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.

In the United States since 9/11, there has been a tendency to reduce Southeast Asia's connections to the Middle East to religion: that is, to the Muslim faith shared by majori-ties east of the Mediterranean and south of the South China Sea, not to mention the Muslim minorities elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While addressing the changing nature and importance of this overlap, Professor von der Mehden will also analyze how and why these two regions, spatially so far apart, have been interacting on a range of economic, security, and political issues, including the question of Palestine. He will argue that there is more interaction today between the two regions than ever before. Each region has become more involved in the affairs of the other. But these burgeoning connections are not what they were expected to be. Nor are they all benign.

Fred von der Mehden is internationally known for his extensive scholarship on politics, religion, and development in Southeast Asia. His talk will update and expand on his 1993 book, Two Worlds of Islam: Interaction between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. A senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995), Professor von der Mehden's many other books include Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia (1986); Southeast Asia 1930-1970 (1974); Comparative Political Violence (1973); and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (1963). He has just returned from Southeast Asia, where he has lectured or done research almost every year since the 1950s. He is California-trained, having earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley; an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School; and a B.A. from the University of the Pacific.

Journalism in Southeast Asia is triply constrained. In a given country, the regime in power may impose censorship or induce self-censorship. Outraged by an article, headline, or photograph, a threatening mob can achieve the same result. Concern for the bottom line may pressure commercial media to avoid "serious" analyses in favor of "lighter" stories with ostensibly greater reader, listener, or viewer appeal. Violence and sex may be featured for the same material reason. What is it like to work under such constraints? What strategies are available to journalists for defeating or deflecting them? How do the news environments in Indonesia and Thailand differ in these respects? What about the prejudices and preferences of journalists themselves? How do all these limits, incentives, and propensities go into the making of the news in Southeast Asia? Yuli Ismartono is uniquely suited to answer these questions. As a correspondent for TEMPO, she covered wars in Cambodia and Sri Lanka, drugs in the Golden Triangle, the student uprising in Burma, the Soviet exit from Afghanistan, Russian elections, the first Gulf War, and events in Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and, of course, Indonesia. For five years while TEMPO was banned, she worked in television and corporate public relations while writing for The Indonesian Observer. Her current responsibilities as executive editor include managing TEMPOInteraktif (online news).

Over the last two years in Southeast Asia, acts of terror done in the name of Islam have divided analysts into two broad camps. Academic specialists on Islam in Southeast Asia have tended to emphasize the moderation of the vast majority of Muslims in the region and the local roots of so-called jihadist violence there. While not denying the moderation of most Muslims, Western journalists and officials have relied more on intelligence reports and detainee confessions to situate Southeast Asian jihadists within a global terrorist network organized and inspired by Al Qaeda. Compared with Western journalists and officials, scholars have also tended to portray Islam as a basically tolerant religion and to seek nonreligious explanations and motivations for seemingly Islamist violence. If the scholars have had faith in explanatory contexts--distinctively local, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, and political--their counterparts in media and policy circles have been more inclined to showcase conspiratorial texts: interrogation transcripts, recordings of clandestine conversations, and the selectively Koranic rhetoric of militant Islamists urging global jihad. Which of these contrasting perspectives is superior, analytically and as a basis for counter-terror policy? Are the perpetrators of apparently Islamist terror in Southeast Asia thinking and acting locally? Or globally? Is there a demonstrably Al Qaeda network in the region? If so, what sort of a structure is it? How does it operate? Can a "war" against it succeed? If not, what might be a better approach? Zachary Abuza is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Simmons College. His most recent book is Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001). Foreign-affairs journals that have published his work include Asian Survey and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He has spoken on Southeast Asian subjects before Congress, at the State Department, on Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour," and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Time, among other media. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1998. In 1995-96 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Hanoi.

Indonesia has seen no respite from its turbulent politics, faltering economy, and simmering conflicts since mass pressure forced President Soeharto from office in 1998 after decades of authoritarian rule. The International Crisis Group (ICG) has focused its Indonesian research on separatist conflicts in Aceh and Papua, communal violence in Maluku and Kalimantan, and the ongoing economic crisis, and has recommended specific military and judicial reforms. In Burma, which has known near-constant conflict since its independence in 1948, the Group has focused on ethnic antagonisms, regime policies, and needed reforms. ICG has also assessed the efficacy of foreign sanctions and engagements as alternative ways of inducing change, and suggested how the international community might help lower the potential for violent strife in a future political transition. Gareth Evans, during his long tenure as Australia's foreign minister (1988-1996), played key roles in bringing peace to Cambodia, founding the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, and promoting forms of regionalism reflecting his country's proximity to Asia. For his Cambodian work he was awarded the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994. Writing of Evans' record as foreign minister, ex-Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten has observed: "High intelligence and principle added to a razor-sharp wit ensured that he was a controversial figure, but one who left the world better than he found it." Foreign affairs, human rights, and legal reform are among the topics explored by Evans in his many publications. Most recently he co-chaired the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. A long-time former member of Australia's parliament (1978-1999), Evans holds degrees in law from Melbourne University and in politics, economics, and philosophy from Oxford University.

American news from Indonesia has been alarming. "Asian Terror: Al Qaeda Seeks Niche in Indonesia, Officials Fear," headlined the New York Times on 23 January 2002. In the same issue, in a column ambitiously subtitled "What the Muslim World Really Feels," Tom Friedman described "an iron curtain of misunderstanding separating America and the Arab-Muslim world"--a world marked, in his view, by "enormous cultural resistance to believing anything good about America."

