In activist communities worldwide, globalization has had an enormous impact, both in the composition of activist groups and the content of their messages. At the same time, regional concerns are playing a significant role in the ways protests are organized, managed, and deployed.
Regardless of their location or their target, it is clear that protest campaigns have, on the one hand, become increasingly globalized. The protests that took place during the July 2008 G8 Toyako Summit in Japan offer a case in point. Approximately one hundred transnational activists flew into Sapporo, a city located near the summit site, and joined various civil and protest activities. Over a loudspeaker, they broadcast statements denouncing the summit meeting as “antidemocratic” and “discriminatory against the poor.” These activists were drawn from East, Southeast, and Central Asia, as well as Europe and North America, and they voiced correspondingly global concerns—for human rights, global peace, and democracy, and against inequality and poverty. These themes echoed those of other major global protests, including demonstrations that took place against the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, the latter most notably in 1999 in Seattle. Indeed, protests of this kind represent what might be called an antiglobalization movement
On the other hand, global movements of this kind also appear to be organized on an increasingly regional basis. Though the activists who protested the Toyako Summit came from all over the world, and addressed topics of global importance, most of the participants came mainly from South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Given this apparent dichotomy, the question arises: Will global social movements become regional?
One could argue that global social movements are and will remain regional, at least for the time being, for two practical reasons. First, the costs associated with flight to activist hubs near protest sites can be expensive. Second, the amount of time spent in transition to the protest site becomes a burden. The time doubles when taking into consideration the time spent to return to the originating country. These factors can be prohibitive especially to those based far away, but are less burdensome to regional activists, thus making it easier for nearby protesters to participate.
While time and cost are no doubt a concern, they may not be as important when compared with the other factors. Language is among these factors. Cooperative activities beyond the national borders are on the rise, yet many foreign activists do not speak the languages spoken in the countries where they protest. They invariably rely on English, widely accepted as the “global” language. Yet the levels of English fluency differ among participating activists, and this is a key factor. With their English ability, activists from Europe and North America tend to communicate with others on an individual basis, while those from nearby countries often rely on interpreters, especially when discussions delve into the details of the planned activity and necessary arrangements associated with it. Typically, interpreters are group leaders, well educated and knowledgeable about regional and global issues—and these individuals facilitate most intergroup communication.
Preestablished ties and preexisting communication can influence negotiation and cooperation processes among activists. Global social movements tend to enhance crossnational cooperation among participating activists—that is, activists who come together from different countries often regroup elsewhere, building on their previous cooperative activities. In the case of the 2008 G8 summit protests, regionalization was very much at work. Several months prior to the summit, Japanese media activists planned a temporary umbrella organization called the G8 Media Network, which helped to accommodate incoming foreign media activists and arranged international cooperative activities during the summit. As it happened, the foreign activists and groups that interacted with the G8 Media Network were actually regional, originating mainly from South Korea and Hong Kong. Under the auspices of the G8 Media Network, these groups of activists arrived prior to the summit and stayed until it concluded. Afterward, the same media groups discussed the continuation of crossnational cooperation. Though technically foreign, the dominant actors and groups who sought to continue cooperative activities were, in fact, only from neighboring countries.
Looking more closely at participants in the global protest activities provides further insight into contemporary global protest movements. At the 2008 G8 Summit protests, two different types of foreign participants were on display—those who had prior ties to host activist groups in Japan, and those who did not. The former group could be described as professional activists, whose preestablished ties ensure that they have good knowledge of a given protest’s scheduled activities. The professional group also organizes its own plans of action, precoordinated with domestic groups. The latter group tends to be traveling activists, a more or less independent and unorganized collection of individuals who enjoy traveling the globe and joining the activities offered at protest sites worldwide. The professional activist group is often drawn largely from neighboring countries in the region.
Most global social movements feature participants from around the world. At the same time, signs of regionalization also exist, making most protests both global and regional in nature. One could claim that the future of global social movements is regional. But whether global or regional, it is vital that we continue to study the composition of global protest movements and their abiding impact on civil society.
This lecture situates the ‘history problem’ in historical perspective, focusing on the ‘textbook issue’ in twentieth century Sino-Japanese relations. Professor Kawashima argues that far from being the beginning of a new problem, the diplomatic tensions that arose in 1982 over Japanese textbooks actually had clear historical antecedents. Even before WWII, these two countries fought over the representation of the past and sometimes competed over rival historical truth claims on the diplomatic stage. We should accordingly examine contemporary problems over the past in light of this basso continuo.
Shin Kawashima teaches the history of international relations in East Asia at the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo. He received his BA from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and his MA and PhD in Oriental History from the University of Tokyo in Oriental history. He served at Hokkaido University in the Department of Politics and the Faculty of Law, until 2006 when he moved to the University of Tokyo. He has also been a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica in Taipei, the Beijing Center for Japanese Studies, National Chengchi University at Taipei and Peking University. His research focuses on Chinese Diplomatic History and he has recently started a project on radio history in East Asia. He has published widely in academic journals and his first book was awarded the 2004 Suntry Academic Prize.
Philippines Conference Room
North Korea has often been considered an aberration in the post-Cold War international system, a relic of a Stalinist past. In fact, a close examination of North Korean foreign relations during the Cold War period reveals that Pyongyang's behavior never fit neatly into the paradigm of a bipolar international order, and that the Cold War itself had a distinctive dynamic in the Korean context. This dynamic helps to explain the continued existence of a divided Korea to this day, long after the bipolar international system has ended. Based largely on formerly secret materials from North Korea's Cold War allies in Eastern Europe, this paper suggests that Pyongyang's "aberrent" behavior long pre-dates the 1990s. It argues that North Korea has exhibited more continuity than change in the way it has dealt with the outside world over the last several decades, focusing on three areas of foreign policy: economic extraction, political non-alignment, and the development of an independent nuclear weapons capability.
Charles K. Armstrong is The Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. In the fall semester of 2008 he was a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University.
A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong is the author or editor of several books, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007), The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, second edition 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. His current book projects include a study of North Korean foreign relations in the Cold War era and a history of modern East Asia.
Professor Armstrong holds a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Yale University, an M.A. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 1996.
Philippines Conference Room
IT firms in Silicon Valley access talent globally, recruiting from colleges abroad and recruiting firms, and personnel transfers from overseas affiliates. Another strategy is to open offshore operations--though this restricts access to a few locations, in countries with large labor pools this may spur innovation, while providing access to domestic markets.
The conference, the fourth in the annual Globalization of Services series, will explore SV firms' assessment of foreign education and experience, the career paths of foreign engineers, and the impact on firms' capacity for scale and innovation. The intent is to understand whether selecting from a global labor force enables US employers to select just the "best" worker or is motivated by other considerations. The conference is limited to 40 persons, including panelists.
Presentations may be downloaded below.
final Agenda
| 8:00 | Continental Breakfast |
| 9:00 | Welcome and Introductions Michael Teitelbaum, Sloan Foundation; Philip Martin, University of California, Davis |
| 9:15-10:30 | Why hire engineers from overseas: findings from a quality study on Indian and Chinese engineers Martin Carnoy and Rafiq Dossani, Stanford University Discussant: TBA |
| 10:45-12:30 | The experience of large IT firms Bill Pearson, Intel; Otto Schmid, NVidia; E.Subramanian, Tata Consultancy Services; Raja Raj, Wipro Discussant: Petri Rouvinen, ETLA, Finland |
| 1:00-2:30 | Lunch at Google, Mountain View, hosted by Raj Shah Presentation, panel discussion and campus tour |
| 3:00-4:15 | The experience of startups and small IT firms Robert Lee, Achievo; Praveen Singh, Arada; Ashish Dixit, Tensilica Discussant: TBA |
| 4:30-5:30 | Recruiting engineers from Asia Anu Parthasarathy, Global Executive Talent; Badri Gopalan, Synopsys; Yatin Trivedi, Synopsys Discussant: Manuel Serapio, University of Colorado, Denver |
Parking Information:
The conference is being held in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall, located at 616 Serra Street on the Stanford University campus.
Attendees should parking in visitor parking. Parking on campus, particularly near Encina Hall, is extremely limited due to recent construction. Attendees should give themselves plenty of time to find a parking spot.
Visitor parking is either at meters with coins or at the "pay and display" machines. Please note that if you park at a meter that take coins you will need $12 in quarters for a full day.
Here are the locations of visitor parking, in order of increasing distance from Encina Hall. Please refer to the visitor parking map for info:
This conference is the 4th annual "Globalization of Services" conference, generously supported by the Sloan Foundation.
Bechtel Conference Center
President Obama’s inauguration one week from today invites us to consider the
immediate agenda and outlook for U.S.-ROK relations. That agenda might usefully
address the following items:
Thomas Fingar, a prominent intelligence expert and China scholar who served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, has joined FSI Stanford effective January 2009. Fingar served on the Stanford staff for a decade after completing his PhD in political science here in 1977 and now returns as the 2008-2009 Payne Distinguished Lecturer. At the expiration of that appointment in December of 2009, he will become the inaugural Oksenberg Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at FSI.
"We are thrilled to welcome Tom Fingar back to Stanford," said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. "His experience and commanding knowledge of international security and intelligence issues - from contemporary China and Iran to the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism using weapons of mass destruction - will be of enormous benefit to our faculty, the students who will be our next generation of leaders, and the wider Stanford community."
FSI's Payne Distinguished Lectureship, named for Frank and Arthur Payne, annually presents to the larger Stanford community prominent speakers chosen for their international reputation as leaders, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, a broad grasp of a given field, and the capacity to articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges. Previous Payne lecturers have included Alejandro Toledo, Peter Piot, David Heymann, Joschka Fischer, Sir David Manning, Mohamed ElBaradei, Jorge Castaneda, Sadaka Ogata, Josef Joffe, and Bill Bradley.
