The talk , based on a recent paper, will describe and examine the social understanding of selling sex for a visa among migrant Filipina hostesses in Tokyo. The paper examines the different constitutions of love in Japan and the Philippines to understand the making of love in the marriages of Filipina hostesses and their Japanese customers. The paper will attempt to argue why the act of selling sex for a visa does not necessarily reduce marriage to prostitution while at the same time questioning the assumption that marriage is ever free of rational motivation.

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include the sociology of gender and labor, the family, and globalization. Her latest book Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award in the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.

Certain East Asian territorial disputes have simmered, unresolved, since the arrangements concluding the Second World War: Japan, China, and Taiwan contest sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu(tai) islands and their surrounding waters; South Korea and Japan both assert a claim to Dokto/Takeshima island (also called Liancourt Rocks); Japan and Russia have not yet signed a formal peace treaty ending the war, mainly because of their continuing dispute regarding sovereignty over the Northern Territories/southern Kuriles; and China, Taiwan and Vietnam plus three other nations assert sovereignty over one or more of the Spratly Island group in the South China Sea. These contending claims arise -- and generate heat -- from conflicting historical memories, national identities, nationalistic impulses, regional power rivalries, and potentially rich economic benefits. China's rising military power and concomitantly more assertive foreign policy posture have added to that volatile mix. The United States was, in a sense, "present at the creation" of the specific postwar arrangements -- that failed adequately to resolve historical issues and left the contested East China Sea islands in a legally uncertain status. The Obama administration's announced "pivot" or "rebalancing" toward Asia was accompanied by public affirmations of enduring U.S. policy interests in Asia and by a call for China to settle its South China Sea disputes through multilateral negotiations.  So the U.S. is involved to a greater or lesser degree in each of the contemporary East Asian territorial disputes. Keyser will discuss the U.S. policymaker's perspective on these territorial conflicts including whether the U.S. government can and should play an active role in facilitating resolutions. 

Donald W. Keyser retired from the U.S. Department of State in September 2004 after a 32-year career.  He had extensive domestic and foreign experience in senior policy positions, conflict resolution, intelligence operations and analysis, and law enforcement programs. His career focused geographically on U.S. policy toward East Asia, particularly China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Fluent in Chinese and professionally conversant in Japanese, Russian and French, he served three tours at the American Embassy in Beijing and two tours at the American Embassy in Tokyo. A Russian language and Soviet/Russian area studies specialist in his undergraduate and early graduate-level work, Keyser served 1998-99 as Special Negotiator and Ambassador for Regional Conflicts in the Former USSR. He is currently a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham, U.K.

The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.

Sophal Ear was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and a TED Fellow in 2009. His next book—The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World, co-authored with Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres—will appear in February 2013. Prof. Ear is vice-president of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated “The End/Beginning: Cambodia,” an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has a PhD in political science, two master’s degrees from the University of California-Berkeley, and a third master’s from Princeton University.

From 18 to 20 November 2012 Phnom Penh in Cambodia will be the summit capital of the world. President Obama and the heads of nearly 20 other countries will gather there for a series of high-level meetings organized by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Events will include the ASEAN Summit, the ASEAN Plus Three Summit, and the East Asia Summit (EAS). Obama will attend the EAS and the US-ASEAN Leaders Summit as well.

Here at Stanford the issues at stake in these summits will be assessed in conversation among the ambassadors to the United States from five ASEAN member countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Viet Nam—and the president of the US-ASEAN Business Council. How will the ASEAN Community planned for 2015 affect economy, security, and democracy in Southeast Asia? What are China’s intentions in East Asia?  How should ASEAN respond to Chinese behavior? Will a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea be announced in Phnom Penh? What can we expect from Indonesia’s leadership of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 2013? Is protectionism in Southeast Asia on the rise? Has Europe’s recent experience discredited economic regionalism? Is the US-backed Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) good or bad for Southeast Asia? Should the controversial American “rebalance” toward Asia be rebalanced? How reversible are the reforms in Myanmar (Burma)? What changes inside ASEAN will make the organization more effective? What is the single change in US policy that each ambassador would most like to see?