Dr. Ankhbayar Begz joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar for the fall and winter quarter of the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Begz currently serves as researcher at Mongolian University of Science and Technology's Open Education Center. While at APARC, he conducted research regarding democracy, women’s political participation, higher education, and gender equality issues in Mongolia and Asia.
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University is pleased to announce that Stephen Kotkin has been appointed to the position of FSI Senior Fellow, effective September 1, 2022.
Kotkin is based at FSI’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), and is affiliated with FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, as well. He holds a joint appointment with the Hoover Institution as the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow.
"Stephen is a remarkable academic and public intellectual whose work has transformed our understanding of Russian history and the historical processes that have shaped today’s global geopolitics,” said APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin. “We are proud to have him as our colleague at APARC and are excited to work together to expand the center’s scholarship on the role and impact of the Eurasian powers in the era of great-power competition."
Prior to joining FSI, Kotkin was the Birkelund Professor of History and International Affairs in what was formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, where he taught for 33 years. He now holds that title as emeritus. In addition to founding and running Princeton’s Global History Initiative, Kotkin directed the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and served as the founding co-director of the Program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy. He chaired the editorial board of Princeton University Press.
“Joining the ranks of the phenomenal scholars at FSI is a dream come true,” Kotkin stated.
Stephen is a remarkable academic and public intellectual whose work has transformed our understanding of Russian history and the historical processes that have shaped today’s global geopolitics.
"I am thrilled to welcome Stephen to FSI this fall,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “He is an excellent addition to the cutting-edge research and teaching team at APARC, and I look forward to seeing the important impact he makes in his new role."
Kotkin writes reviews and essays for The Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He was the business book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business Section for a number of years. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Rochester in 1981 and received a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1988, and during that time took a graduate seminar at Stanford.
On March 22, 2022, APARC's Japan Program welcomed a delegation from the Embassy of Japan in the United States and the Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco, including Ambassador Koji Tomita and Consul-General Hiroshi Kawamura, who met with a joint panel of scholars and administrators from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley for a discussion about fostering a greater understanding of Japan studies in the United States.
APARC Deputy Director and Japan Program Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui presented data on enrollment and employment statistics for Japanese studies in higher education. According to the report, Japanese studies have been in a slow state of decline since the late 1980s, when many in the United States viewed Japan as an economic threat and the country was not as well-understood as it is today. Despite this decline, students today are still very interested in studying Japan and are eager to visit the country.
The delegation discusses Japan studies in the U.S.
Michael Breger
Ambassador Tomita
Photo by:
Michael Breger
Professor Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Photo by:
Michael Breger
Consul-General Kawamura
Photo by:
Michael Breger
Junko Habu
Photo by:
Michael Breger
The delegation discusses Japan studies in the U.S.
Photo by:
Michael Breger
Professor Junko Habu, Chair of the Center for Japanese Studies (CJS) and Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, along with Kumi Sawada Hadler, Program Director of CJS, described logistical challenges Japan scholars have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the inability to access the country under lockdown, and indicated that, across the board, universities are not providing as much support for Japanese studies as they used to, especially in terms of endowed faculty positions and departmental "slots" specifically for Japan specialists.
Ambassador Tomita and Consul-General Kawamura agreed that more support was needed to bolster scholarships of Japan. Ambassador Tomita stated that over his long career, he has seen the theoretical focus of Japan studies in the United States shift away from bilateral relations between the two countries toward the region at large. He noted that the public discussion is increasingly directed at Japan as part of a broader complex of nations in East Asia. Consul-General Kawamura indicated that the pandemic has posed a host of challenges for his office but that Japan will continue to open its doors to scholars in the future.
The meeting concluded with a reaffirmation of the longstanding and crucial relationship between the two nations and of the importance of Japan studies in the United States in fostering fruitful collaboration between the two nations.
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Q&As
New Book by Stanford Sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui Probes the Decoupling of Policy and Practice in Global Human Rights
In his new book, Shorenstein APARC’s Japan Program Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui explores the paradox underlying the global expansion of human rights and Japan’s engagement with human rights ideas and instruments. Japan, he says, has an opportunity to become a leader in human rights in Asia and in the world.
The Long and Winding Road to the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics
While public support in Japan has been lackluster for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the mood may change once the games start – provided no major public health incidents and other unfortunate accidents occur, says Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui.
At an in-person meeting of a joint delegation from Japan's Embassy to the United States and Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco with a panel of experts from Stanford and UC Berkeley, Japanese Ambassador Koji Tomita stressed the importance of bilateral academic collaboration in the continual development of the U.S.-Japan partnership.
As reports of leveled mosques, detention camps, and destroyed cultural and religious sites in China's Xinjiang province emerged in the mid-to-late 2010s, the world took notice of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) flagrant oppression of Uighur Muslims and other minorities. Under the Xi Jinping administration, the Xinjiang region in northwestern China has experienced what is perhaps the greatest period of cultural assimilation since the Cultural Revolution. This massive state repression represents a primary research focus for Dr. James Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, who joined both APARC's China Program and the Stanford History Department as a visiting scholar for winter quarter 2022.
Millward's specialties include the Qing empire, the silk road, and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. In addition to his numerous academic publications on these topics, he follows and comments on current issues regarding Xinjiang, the Uyghurs and other Xinjiang indigenous peoples, PRC ethnicity policy, and Chinese politics more generally. We caught up with Millward to discuss his work and experience at Stanford this past winter quarter. Listen to the conversation:
Millward emphasizes the importance of documenting the scope and scale of the crisis in Xinjiang. "What's happened in the last four or five years in Xinjiang is of great global importance and interest to people," he says, and although it is still early to write the history of this period of repression, "it's important at least to try and get an organized draft of it down and to try to begin to interpret rather than just narrate the litany of things going on: the camps, the digital surveillance, forced labor, birth depressions, and try and put it all into some kind of framework where we can understand it."
China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang is part of aggressive intolerance of cultural and political diversity that is emerging as a central feature of Xi Jinping’s tenure, explains Millward. The shift in the CCP's assimilationist policies constitutes a complete "reversal of what had been an earlier approach to diversity in China," which allowed for 56 different nationalities to have regional autonomy. His aim is to "point out a really aggressive assimilating thrust under the Xi Jinping regime [...] and then also to look more clearly at settler colonialism in Xinjiang."
In this talk, Millward explains how PRC assimilationist policies, if most extreme in Xinjiang, are related to the broader Zhonghua-izing campaign against religion and non-Mandarin language and perhaps even to intensified control over Hong Kong and efforts to intimidate Taiwan.
U.S.-China Cooperation Amid Strained Ties
The Xinjiang crisis has affected how the United States views China, bringing an unexpected unity to the usually-polarized American foreign policy arena. "The Xinjiang issue has contributed to the broad-spectrum feeling in the American political sphere that engagement with China has failed," notes Millward. The parallels between China's repression of minorities and some of the worst events in the 20th century in Europe "have brought together the political sides in America and rallied them around a much stronger anti-China stance," he says.
From Millward's perspective, however, it is not only possible but also necessary for the United States to act on Xinjiang and press China on its human rights record while cooperating with China on other issues. "This is the art of diplomacy, you have to compartmentalize and deal with different issues, particularly with two countries as large as the United States and China." In Millward's view, areas pertinent to U.S.-China collaboration are varied and transcend global challenges such as climate change or pandemics. Those are simplistic dichotomies," he says. "We have 300,000 Chinese students in our universities and we welcome them and learn a lot from them [...] We benefit from Chinese expertise in all sorts of ways."
Millward spent a productive winter quarter at APARC. Returning to Stanford as a visiting scholar provided him a unique opportunity to reconnect with his past on The Farm and survey all that has changed in the years since he completed his doctorate under the tutelage of the late Professor Harold Kahn. "The trailer park where I lived as a first-year graduate student is no more, and I couldn't even find the footprint of where it was."
An Uncomfortable Friendship: Understanding China’s Position on the Russia-Ukraine War and Its Implications for Great Power Competition
On WBUR’s "On Point" and Fox 2 KTVU, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro shares insights about China's alignment with Russia and the worldwide implications of its calculus on Ukraine.
Bargaining Behind Closed Doors: Why China’s Local Government Debt Is Not a Local Problem
New research in 'The China Journal' by APARC’s Jean Oi and colleagues suggests that the roots of China’s massive local government debt problem lie in secretive financing institutions offered as quid pro quo to localities to sustain their incentive for local state-led growth after 1994
APARC Visiting Scholar James Millward discusses PRC ethnicity policy, China's crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang province, and the implications of the Xinjiang crisis for U.S. China strategy and China's international relations.
This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.
Since 2013, women's higher education enrollment rate has outpaced men's enrollment rate in South Korea. Despite this increase in educational attainment, gender inequalities remain deeply rooted in Korean higher education, including gender gaps in STEM, doctoral program enrollment, and faculty diversity. Universities have also fallen short in including gender-related topics in curricular content and ensuring safe campuses for women. The panel will reflect on these educational disparities and the social, cultural, and economic forces shaping Korean women's lives during and after higher education. It will also place Korea's experience in a comparative context by discussing global trends in gender and higher education.
Speakers:
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Namhee Kim has a 20-year research and teaching career in higher education in South Korea and the U.S. She is currently an Associate Professor of Education at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. She has previously worked for Korean Education Development Institute and Korean Women’s Development Institute in the areas of education policy development and conducting research on women workforce issues. Her earlier teaching career includes many graduate classes at Texas A & M and Northcentral University in the US. Kim holds a PhD in Education majoring in Adult Education and Human Resource Development from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and MEd and BA from Ewha Womans University. Her research interests include women’s career development, critical human resource development, and international education.
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Christine Min Wotipka is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Her research centers around two main themes examined from cross-national and longitudinal approaches. One line of work seeks to understand how marginalized groups and topics have been incorporated into school textbooks. Another contributes to the comparative scholarship in gender, diversity, leadership, and higher education. Her articles have appeared in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Gender & Society, American Journal of Education, AERA Open, Journal of LGBT Youth, Comparative Education Review, Compare, Comparative Education, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Wotipka earned her BA in International Relations and French at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and MA in Sociology and PhD in International Comparative Education at Stanford University. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she proudly served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in rural northeast Thailand and worked in South Korea at an economic research firm. Among her professional activities, Dr. Wotipka has consulted on girls education policies for the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan.
Moderator: Dafna Zur, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures; director of Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University
Like in many other states worldwide, democracy is in trouble in South Korea, entering a state of regression in the past decade, barely thirty years after its emergence in 1987. The society that recently had ordinary citizens leading “candlelight protests” demanding the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in 2016-17 has become polarized amid an upsurge of populism, driven by persistent structural inequalities, globalization, and the rise of the information society.
The symptoms of democratic decline are increasingly hard to miss: political opponents are demonized, democratic norms are eroded, and the independence of the courts is whittled away. Perhaps most disturbing is that this all takes place under a government dominated by former pro-democracy activists.
The contributors to this volume trace the sources of illiberalism in today’s Korea; examine how political polarization is plaguing its party system; discuss how civil society and the courts have become politicized; look at the roles of inequality, education, and social media in the country’s democratic decline; and consider how illiberalism has affected Korea’s foreign policy.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Korea’s Democratic Decay: Worrisome Trends and Pressing Challenges Gi-Wook Shin and Ho-Ki Kim
1. Why Is Korean Democracy Majoritarian but Not Liberal? Byongjin Ahn
2. Uses and Misuses of Nationalism in the Democratic Politics of Korea Aram Hur
3. The Weakness of Party Politics and Rise of Populism in Korea Kwanhu Lee
4. The Politicization of Civil Society: No Longer Watchdogs of Power, Former Democratic Activists Are Becoming New Authoritarian Leaders Myoung-Ho Park
5. The Politicization of the Judiciary in Korea: Challenges in Maintaining the Balance of Power Seongwook Heo
6. Two Divergences in Korea’s Economy and Democracy: Regional and Generational Disparities Jun-Ho Jeong and Il-Young Lee
7. Democracy and the Educational System in Korea Seongsoo Choi
8. Social Media and the Salience of Polarization in Korea Yong Suk Lee
9. Illiberalism in Korean Foreign Policy Victor Cha
10. The Democratic Recession: A Global and Comparative Perspective Larry Diamond
Epilogue
Korea’s 2022 Presidential Election: Populism in the Post-Truth Era Ho-Ki Kim and Gi-Wook Shin
Media Coverage
To celebrate the publication of South Korea's Democracy in Crisis, APARC held a book launch seminar in Seoul on June 14, 2022. The event received extensive coverage in Korean media, including the following:
This event will offer simultaneous translation between Japanese and English.
