Please note: the start time for this event has been moved from 3:00 to 3:15pm.

Join FSI Director Michael McFaul in conversation with Richard Stengel, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. They will address the role of entrepreneurship in creating stable, prosperous societies around the world.

In recent years, questions have been posed regarding the durability of the current rules-based (liberal) international order and what this means for the practice of international relations. In this talk, Benjamin Ho, an assistant professor from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) argues that Southeast Asia countries are increasingly challenged in their ability to hedge and would have to make some tough choices between US and China (Chimerica) in their foreign relations. To this end, domestic myths will become increasingly important in determining how states exercise their foreign policy choices and preference towards international order. Drawing from his vantage point as a hybrid scholar/thinktank analyst in a key Southeast Asia state and supplemented with fieldwork experience elsewhere in Northeast Asia (Mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), Ho argues that states will view the international order as good or just if the characteristics of such an order support and allow for preservation for domestic myths. On the other hand, states will view the international order unfavourably if the characteristics of this order run up or challenge their ability to preserve domestic myths. As such, how Southeast Asia countries chose would provide clues to the future of the international order and the extent to which hedging remains a (still?) viable strategy moving forward. 

Speaker

Image

Dr Benjamin Ho is Assistant Professor and Coordinator at the China Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore. He obtained his PhD from the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK under a RSIS PhD scholarship. His research focus includes the study of China’s international relations, with an emphasis on Chinese political worldview and exceptionalism thinking. Other research interests include security multilateralism in the Asia Pacific region with a focus on regional institutions and fora, national security (intelligence), the sociology of religion and public theology (Christianity). He is the author of the book China’s Political Worldview and Chinese Exceptionalism: International Order and Global Leadership (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and is working on his second book project on Political Myths and International Order in Northeast Asia (with a focus on China, Japan and South Korea). He has also published in journals such as China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, East Asia: An International Quarterly, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Asia Policy, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He was a Fulbright scholar at the Elliot School of International Affairs (George Washington University between 2021-2022), a Taiwan MOFA Fellow at the Institute of Political Science Academia Sinica (Taiwan) in 2022 and a Republic of Korea-ASEAN Scholar at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy in 2025.

Stanford students, scholars, and faculty are welcome to join the Asia-Pacific Research Center's Southeast Asia Program for "The Promise and Peril of Informal Categorization as Refugee Brothers and Sisters", presented by Swan Ye Htut.

This talk is part of the APARC Southeast Asia Program Workshop series. Learn more about the workshop and student presentation opportunities by reaching out to kilimpan@stanford.edu

After the 2021 Myanmar military coup, over 40,000 Chin displaced migrants from Myanmar fled across the border into Mizoram, India. Despite India not being a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Refugee Protocol, the Mizoram welcomed the migrants as "refugee brothers and sisters". This talk investigates the informal "refugee" status, or "raltlan" in the Mizo language, which positions migrants as ethnic kin, but also subjects them to legal exclusion and moral judgements. This research offers broader lessons on how colonialism, minoritization within the nation-state order and transborder ethnic ties facilitate, but also complicate informal refugee reception. 

Speaker

Image

This talk discusses the Thai monarchy’s strategic response to the 2020 youth-led protests which called for reforms to the royal family’s place in national life. The speaker argues that King Vajiralongkorn did not merely seek to restore the status quo but executed a profound transformation which he terms ‘overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalisation.’ This shift converted informal influence into visible, legally codified, and personally commanded authority, entrenching absolute power within the constitutional framework to neutralise reformist momentum. The speaker documents this pivot across four interconnected institutional axes: financial codification, achieved through the 2017–18 legal restructuring that transferred Crown Property Bureau assets to Vajiralongkorn’s personal ownership; political gatekeeping, which used institutional proxies like the Senate and Constitutional Court to nullify electoral mandates; symbolic control, through a strategy of ‘defensive hyper-personalisation’ that asserts a direct personal command over the state, military, and dynastic narrative; and legal coercion, identifying the systematic weaponisation of the lèse-majesté law as it evolved from a criminal deterrent into a definitive constitutional veto. The speaker concludes that while the 2020 protests established royal reform as the central fault line of Thai politics, the monarchy’s aggressive consolidation has replaced the consensus-based network monarchy with a more confrontational and legally absolute model of rule.

Speaker

Image

Pavin Chachavalpongpun is a professor at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, He is the chief editor of the online journal Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, in which all articles are translated from English into Japanese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Vietnamese, Burmese and Khmer. Earning his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Pavin is the author and editor of several books including the upcoming, Kings in the American Mirror: Two Centuries of U.S.-Thai Monarchy Relations (University of Hawai’i Press).

Moderator

Image

David Cohen is a leading expert in the fields of human rights, international law and transitional justice, as well as one of the world's leading social and legal historians of ancient Greece. Cohen taught at UC Berkeley from 1979-2012 as the Ancker Distinguished Professor for the Humanities, and served as the founding Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center, which moved to Stanford in 2013 and became the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. He now serves as the Center's faculty co-director. Cohen holds the WSD-HANDA Professorship in Human Rights and International Justice and is appointed in the Classics department at Stanford. He is also appointed as Professor of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems in the Department of Environmental Behavior Sciences at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability.