The fastest growing economy in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the Lao People's Democratic Republic. For a decade Steve Parker has been intensively involved on behalf of USAID as a resident adviser on economic and related legal reforms, first in Vietnam and for the last three years in Laos. In each country he has focused on helping the government fulfill the requirements of membership in the WTO. Vietnam joined the WTO in 2007 and Laos followed suit on 2 February 2013. He is also advising the Lao government on meeting its obligations under the ASEAN Economic Community that is scheduled for inauguration in 2015, and on implementing the 2005 U.S.-Lao PDR Bilateral Trade Agreement.  

Since the resignation of Indonesia’s authoritarian president Suharto in 1998, the country has made great strides in consolidating a democratic government. But it is by no means a model of tolerance. The rights of religious minorities are routinely trampled. Regulations against blasphemy and proselytizing are routinely used to prosecute minorities including atheists, Ahmadiyah, Bahais, Christians, and Shias. As of 2012 Indonesia had over 280 religiously motivated regulations restricting minority rights. 

Hard-line groups such as the Islam Defenders Front use narrow interpretations of local and national legislation as a key tool to suppress minorities. In 2006 two ministers in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's cabinet jointly decreed stricter legal requirements for building a house of worship. The decree is enforced only on religious minorities, often when Islamists pressure local officials to refuse to authorize the construction of Christian churches or to harass those worshiping in “illegal” churches. More than 430 such churches have been closed since. Violent attacks on religious minorities have become more frequent—from 216 cases in 2010, to 244 in 2011, to 264 in 2012. What explains this record of intimidation? Can it be stopped, and if so, how?

Andreas Harsono is widely published. He co-wrote In Religion's Name: Abuses against Religious Minorities in Indonesia (Human Rights Watch, 2013). His commentaries appeared in 2012 in outlets ranging from The New York Times to The Myanmar Times. Other writings include My “Religion” Is Journalism (2010), a collection of his Indonesian-language essays. In 2003 he helped establish the Pantau Foundation, which trains Indonesian journalists and defends media freedom. In 1999 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship on Journalism at Harvard. He co-founded the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (Bangkok,1998), the Institute for the Study of the Free Flow of Information (Jakarta, 1995), and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (Jakarta, 1994). Earlier in his career he edited Pantau, a monthly Indonesian magazine on journalism and the media. Still earlier he worked as a reporter for The Nation (Bangkok) and The Star (Kuala Lumpur). He describes himself as a “journalist-cum-activist”—an identity richly illustrated by his career.

Related Resources

Indonesia: Religious Minorities Targets of Rising Violence (HRW, press release)

Indonesia: Rising Violence Against Religious Minorities (HRW, slideshow)

In Religion’s Name: Abuses Against Religious Minorities in Indonesia (HRW, report)

How do jihadists and militant Papuan pro-independence groups in Indonesia analyze each other's behavior? How do government policies toward the two groups differ? Why does the murder of a policeman warrant a murder charge when committed by a Papuan guerrilla but a terrorism charge when committed by a jihadist? Why is speech in favor of independence banned but speech exhorting the killing of deviants allowed? Why are "deradicalisation" programs, such as they are, aimed only at jihadists and not at Papuan militants? Why is the Papuan independence flag banned while flags that promise an Islamic caliphate are allowed? Some inconsistencies may be unavoidable, but when "terrorists" are not producing mass casualties and some "rebels" are beginning to target civilians, it may be time to rethink policies toward both. Sidney Jones will address these disparities using evidence drawn from interviews and from these groups’ own statements and actions.

Sidney Jones is a globally acclaimed expert on inter-group conflict in Southeast Asia. Topics she has covered for ICG include radical Islamism and communal violence in Indonesia and the Philippines. Previously she held positions with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Ford Foundation. Her writings in 2011–12 have appeared in Southeast Asian Affairs 2011, The Straits Times, and Strategic Review among other outlets. Her earlier work includes Making Money Off Migrants: The Indonesian Exodus to Malaysia (2000). A frequent media interviewee, she also lectures widely—most recently in Sydney on extremism and democracy in Indonesia at the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Based in Jakarta, she has spent Fall 2012 as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

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?

Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.

The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:

• Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
  As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?

• How are higher education systems globalizing?
  What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?

• How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
  What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?

• What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
  What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.