The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has challenged itself is to become a single integrated community by 2015.  The prospect has raised high hopes inside the region.  Will they be met?  Efforts to build the community have intensified, yet the clock ticks and the deadline looms.  Although the result will not match what local enthusiasts of regional unification want to see, but it will likely exceed the expectations of skeptical outsiders.  ASEAN is the linchpin of East Asian regionalism, by design and by default.  What happens to the Association over the next several years has far-reaching implications for the United States, China, and not least for the states and peoples of Southeast Asia.  In his talk, Prof. Pongsudhirak will tease out these dynamics, assess their significance, and explore possible futures beyond 2015.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak heads the Institute of Security and International Studies and teaches international political economy at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.  In 2010 he was an FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor at Stanford and, in spring 2011, a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.  He has written many articles, chapters, and books on ASEAN and East Asian affairs, and on Thai politics, political economy, and foreign policy.  He has worked for The Nation newspaper (Bangkok), The Economist Intelligence Unit, and Independent Economic Analysis (London).  He currently serves on the editorial boards of Asian Politics & Policy, Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Studies, and South East Asia Research.  His degrees are from the London School of Economics (PhD), Johns Hopkins University (School of Advanced International Studies, MA), and the University of California, Santa Barbara (BA). 

China's pace of demographic transition -- both mortality and fertility decline -- have been unparalleled in human populations of significant size. With China's fertility now well below replacement level, what lies ahead for this demographic overachiever? Dr. Wang will discuss the role of the Chinese state in the demographic transition, pointing out how focusing on the role of government overlooks the socioeconomic engines of China's transition and contributes to under-appreciation of the long-term implications of China's demographic transition.

Wang Feng is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy. Prior to his current position, Wang Feng taught at the University of California, Irvine (from where he is on leave currently). Professor Wang is an expert on China’s social and demographic change. His recent work on social inequality in China includes Boundaries and Categories, Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2008), Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China (co-edited with Deborah Davis, Stanford University Press, 2009), and his work on demographic change in China includes “The Demographic Factor in China’s Transitions” (with Andrew Mason, included in Loren Brant and Thomas Rawski, eds., China’s Great Economic Transformations. Cambridge University Press, 2008).

In addition to the health-protective effects of higher income and social status, better education appears to be an important contributor to good health. However, evidence is limited from developing countries undergoing rapid socioeconomic transition like China. To document the evolution of the educational gradient in health, we analyze the China National Health Services Survey (Ministry of Health, 1998, 2003 and 2008), and the Chinese Family Panel Study (Peking University, 2010). We find patterns consistent with the economic theory of socioeconomic gradients in health, as modified to take account of China's rapid economic, demographic, and epidemiologic transitions over the past quarter century.

Co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University.

A police “encounter killing,” or simply “encounter,” is a term with no legal validity but which has seeped via the media into Indian English so surely that it has acquired a life of its own. It refers to a face-to-face interaction between the police and suspects leading to the killing of the suspects. While intended to convey serendipity, encounter killings in reality are often pre-planned executions by police or security agencies. First used against Maoists in the 1970s, and counterinsurgents in the Northeast and Kashmir, executions as unstated state policy were perfected in dealing with Sikh militant groups in the 80s and 90s. The ‘Punjab solution’, as it came to be known, became the model for the internal security establishment. Mumbai’s underworld was reined in through a series of high profile encounter killings—much celebrated in the popular media for imposing order into the urban anarchy that the gang-wars were breeding. Indeed, this became the preferred quick-fix method of dealing with a range of ‘undesirables’, from petty criminals to gangsters, to alleged terrorists and separatists. But more often than not, those lumped together as ‘encounterables’ were simultaneously marked out through their caste, ethnic and religious affiliations. The talk will discuss the history of fake encounters in India and the role of the media and judiciary in dealing with them.

Manisha Sethi is Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests are in the area of gender and religion, communalism, and law and terrorism. She has published extensively on these themes in academic as well as popular publications. She is currently Associate Editor, Biblio: A Review of Books, India’s premier book review journal, with which she has been associated for over a decade. Sethi is the President of the Jamia Teachers' Solidarity Association, which has been closely involved in a campaign against extra judicial killings. Her book, Escaping the World: Chastity, Power and Women’s Renunciation among Jains, Routledge India, is due later this year.

This event is co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for South Asia and

The Indian American Muslim Council