Nancy Peluso will discuss how "political forests" originated in colonial-era Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and how they have been maintained over at least a century and a half of broader political-economic change. She will argue that forests were produced and normalized in Southeast Asia through political categories embedded in the law, scientific and public practice, colonial and post-colonial empires of forestry, and the insurgencies and emergencies of the Cold War era. This required the sometimes violent separation of the components of agrarian environments. From the fact that forests can be shown to be not only biological but also historical and political in nature she will draw important implications for conservation, development, and "green governance."

Nancy Lee Peluso is program director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics at UC - Berkeley, where she teaches courses in political ecology and studies forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. She is the co-editor of Violent Environments (2001) and Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (1996) and the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (1992) and many journal articles and book chapters. She is presently finishing a book manuscript whose working title is "Ways of Seeing Borneo: Territoriality, Violence, and the Production of Landscape History". She is an associate editor of Global Environmental Politics and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Her PhD is from Cornell University.

Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand are plagued by corruption. Why? What have their governments done to curb the phenomenon? How effective or ineffective have their efforts been, and why? In the course of addressing these questions, Professor Quah will argue for anti-corruption measures that are comprehensive in nature and backed by political will. He will also conclude that Thailand appears to have had greater success in stemming corruption than either the Philippines or Indonesia. In explaining that difference, he will highlight, among other factors, the reform constitution that Thailand adopted in 1997.

Jon Quah is co-editor of the Asian Journal of Political Science and presently a visiting scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. In 1992-98 he chaired the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He has held visiting positions at Stanford University and Harvard University, among other institutions. Relevant publications include Curbing Corruption in Asia: A Comparative Study of Six Countries (2003); "Causes and Consequences of Corruption in Southeast Asia," Asian Journal of Public Administration (2003); and "Democratization and Political Corruption in the Philippines and South Korea," Crime, Law and Social Change(2004). His advisory positions have included being lead consultant for a UN Anti-Corruption Mission to Mongolia.

In Thailand in 1997 reformers drafted a new constitution. They hoped to trigger dramatic improvements in the country's political system. Analysts, activists, and politicians alike blamed many of Thailand's problems on shortcomings of a party system seen as dangerously weak and fragmented. Accordingly, the new charter was designed to strengthen political parties while reducing their number. These constitutional changes profoundly affected Thai politics, but not always in the ways or for the reasons that reformers had in mind. Have the changes improved or worsened the quality of democracy in Thailand? In addressing this question, Professor Hicken will highlight the unintended consequences of constitutional reform and the nature of governance under Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai Party.

Allen Hicken studies political institutions and policy making in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia. Countries he has worked in include Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Cambodia. Writing-in-progress includes a book manuscript, "Building Party Systems: Elections, Parties, and Coordination in Developing Democracies." He has published in the American Journal of Political Science and Electorial Studies, among other places. At Michigan he is affiliated with the university's Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Center for Political Studies. He earned his Ph.D in political science and Pacific studies from the University of California - San Diego.

Thailand has gone through an extraordinary six months. In October in the south, a protest by Muslims in Tak Bai triggered a deadly overreaction by security forces. Eighty-five people died by suffocation or crushing from being detained in army trucks. Many more were killed in December when a tsunami struck the country's west coast, devastating the local tourist industry. The poultry industry had already been badly hurt by avian flu. One might have thought that the government's popularity would have suffered from these events. Instead, in national parliamentary elections in February, the ruling Thai Rak Thai party of incumbent Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra won an unprecedented absolute majority of 377 out of 500 seats. No Thai prime minister had ever been reelected for a second consecutive term, and no Thai party had ever carried a democratic election by such a huge margin. Why? And with what implications for the future?

Kavi Chongkittavorn is assistant group editor of National Multimedia Group, publisher of the English language daily, The Nation. Before taking up this position, he was The Nation's bureau chief in Cambodia (1987-1989) and Vietnam (1989-1991). For more than two decades he has reported the news from Thailand and Southeast Asia. He served briefly as a special assistant to the secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (1994-1995). He also chairs the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, a Bangkok-based media freedom advocacy group.

In 2007 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will be forty years old. Yet the most basic questions about it remain controversial. What exactly is it? An organization? A discourse? A regime? A concert? A community? A facade? None, one, some, or all of the above? Has it succeeded? Has it failed? Both? To what extent? How? Why? In the context of these uncertainties, this talk will explore three topics: (1) the controversy over whether ASEAN is, or is not, a "security community"; (2) the incompatibility of member sovereignty versus member democracy as principles of ASEAN cooperation; and (3) the implications of (1) and (2) for US-ASEAN relations. The talk will draw mainly on two sources: a paper that can be downloaded; and a March 2005 research-and-conferencing trip to Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

Octobers and democracy in Thailand are inextricably entwined. On 14 October 1973, thirty years to the day before Dr. Pitsuwan will speak at Stanford, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, Thailand's strongman prime minister, was driven into exile. Parliamentary democracy flourished for three years until it was violently shut down in October 1976 following Thanom's return. On 12 October 2002 in Bali, extremist Muslims took more than 200 lives and made terrorism an urgent priority for Thailand and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Relevant events in Southeast Asia in October 2003 include three summits--of ASEAN (Bali, 7-8 Oct.), of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (Kuala Lumpur, 16-18 Oct.), and of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (Bangkok, 20-21 Oct.), the latter to include U.S. President George W. Bush. Dr. Pitsuwan will this unusual conjunction of anniversaries and summits to explore some of the ways in which democracy, terrorism, regionalism, and Islamism in Southeast Asia overlap and intersect. About the speaker Surin Pitsuwan served as Thailand's foreign minister from 1997 to 2001. He was the first Muslim to hold that post. He has been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Thailand's House of Representatives since 1986. He has also been a columnist for Thai newspapers and a political science lecturer in Thammasat University. In 1983-84 he was a legislative assistant to U.S. Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. He earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1982 after graduating cum laude from the Claremont Men's College in Claremont, California.

Potentially the most divisive issue to be addressed at the upcoming summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Bali on October 7-8, 2003 concerns the membership of Burma. Traditionally ASEAN has been regarded as among the most successful regional institutions anywhere. Since its founding in 1967, ASEAN member states have never waged war against each other. Southeast Asia has become an enduringly peaceful security community. This achievement reflects ASEAN's commitment to the norm of national sovereignty, its refusal to violate that norm by interfering in a fellow member's domestic affairs, and its consensual style of diplomacy--the confrontation-shunning "ASEAN Way." But these facilitators of regional peace have at the same time reinforced the more or less authoritarian character of the Association's ten member regimes. Nowhere in Southeast Asia is this anomaly of an "illiberal peace" more acute than in the crisis now facing ASEAN over the lack of democracy in Burma. Recently the junta in Rangoon arrested and imprisoned the leader of the Burmese opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi. The Burmese regime was able to crack down partly because of ASEAN's adherence to the principle of sovereignty and its reluctance to allow criticism of one member state by other member states. Will ASEAN's faith in sovereignty survive? Or will the Burmese dilemma force ASEAN's leaders at the Bali summit to rethink the very meaning of the Association in a globalizing and democratizing world? Erik Kuhonta recently completed his dissertation on the politics of equitable development in Malaysia and Thailand. He specializes on the comparative and international politics of developing countries with a focus on Southeast Asia. A citizen of the Philippines, he was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Italy, and now considers Thailand his home. Kuhonta holds a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.