While serving as the Payne Lecturer, Fingar will deliver three public lectures to the Stanford community. He will reside in FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), co-directed by nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and political scientist Scott D. Sagan, with Lynn Eden serving as acting co-director while Sagan is on sabbatical this year. "Stanford is fortunate to have a scholar-practitioner of Tom Fingar's stature engaging in our multidisciplinary efforts to address the complex security issues currently facing the international community," Hecker said.
A prominent China scholar who has published dozens of books and articles on Chinese politics and policymaking, Fingar will become the inaugural Oksenberg Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at FSI in 2010, based at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). The Shorenstein center is world renowned for its work on contemporary political, economic, and security issues in Northeast Asia and houses the Asia-Pacific Scholars Program, which supports graduate students engaged in Asia-related studies.
Fingar has had a distinguished career in public service. He was assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and principal advisor to the secretary on intelligence issues from July 2004 until May 2005, when he was named Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. While at the State Department, he also served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research (2003-04 and 2000-01), Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (2001-03), Deputy Assistant Secretary for Analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89).
Between 1975 and 1986, Fingar held a number of positions at Stanford, including senior research associate at CISAC and director of the university's U.S.-China Relations program, which ultimately, with other units, became Shorenstein APARC. He has also served as a consultant to many U.S. government agencies and private sector organizations.
Fingar holds a BA in government and history from Cornell and an MA and PhD from Stanford in political science. He will offer his first 2009 Payne distinguished lecture on March 11, 2009 from 4:30 - 6:00 pm in FSI's Bechtel Conference Center, 616 Serra Street. The address is free and open to the public.
This study proposes a theoretical framework to understand how nations deal with collective memories of perpetration of severe human rights violations, which do not fit comfortably in any national master narrative but have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Building on studies of collective memory, the framework explicates how initial historical conditions of the nation, domestic social movements, and the degree of international pressures move the national discourse along two key dimensions – (a) acceptance of guilt and (b) international orientation of the discourse – which map out seven possible responses to collective trauma of perpetration. Through examination of the history of post-war Japan and content analyses of newspaper editorials and prime ministers’ speeches from 1945 to 2004, the empirical analysis applies the framework to the Japanese case and reveals
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan. His research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. He has conducted cross-national statistical analyses on how human rights ideas and instruments have expanded globally and impacted local politics and qualitative case studies of the impact of global human rights on Japanese politics. His current projects examine (a) the evolution of transnational social movement organizations, (b) global expansion of corporate social responsibility, (c) changing conceptions of nationhood and minority rights in national constitutions, (d) dynamics of political identities in contemporary Europe, (e) global human rights and three ethnic minority social movements in Japan, and (f) changing discourse around the Asia-Pacific War in Japan.
Philippines Conference Room
History has become both a source and focus of rising tensions in East Asia in recent decades, revolving around controversies over ‘distorted’ interpretations of the past, most notoriously over ‘revisionist’ histories of invasion and the whitewashing or denial of atrocities. Japan has, unsurprisingly, been regarded by its neighbors as the primary perpetrator, both in history and in its retelling in revisionist textbooks, but it has by no means been the only offender, and ‘history wars’ have become increasingly common within and between other countries in the region. In this paper, Alisa Jones examines the phenomenon of ‘historical revisionism’ in East Asian textbooks and the - primarily domestic - ideological, political and pedagogical purposes it serves. Analyzing often contradictory depictions of victims and perpetrators, heroes and villains, winners and losers, she demonstrates how textbooks convey (others’) guilt/inferiority and (our) innocence/superiority, and how they attempt to defend or legitimize present political projects and territorial claims, win hearts and minds, and shape the values and beliefs of future citizens.
Alisa Jones is the Northeast Asia History Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. She received her degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of Leeds, specializing in the history and politics of modern and contemporary China. Her research and scholarly publications focus on the politics and practice of historiography and history education in East Asia, in particular on the ways in which the past has been commemorated, revised and contested in both domestic and international arenas. She is currently working on several related projects, examining the goals and content of history and citizenship education as well as the ways in which other public and private mechanisms (such as the legal system, patriotic campaigns, the media, the internet) have been used and abused to define the parameters of acceptable debate about the past and the claims on the citizens of the present and future it represents.
Philippines Conference Room
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Alisa Jones received her MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and her PhD from the University of Leeds. She specialized in the history of modern and contemporary China with secondary interests in politics and education, writing her doctoral dissertation on history education policy and praxis in the post-Mao reform-and-opening period.
Recently, Jones collaborated on book projects that address the roles played by history textbooks, historiography, and popular culture in shaping public memory and national identities across East Asia and the ways in which the past has been contested in various domestic and international arenas. She is currently working on several related projects, examining the goals and content of history and citizenship education as well as the ways in which other public and private mechanisms (such as the legal system, patriotic campaigns, the media, the internet) have been used and abused to define the parameters of acceptable debate about the past and the claims on the citizens of the present and future it represents.
While at Shorenstein APARC, she will be researching and teaching on issues of historical memory, identity, conflict and reconciliation in the Northeast Asian region.
