 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) won the country's first-ever direct presidential election by a landslide. During the campaign he promised, above all, an effective

government. Looking back on his first year, how has he performed? Has he broken the string of weak leaders? Will he grow in his job to become more effective? More

broadly, are weak leaders good for democracy but bad for development? Or does Indonesia illustrate some other relationship between national leadership, political

openness, and economic progress?

Hadi Soesastro is currently a visiting professor in the Weatherhead Institute of East Asian Studies at Columbia University. He has been with CSIS since 1971. His research interests include the political economy of development, regionalism, and trade, and energy issues, topics on which he has published and lectured widely. Recent writing on Indonesia includes an essay in Economic Recovery and Reform (2004). Dr. Soesastro chairs the International Steering Committee of PAFTAD (Pacific Trade and Development) and serves as an adjunct professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. In Indonesia he has served as a member of the National Research Council and the National Economic Council. He earned his PhD from the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.

The Philippines suffers from an ominous systemic deficit: the incapacity of democratic institutions to respond to pent-up social demands. A scant four years after a second "peoople power revolution" in 2001 brought down President Joseph Estrada on charges of involvement in illegal gambling, the country again finds itself in crisis. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo struggles to retain power as she faces allegations that close relatives are also involved in gambling syndicates and still more damaging accusations of complicity in fixing the May 2004 elections. Unlike in 1986 and 2001, when changes in leadership nurtured new hopes, the crisis of 2005 reveals a system desperately struggling for legitimacy. Prof. Hutchcroft will argue for well-considered institutional reform designed to break the cycle of recurrent crisis and tackle the country's perilous democratic deficit.

Paul D. Hutchcroft has written widely on Philippine politics and political economy, including Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (1998). His current writing includes a book on state formation and territorial politics in the Philippines from the early American colonial period through the enactment of the Local Government Code in the 1990s; and an edited volume on Philippine political reform stemming from a workshop he organized in Manila in July. He has been a visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore and is now the associate chair of UW-Madison's Political Science Department.

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.

Often those who report or analyze state repression emphasize its intensity without exploring its logic. Drawing on his latest book, Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia (2004), Prof. Boudreau will treat state repression as a strategic activity designed to undercut threats, defeat rivals, and strengthen new regimes with reference to the dictatorships of Ne Win in Burma, Suharto in Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. He will highlight state capacity, social challenges, and how they interact in struggles for power. By asking what state repressions seems designed to accomplish, Boudreau seeks to develop a more fully political understanding of state violence in relation to social resistance.

Vincent Boudreau heads the Department of Political Science and the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York. His many publications include a unique study of the internal dynamics of anti-regime activism in the Philippines, Grassroots and Cadre in the Protest Movement (2001). He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1993.

East Asia is on the move. Diverse national strands are being woven into a distinctive regional fabric. No longer are regionalism and regionalization projections of specific national models. Such models are being drawn upon to create something new and different that is much more than any one national paradigm writ large. Prof. Katzenstein will describe and explain this development with particular reference to East Asia as a distinctively porous region in the American imperium.

Peter J. Katzenstein is a 2004-2005 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has written many books, including Norms and National Security (1996), Small States in World Markets (1985), and Corporatism and Change (1984), and edited many others, including Network Power: Japan and Asia (1997) and The Culture of National Security (1996). In 1993 he received a Cornell University award for distinguished teaching and shared (with Nobuo Okawara) the Ohira Memorial Prize. His degrees are from Harvard University (PhD), the London School of Economics (MSc), and Swarthmore College (1967).

Regional financial cooperation in East Asia is proceeding with unprecedented intensity. Latest developments include creation by the regional central bankers group of two Asian bond funds and the launching of an Asian Bond Market Initiative by the finance ministers of ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan, South Korea). Some observers continue to attribute such cooperation to sharpened antagonism between East Asia and the West since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. But this view overlooks a key internal driver: China's remarkable shift toward a more proactive stance toward regional cooperation. Current 2005 East Asian financial cooperation is motivated by factors that differ considerably from those observed in the immediate aftermath of the Asian financial crisis and with implications that extend beyond East Asia.

Jennifer Amyx is a 2004-2005 Shorenstein Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center. She is the author of Japan's Financial Crisis: Institutional Rigidity and Reluctant Change (2004), articles on East Asian financial cooperation, and a book-in-progress on the latter topic. Since earning a Stanford PhD in political science in 1998 she has held fellowships at Australian National University and been a visiting scholar at several Japanese financial policy and research institutions including the Bank of Japan.

China's rapid growth and increasingly close integration with world markets is transforming Northeast and Southeast Asian regional production and trade. Southeast Asia's relatively resource-abundant economies are expected to lose comparative advantage in low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing activities while gaining comparative advantage in natural resource products. The latter shift will increase incentives to exploit and export the products of forestry, fisheries, and agriculture.

What are the implications for long-run growth and welfare, particularly in the poorest and least industrialized economies, including Indonesia and Vietnam? How will this trend interact with the other major phenomenon sweeping through Southeast Asia, i.e., decentralization? With reduced national authority and minimal local accountability, the potential for disastrous rates of resource exploitation is high. A race to liquidate natural resource assets, if sufficiently pronounced, could expose parts of the region to a new variant of the "natural resource curse" - the idea that resource-abundant economies grow more slowly than others.

Ian Coxhead is an economist and serves as director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His specialty is the economic development of Southeast Asia. His many publications on trade, development and the environment include The Open Economy and the Environment: Development, Trade and Resources in Asia (2003, with Sisira Jayasuriya). Prof. Coxhead's current research features the impacts of globalization, regional growth, and domestic policy reforms on the structures of production and employment, issues of poverty and the environment, and the exploitation of natural resources in Vietnam and the Philippines.