Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

The world’s leading economic policymakers are “on the right track” to ensure a global financial upturn, the chief of the International Monetary Fund told a Stanford audience on Tuesday.

But she warned the recovery will be derailed without the creation of more jobs, better education systems and a way to shrink the gap between rich and poor. And she cautioned against the potential pitfalls of untested exchanges and digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

“We are on the right track, but we need to ask – the right track to where? And the right track to what growth?” said Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director. “Will it be solid, sustainable, and balanced – or will it be fragile, erratic, and unbalanced? To answer this question, we need to look at the patterns of economic activity in the years ahead, and especially the role of technology and innovation in driving us forward.”

Lagarde’s visit to Stanford was co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition to delivering public remarks at FSI’s Bechtel Conference Center, Lagarde met privately with faculty and students during the day.

Just returning from the G-20 summit in Sydney, Lagarde said she is optimistic that the world’s economic leaders are committed to taking the steps that will guard against another large-scale financial collapse. She said the G-20 members agreed to complete a set of financial reforms by the end of this year, a move that will make the “financial sector safer and less likely to cause crisis.”

She said the member countries and their central banks have also agreed to better cooperate and be more transparent in their policymaking.

But she’s worried that unless more sustainable jobs are created, economic disparities will increase. And that, she said, will “harm the pace and sustainability of growth over the long term.”

As technology has helped create a more interconnected world, it is playing an increasing role in the economic landscape. Machines have made our lives easier. Artificial intelligence has led to cars that can drive themselves, robots that can do things in place of humans and smartphones that are more powerful than the first supercomputers.

But so far, there’s been no measure of how new technology has increased productivity.

“We certainly need to keep an eye on this,” she said. “One of the biggest worries is how this technological innovation affects jobs. Put simply: will machines leave workers behind?”

She said technology creates “huge rewards for the extraordinary visionaries at the top, and huge anxieties for workers at the bottom.”

Lagarde said it is up to educators to better prepare the next generation of workers.

“Educational systems are not keeping pace with changing technology and the ever-evolving world of work,” she said. “We need to change what people learn, how people learn, when people learn, and even why people learn. We must go beyond the traditional model of students sitting in classrooms, following instructions and memorizing material. Computers can do that.”

Instead, humans must “outclass computers” in cognitive, interpersonal and sophisticated coding skills, she said.

“Think of creative jobs, caring jobs, jobs that entail great craftsmanship – imagination,” she said. “And given the rate and pace of change, we will need the ability to constantly adapt and change through lifelong learning.”

She called on institutions such as Stanford to play a key role in the process.

“Stanford’s model of education was innovative from the very first day—co-educational, non-denominational, and always practical, focusing on the formation of cultured and useful citizens,” she said. “Stanford was ahead of its time back then. I know that it will continue to be ahead of its time as we venture into the exciting period ahead.”

But that exciting period carries with it uncertainty and risk.

Asked about the role that emerging digital currencies such as Bitcoin could have on the evolving economy, Lagarde was skeptical, calling it a “shaky and wobbly” system.

The currency’s trading website went offline this week, spooking investors and calling into question Bitcoin’s future.

“It’s a glamorous, sexy attractive new system,” she said. “But a monetary system is a public good. It has to be supervised and sufficiently regulated so it is accountable. At this point in time, I think Bitcoin is outside that perimeter of both supervision and regulation.”

Lagarde is the 11th managing director of the IMF, and the first woman to lead the 188-country organization. Since she took over the organization in 2011, she has played a role in the world’s most pressing financial matters, working on solutions to a sluggish global economy and the debt crises in Europe.

The IMF gives both policy advice and financing to countries in difficult economic situations. It also helps developing countries reduce poverty and become more economically stable. 

The organization is now poised to assist Ukraine, which is at risk of running out of money to pay its bills in the midst of a political crisis. The country is struggling to cobble together a temporary government in the wake of President Viktor Yanukovych leaving Kiev and being removed from power.

But until a provisional government is formed, the country cannot technically ask for help. When it does, Lagarde said the IMF will send “technical assistance.”

“We are ready to engage,” she said.

Mark Peattie, Ph.D., noted scholar of Japanese Imperial history, died peacefully, surrounded by family on January 22, 2014 in San Rafael, California; he was 83. 

Peattie was born in Nice, France, to expatriate writers Donald Culross and Louise Redfield Peattie on May 3, 1930. He returned to the United States with his parents and his two brothers, Malcom R. Peattie and Noel R. Peattie. He grew up in Santa Barbara, where he graduated from Laguna Blanca School. He went on to get a B.A. in history at Pomona College. He served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1954, including an assignment in counter-intelligence in Europe.

In 1955, after completing his M.A. in history at Stanford University, Peattie began his career as an American cultural diplomat with the U.S. Information Agency. He began his stint in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he served for two years. His nine years in Japan started in Sendai; in Tokyo he trained intensively in Japanese language before serving as director of the American Cultural Center in Kyoto.

In 1967, after serving a final year in diplomacy in Washington, D.C., his love of history called him to the world of academia. After earning his Ph.D. in modern Japanese history from Princeton University, he taught at Pennsylvania State University, the University of California – Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For many years, Peattie was a research fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He was also a senior research staff member of the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace, before becoming a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

His publications include The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945, Stanford University Press; Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909 –1941, Naval Institute Press; Nan'yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945, University of Hawaii Press; Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (with David C. Evans), U.S. Naval Institute Press; The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (with Peter Duus and Ramon H. Myers), Princeton University Press;The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton University Press; and Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's Confrontation with the West, Princeton University Press.                                                                 

Peattie was married to the late Alice Richmond Peattie for 52 years and is survived by his daughters Victoria Peattie Helm of Mercer Island, Washington; Caroline Peattie of Mill Valley, California; son David Peattie of Berkeley, California; nieces Dana VanderMey and Hilary Peattie, both of Santa Barbara; and grandchildren, Brendan Shuichi, Marcus Takeshi, Kylie Max, Kai Schorske, and Jessica Susan.

Mark Peattie passionately believed in sensible handgun control laws to reduce deaths and injuries.  In lieu of flowers the family requests donations be directed to www.bradycampaign.org.

Services will be held at a later date. Please sign the online guestbook to see updated service information at www.cusimanocolonial.com.