FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
Yusuke Mitsumori is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2021-22.
Yuko Osaki is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2021-22.
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Co-sponsored by the Stanford Center at Peking University.
In honor of its release, contributors Mary Bullock, Thomas Fingar, and David M. Lampton will join editor Anne Thurston for a panel discussion of their volume Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations (Columbia University Press, 2021).
Recent years have seen the U.S.-China relationship rapidly deteriorate. Engaging China brings together leading China specialists—ranging from academics to NGO leaders to former government officials—to analyze the past, present, and future of U.S.-China relations. Bullock, Fingar, Lampton, and Thurston will reflect upon the complex and multifaceted nature of American engagement with China since the waning days of Mao’s rule. What initially motivated U.S.’ rapprochement with China? Until recent years, what logic and processes have underpinned the U.S. foreign policy posture towards China? What were the gains and the missteps made during five decades of America’s engagement policy toward China? What is the significance of our rapidly deteriorating bilateral relations today? Speakers will tackle these questions and more at this critical time when tensions between the U.S. and China continue to intensify.
For more information about Engaging China or to purchase a copy, please click here.
Fingar's most recent books are The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform, editor (Stanford, 2016), Uneasy Partnerships: China and Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2017), and Fateful Decisions: Choices that will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Jean Oi (Stanford, 2020).
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Fall 2021 Webinar Series Kickoff with Mr. Ban Ki-moon and Prof. Nicole Ardoin
September 28, 5-6 p.m. California time/ September 29, 9-10 a.m. Korea time
This event is held virtually via Zoom. Registration required.
The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s most vulnerable region to climate change risks. With its densely populated low-lying territories and high dependence on natural resources and agriculture sectors, Asia is increasingly susceptible to the impacts of rising sea levels and weather extremes. The impacts of climate change encompass multiple socioeconomic systems across the region, from livability and workability to food systems, physical assets, infrastructure services, and natural capital.
The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center’s Fall 2021 webinar series, “Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia,” explores climate change impacts and risks in the region, adaptation and mitigation strategies, and policy responses.
Join us for the series kickoff event, featuring a keynote address by former UN Secretary-General and former South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, who is known for putting sustainable development and climate change at the top of the UN agenda, and a discussion with Stanford social ecologist Nicole Ardoin, a leading expert in environment, sustainability, and climate change education. Mr. Ban’s keynote will focus on COVID-19 and climate change.
Panelists
Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Chairman of Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future, 8th Secretary-General of the UN
Ban Ki-moon is a South Korean diplomat who was the 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations and a career diplomat in South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the UN.
Mr. Ban’s current leadership roles include the Chairman of South Korea’s Presidential National Council on Climate and Air Quality; Chairman of Boao Forum for Asia; Co-Chair of the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens, Vienna; Chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s Ethics Committee; Distinguished Chair Professor and Honorary Chairman at the Institute of Global Engagement and Empowerment at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea; and President of the Assembly and Chair of the Council of Global Green Growth Institute.
Mr. Ban served two consecutive terms as the Secretary General of the UN (2007-2016). Throughout his tenure at the UN, he strove to be a bridge builder, to give voice to the world’s poorest and the most vulnerable people, and to make the organization more transparent and effective. He successfully pressed for action to combat climate change — an effort that culminated in the adoption and rapid entry into the landmark Paris Agreement in 2016. Mr. Ban worked closely with member states of the UN to shape the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to establish UN Women, which has been advancing the organization’s work for gender equality and women’s empowerment. He also launched major efforts to strengthen UN peace operations, to protect human rights, to improve humanitarian response, and to prevent violent extremism and to revitalize the disarmament agenda.
At the time of his appointment at the UN, Mr. Ban was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Republic of Korea. His 37 years with the Ministry included postings in New Delhi, Washington D.C., and Vienna, and responsibilities for a variety of portfolios, including Foreign Policy Adviser to the President, Chief National Security Adviser to the President, Vice Minister, Deputy Minister for Policy Planning and Director-General for American Affairs. Mr. Ban has also been actively involved in issues relating to inter-Korean relations by serving as Chairman of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization.
Mr. Ban earned a master’s degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1985 and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Seoul National University in 1970.
Founder of the Stanford Social Ecology Lab, Professor Ardoin is an interdisciplinary social scientist who researches individual and collective environmental behavior as influenced by environmental learning and motivated by place-based connections. Professor Ardoin and members of her lab pursue their scholarship with a theoretical grounding and orientation focused on applications for practice. They often work in collaboration with community partners, including public, private, and social sector organizations at a range of scales, to co-design and implement studies that build on a theoretical frame while concurrently addressing questions of interest to the partners. This work occurs primarily in informal settings, such as parks and protected areas, nature-based tourism locales, community gathering spaces, and other everyday-life settings.
Interested in actionable knowledge and notions of co-production, Professor Ardoin and her group collaborate with sustainability, environmental conservation, and philanthropic organizations to study the design, implementation, and effectiveness of a range of social-ecological practices. Through reflective learning, curiosity, and humility, the Social Ecology Lab strives to bring theoretically based insights to sustainability opportunities and challenges.
Professor Ardoin is an associate editor of the journal Environmental Education Research, a trustee of the George B. Storer Foundation, chair of NatureBridge's Education Advisory Council, an advisor to the Student Conservation Association and Teton Science Schools, among other areas of service to the field.
Moderator
Gi-Wook Shin is the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea; the founding director of the Korea Program; a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and a professor of sociology, all at Stanford University. As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, and international relations.