当イベントは日本語と英語の同時通訳がついています。
This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk.
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
当イベントはZoomウェビナーで行われます。ウェビナーに参加するためには、こちらのリンクをクリックし、事前登録をして下さい。
Febuary 14, 4-5:30 p.m. California time/ February 15, 9-10:30 a.m. Japan time
COVID-19 has changed the way we work. While remote work has become the norm, the pandemic has also highlighted the inequity in childcare, elderly care, and household work. Japanese workplaces feel a particularly acute need for adjustment, as lack of digitalization and persistent gender inequality continue to limit productivity gains and diversity in the workforce. Social entrepreneurs in Japan have started offering new technologies that address these problems and transform Japanese work environments, using matching algorithms, innovative apps, and other new technologies. How can these social technologies reshape the workplace? What principles do we need in using these technologies in practice, in order to unlock the keys to untapped human resource potentials and realize a more equitable and inclusive work environment in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere? Fuhito Kojima, a renowned economist specializing in matching theory, will talk about market design from the perspective of regulation design and economics, and Eiko Nakazawa, an influential entrepreneur, will speak about her experiences founding education and childcare startups in the United States and Japan, moderated by Yasumasa Yamamoto, a leading expert on technology and business in Japan and the United States.
Panelists
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Fuhito Kojima is a Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo and Director of the University of Tokyo Market Design Center. He received a B.A. at University of Tokyo (2003) and PhD at Harvard (2008), both in economics and taught at Yale (2008-2009, as postdoc) and then Stanford (2009-2020, as professor) while spending one year at Columbia in his sabbatical year. His research involves game theory, with a particular focus on “market design,” a field where game-theoretic analysis is applied to study the design of various mechanisms and institutions. His recent works include matching mechanism designs with complex constraints, and he is working on improving medical residency match and daycare seat allocation in Japan based on his academic work. Outside of academia, he serves as an advisor for Keizai Doyu Kai as well as several private companies.
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Eiko Nakazawa is the Founder and CEO of Dearest, Inc., a VC-Backed startup in the United States that makes high-quality learning, childcare, and parenting support accessible by helping employers subsidize those costs for their working families. She also advises and invests in early-stage startups, and has recently co-founded Ikura, Inc., an education x fintech company in Japan. Prior to founding Dearest, Nakazawa spent 11 years with Sony Corporation, where she led global marketing, turnaround, and new business launch initiatives. Nakazawa earned an M.S. in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Moderator
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Yasumasa Yamamoto is a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University graduate school of management and has been a specialist in emerging technology such as fintech, blockchain, and deep learning. He was previously industry analyst at Google, senior specialist in quantitative analysis of secularized products, as well as derivatives at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in New York. Yamamoto holds a M.S. from Harvard University and a masters degree from University of Tokyo.
Innovation and entrepreneurship rank highly on the strategic agenda of most countries today. As global economic competition intensifies, many national policymakers now recognize the central importance of entrepreneurship education and the building of financial institutions to promote long-term innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Drivers of Innovation brings together scholars from the United States and Asia to explore those education and finance policies that might be conducive to accelerating innovation and developing a more entrepreneurial workforce in East Asia.
Some of the questions covered include: How do universities in China and Singapore experiment with new types of learning in their quest to promote innovation and entrepreneurship? Is there a need to transform the traditional university into an “entrepreneurial university”? What are the recent developments in and outstanding challenges to financing innovation in China and Japan? What is the government’s role in promoting innovative entrepreneurship under the shadow of big business in South Korea? What can we learn about the capacity of services to drive innovation-led growth in India?
Drivers of Innovation will serve as a valuable reference for scholars and policymakers working to develop human capital for innovation in Asia.
Contents
Educating Entrepreneurs and Financing Innovation in Asia Fei Yan, Yong Suk Lee, Lin William Cong, Charles Eesley, and Charles Lee
Fostering Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Education, Human Capital, and the Institutional Environment Charles Eesley, Lijie Zhou, and You (Willow) Wu
Entrepreneurial Scaling Strategy: Managerial and Policy Considerations David H. Hsu
Innovation Policy and Star Scientists in Japan Tatsuo Sasaki, Hiromi S. Nagane, Yuta Fukudome, and Kanetaka Maki
Financing Innovation in Japan: Challenges and Recent Progress Takeo Hoshi and Kenji Kushida
Promoting Entrepreneurship under the Shadow of Big Business in Korea: The Role of the Government Hicheon Kim, Dohyeon Kim, and He Soung Ahn
The Creativity and Labor Market Performance of Korean College Graduates: Implications for Human Capital Policy Jin-Yeong Kim
Financing Innovative Enterprises in China: A Public Policy Perspective Lin William Cong, Charles M. C. Lee, Yuanyu Qu, and Tao She
Forging Entrepreneurship in Asia: A Comparative Study of Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore Zhou Zhong, Fei Yan, and Chao Zhang
Education and Human Capital for Innovation in India’s Service Sector Rafiq Dossani
In Need of a Big Bang: Toward a Merit-Based System for Government-Sponsored Research in India Dinsha Mistree
The Implications of AI for Business and Education, and Singapore’s Policy Response Mohan Kankanhalli and Bernard Yeung
Stanford Asia-Pacific Innovation
The volume 'Drivers of Innovation' is the third in three publications that are the product of APARC's multi-year research project Stanford Asia-Pacific Innovation. This project helps promote innovation and entrepreneurship in the region by providing critical academic and policy research into the severe challenges to East Asia's continued growth and development.
Congratulations, Indonesia! What a thrill it was to open my daily copy of The New York Times on Aug. 3 and see a nearly half-page color photo of the jubilant faces and raised fists of Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu as they celebrated their and their country’s Olympic gold medal in women’s- doubles badminton.
Their first-place finish could not have been more timely. Indonesia needs good news. Bloomberg has combined 12 variables to determine where the COVID-19 pandemic is being most-to- least effectively managed.
From April to July, by that measure, Indonesia fell steadily to last place among the 53 countries covered. Such a bad review cannot be explained by domestic underperformance alone. The ferocity of the now ubiquitous Delta variant has played a role. So has vaccine nationalism—the limited and late availability of effective jabs from abroad. Not to mention less well-established variables such as the relative potency of Chinese vaccines. Whatever the reasons, there is little to celebrate regarding the risk to the health of Indonesians.
In this downbeat context, however, and far less well known than Indonesia’s “goodminton” victory in Tokyo, is an upbeat development on Indonesia’s academic front that also deserves Indonesian pride: the five-day inaugural Conference on Indonesian Studies (CIS) held online on June 24-27 Jakarta time. The American Institute for Indonesian Studies and Michigan State University sponsored the meeting with the participation and cooperation of hundreds of students, academics, and educational institutions in Indonesia and the United States. As a long-time would-be Indonesianist, I was happy to attend.
Researchers have more questions than answers. Nationalists reverse the ratio. The scholarly ideal—gathering evidence, testing assertions, birthing, sharing, and comparing ideas— transcends borders. But nationality has long shaped Indonesian studies.
During Dutch rule over the East Indies from 1816 to 1941, with rare exceptions, the archipelago’s past was largely interpreted by Europeans with colonial access. Indonesian studies were dramatically expanded and diversified following World War II. But the birth and growth of “area studies” in Western universities continued to incubate mainly Western scholarly careers.
The recent CIS was doubly important, as an affirmation and a stimulus. Its 326 presentations in 65 different sessions served to remind the roughly 500 attendees from Indonesia and 22 other countries of the breadth and vitality of Indonesian studies and thereby motivate further research.
Included on the program were a first-rate keynote speech by Prof. Aquarini Priyatna of Padjadjaran University on feminist voices in Indonesian literature; the premiere reading in English of Oh by Indonesia’s renowned novelist and playwright Putu Wijaya, whose work I remember applauding at Taman Ismail Marzuki decades ago; and a rousing performance of the wayang lakon (Javanese puppet show) Ciptoning by Ki Purbo Asmoro, ably and simultaneously rendered in English by Kathryn Emerson (no relation).
The conference also conveyed what was on the minds of the more than 300 mainly young and Indonesian panelists who wrote papers and made presentations about their country. Although the topics were diverse, some were more popular than others. A comparison may offer clues as to the subjects for research that are attracting the next generation of Indonesian scholars as they begin to shape the future and focus of Indonesian studies.