Indonesia is mainly Malay, not Arab, but it has more Muslims than any other country. How seriously should signs of jihadism there be taken? Ostensibly Islamist or jihadist movements include Darul Islam, HAMMAS, Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front, the Islamic Youth Movement, Jemaah Islamiah, and KISDI. In Maluku and Sulawesi, Christians have killed Muslims and vice versa. Americans and their embassy in Jakarta have been threatened. How should such groups, events, and risks be described, explained, and responded to? In what specific ways are faith, politics, and violence intersecting in Indonesia--and with what implications for Indonesians and Americans?

Analysts have long portrayed Indonesian Muslims as exemplary in their openness and tolerance toward non-Muslims and, within the Muslim community, toward religious diversity, creativity, and reform. Were these observers naive? Or have jihadism and Islamism been grossly overdrawn, and for reasons that involve politics, prejudice, and sensationalism far more than actual conditions? In this volatile context, how realistic are current reformist projects to foster a "liberal Islam," a "moderate Islam," a "feminist Islam," or a distinctively accommodative "Indonesian Islam"--as against an avowedly "militant Islam" that would impose an "Islamic state"?

How was it that Afghanistan, a country that was often conquered and ruled by outsiders before 1800, became seemingly impossible to conquer and rule in the 19th and 20th centuries? An historical examination of Afghan history reveals that premodern Central Asian rulers looked upon war and conquest as the business of displacing rival elites, a process having little or nothing to do with the inhabitants of the territory. During the 19th century, this pattern began to change in Afghanistan where governments found themselves dependent on raising tribal armies to repel foreign invaders, such as the British, at the cost of sharing power with them in the postwar period. This pattern continued into the 20th century when during each period of state collapse drew an ever-wider part of the population into the political struggle for power. The Soviet invasion drew the widest possible opposition but upon their withdrawal no faction was able to create a stable government. Afghanistan fell into ten years of civil war that opened it up to extreme movements such the Taliban and its exploitation by outsiders such as Osama bin Laden. Since war alone has now proved incapable of solving Afghanistan's problems the current conflict in Afghanistan can only be won by a wider policy that makes Afghanistan's economic and political reconstruction a priority in a way that can end its cycle of anarchy.

While Islam is commonly portrayed as a Middle Eastern religion, the majority of the world's Muslims reside in Asia. Indonesia is home to the world's largest Muslim population, with India following close behind. Millions of Muslims are scattered throughout South, Southeast, Central and Northeast Asia. In the wake of the horrific terrorists attacks on September 11th, many non-Muslims have mistakenly identified Islam with political violence. The need to distinguish moderate Islam practiced by the Muslim majority in Asia and the radical extremism used by terrorists has never been greater. In an effort to create a more comprehensive understanding of these complex issues and address misconceptions linking Islam and terrorism, the Asia Society and the Shorenstein Forum will convene a panel of experts to explore Muslim thought and practice in several key Asian countries, namely Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. Among the questions that will be addressed by the panel is how recent events will impact the future of Islam in Asia and what role extremist and other groups may play in this process.

Anand Patwardhan's latest film, a work in progress (180 min.), shot in India, Pakistan, and Japan The director will be present for discussion after the screening. Starting with the outbreak of jingoism that marked the 1998 series of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, Patwardhan creates a road movie that vivifies the human and historical realities of this new leap in the world's nuclearization. We visit test sites with politicians, watch urban sound-and-light spectacles glorifying the military, hear the stories of suffering villagers near the test site, travel with peace marchers who confront furious pro-bomb crowds, join a conference of Indian and Pakistani peace activists, and go to Japan to hear testimony from survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. In the style that has distinguished his earlier films, Patwardhan brilliantly captures individual voices, gestures, facial expressions, and public dramas that simultaneously reveal intimate human experience and the sweep of history. India's most controversial and renowned documentary producer, Patwardhan has won numerous Indian and international prizes during his career as a filmmaker, which spans more than a quarter of a century. While his films cover a wide variety of subjects, regions, and social groups, his central interests have been human rights, communalism, and violence. For information, see . Further questions? Contact , , or 650-725-9732.

Separatism and terrorism, demonstrations and scandals, elite conflict and economic malaise ... With so much trouble on its hands, why should the Indonesian government willingly open up the Pandora's box that is the legacy of violence from the Suharto regime, especially since many of his associates remain politically active? Or is the risk of focusing on the past worth takingÑto administer justice and foster a humane consensus strong enough to ensure that such abuses do not recur? These difficult questions cannot be answered without taking local conditions into account: the sense of uncertainty and stagnation that hangs over the reform process; the widespread perception that in mysterious and powerful ways Suharto is still controlling events; and the apparent inability of Indonesian society to transform its recent history into a set of lessons that could generate momentum toward a better future. Mary S. Zurbuchen was based until recently in Jakarta, as the Ford Foundation's chief representative for Southeast Asia (1992-96) and Indonesia (1996-2000). She is the academic coordinator of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA, where she is teaching a course on Indonesia while continuing her research on the intersection of history and memory in that country. Her many publications on cultural and social change in Indonesia include The Language of Balinese Shadow Theater (1987).