The distribution of themes is informative. Nearly half of all the CIS sessions were about culture. Culture in the sense of identity was by far the most popular topic at the conference, including religious and especially Muslim identity, with lesser attention to language and gender. Three genres of performed culture — art, music, and literature—were featured in roughly a fourth of the sessions. Five different sessions took up the blood-shedding watershed of 1965, encouragingly in the light of past silence on the subject. Only three panels focused on the economy, merely three were on climate change, and just two featured foreign policy.
It is tempting to view this evidence for the popularity of cultural identity in Indonesian studies as a local instance of two trends that some scholars have noted: a greater emphasis on identity in political discourse around the world and a related decline in the salience of ideology, including democracy.
Of the 65 conference panels, only two featured democracy, despite the alarm bell that some established Australian and Indonesian scholars had rung in 2020 in a book entitled Democracy in Indonesia; From Stagnation to Regression? Yet human rights and civil liberties in Indonesia were highlighted at the event, including the freedom of creative expression embodied in literature and the arts. A case in point was a session on “Islam Nusantara” featuring scholars from the University o Nahdlatul Ulama Indonesia.
Not even a five-day-long gathering could have dealt with everything. The relative neglect of economics and foreign policy was unfortunate nevertheless. Five days after the conference ended, the World Bank reclassified Indonesia as a lower-middle-income country, down one level from the upper-middle-income status it had previously briefly held. Also basically ignored at the CIS was a key reason for that slippage: COVID-19.
In fairness, these omissions are not unique to Indonesia. Among scholars in area studies worldwide, economists are scarce and health policy experts still harder to find. In my own conversations with foreign advisors in Indonesia during the Soeharto years, some of the number-crunching economists were inclined to dismiss the interpretation-minded anthropologists. Some of the latter reciprocated the disregard. A joke in circulation at the time held that the sole requirement that a development economist needed to meet in order to be a consultant in Indonesia was to have flown over the country once in daylight.
That disciplinary rift may very well be obsolete. But if it isn’t, it should be. Climate-friendly economic development and improved health policies are vital to Indonesia’s future and therefore to the future agenda of Indonesian studies.
As for Indonesian foreign policy, the paucity of CIS panels on that topic has to an extent been compensated for by the laudable efforts of Dino Patti Djalal’s Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia to stimulate and reward the interest and involvement of the younger generation in their country’s future role in the world.
The challenge now is to build on the success of the inaugural CIS to the larger and ongoing benefit of Indonesia’s capacity to navigate these difficult times.
On a panel discussion hosted by the political quarterly 'Democracy,' Donald K. Emmerson joins experts to assess how the Biden administration is navigating the U.S. relationships in Asia.
Scholarship, Autonomy, and Purpose: Issues in Indonesian Studies
Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson delivers a keynote address at the American Institute for Indonesian Studies–Michigan State University Conference on Indonesian Studies.
Chinese foreign policy in Southeast Asia affects, and is affected by, the more despotic character of ASEAN’s mainland compared with its maritime member states. But the destiny of even the already undemocratic mainland portion of Southeast Asia is not—not yet at least—made in Beijing.
The American Institute for Indonesian Studies and Michigan State University Asian Studies Center are holding the inaugural Conference on Indonesian Studies this week, June 23-26, 2021. The conference's theme is "Indonesian Studies — Paradigms and New Frontiers." On June 24, APARC's Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson delivered a keynote address, "Scholarship, Autonomy, and Purpose: Issues in Indonesian Studies." Watch the session below:
The Conference on Indonesian Studies seeks to expand research dissemination, activities, and collaboration on the academic study of Indonesia to better understand the archipelago's historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, artistic, economic, environmental, and political dimensions, as well as its role in the Indo-Pacific and the world. The conference connects scholars and academic communities from multiple disciplines based in Indonesia, the United States, the Asia-Pacific, and other global contexts.
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Commentary
Southeast Asia: China’s Long Shadow
Chinese foreign policy in Southeast Asia affects, and is affected by, the more despotic character of ASEAN’s mainland compared with its maritime member states. But the destiny of even the already undemocratic mainland portion of Southeast Asia is not—not yet at least—made in Beijing.
Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson delivers a keynote address at the American Institute for Indonesian Studies–Michigan State University Conference on Indonesian Studies.