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Register: https://bit.ly/3ndgszc
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Peter Martin joins us to discuss his recent book, China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy. Chinese diplomacy in the past several years has become more assertive and its diplomats have used sharper language, earning them the title "wolf warriors." The book traces the roots of China's approach to diplomacy back to the communist revolution of 1949 and tells the story of how it's evolved through social upheaval, famine, capitalist reforms and China's rise to superpower status. It draws on dozens of interviews and -- for the first time -- on the memoirs of more than 100 retired Chinese diplomats.
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Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Michael (Mike) Breger joined APARC in 2021 and serves as the Center's communications manager. He collaborates with the Center's leadership to share the work and expertise of APARC faculty and researchers with a broad audience of academics, policymakers, and industry leaders across the globe.
Michael started his career at Stanford working at Green Library, and later at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, serving as the event and communications coordinator. He has also worked in a variety of sales and marketing roles in Silicon Valley.
Michael holds a master's in liberal arts from Stanford University and a bachelor's in history and astronomy from the University of Virginia. A history buff and avid follower of international current events, Michael loves learning about different cultures, languages, and literatures. When he is not at work, Michael enjoys reading, painting, music, and the outdoors.
The Pacific islands are known for their tropical climate, lush landscape, and rich cultures, but as coterminal student Ma’ili Yee has learned, they also form a backdrop to multiple geostrategic agendas in the Pacific Ocean region. In her recent research, Yee focuses on the vital economic, military, and geopolitical roles the Pacific island nations play at a time when the U.S.-China great power competition is generating renewed interest in the region.
Yee received her BA in International Relations in 2020 and is completing her MA in East Asian Studies this summer. She has been interested in Sino-U.S. relations in the South Pacific and noticed the scarcity of materials that incorporate Pacific Islander perspectives on the geopolitical developments in the region and how the island nations are affected by and responding to the tensions in the U.S.-China relation. She set out to study these issues.
Yee’s research over the past year has been supported by the Shorenstein APARC Diversity Grant. As part of its commitment to promoting inclusion and racial justice at Stanford, APARC established the grant in summer 2020 to support students from underrepresented minorities interested in studying contemporary Asia. Yee is the grant’s inaugural recipient.
Yee originally intended to use the grant to conduct field research in Fiji and Tonga but had to adjust her plans due to restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. She ended up studying primary source materials shared online by country members of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), an inter-governmental organization that aims to enhance cooperation between countries and territories of the Pacific Ocean region, including the formation of a trade bloc and regional peacekeeping operations.
Yee’s research reveals that Pacific island nations do not share the same strategic and diplomatic agendas of traditional powers. Rather, in recent years, they have developed a more assertive diplomatic posture, becoming highly involved in promoting blueprints that are vital to their objectives and creating their own framework for defining strategic priorities in the Pacific region. Most importantly, as Yee explained in a recent presentation to the APARC community, Pacific island nations reject being viewed as pawns in a power game by larger states, particularly amidst the intensifying U.S.-China competition.
Against the framework of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, island nations have endorsed a collective framework they call the Blue Pacific. The Free and Open Indo-Pacific, which was introduced by Japan and later formalized by the United States, is a strategic vision that often privileges the Indian Ocean over the Pacific Ocean and prioritizes U.S.-led maritime concerns.
By contrast, the Blue Pacific vision is grounded in Pacific island nations’ perspectives. It emphasizes the opportunity to leverage their collective oceanic presence and focuses on their concerns, foremost of which are climate change and sustainable development. The Blue Pacific advocates for a long-term foreign policy commitment to act as one “Blue Continent” while also calling for greater international coordination. PIF member countries are currently developing these priorities in their vision for the future, the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. “The uncertainty of COVID-19,” write PIF Members, “only reinforces the need for a long-term strategy for how we work together as one Blue Pacific.”
By consolidating their interests as a unified political bloc, Yee concludes, Pacific Island nations now exercise significant agency in determining the trajectory of their region and using their voices to shape multilateral initiatives such as the Paris Agreement. External powers who seek to exercise influence in the Pacific Ocean region would do well to develop reciprocal relationships with island nations and consider their goals, she says.
Yee's research also examines the opportunities for fintech to promote sustainable development in the Pacific Ocean region and as an area for potential collaboration and competition amongst world powers as U.S.-China tensions continue to unfold.
“I am grateful to APARC for this Diversity Grant and for allowing me to do this kind of work,” says Yee. “It really would not be possible without such support, so it was cool to see this resource come out last summer.”
With support from Shorenstein APARC’s Diversity Grant, coterminal student Ma’ili Yee (BA ’20, MA ’21) reveals how Pacific island nations are responding to the U.S.-China rivalry by developing a collective strategy for their region.
U.S. strategy, directed toward an escalating competition with China, now sees the Indian Ocean as inseparable from the Pacific—combined in an organic Indo-Pacific whole—and India as a linchpin partner in it. As the United States plans to redouble its military power in the western Pacific, it is relying on India to grow more powerful and help safeguard their shared interests in the Indian Ocean, easing demands on U.S. resources in that region.
But that will not be the end of the story. India remains the most consequential strategic actor in the Indian Ocean by virtue of its geographic centrality, economic and military power, and abiding networks of influence across the region. But its capabilities and intentions—and therefore the strategic trajectory of the Indian Ocean—will continue to evolve as they have since the uncertain days of 1989 and long before. What if in the coming years India fails to expand its military power as its champions expect and instead is outmatched by China in the Indian Ocean? Or what if, in the throes of competition with China, India exercises its power more nakedly than its regional partners would wish? Relatedly, what if the United States, which has for decades underwritten regional security, chooses to retrench its strategic presence to focus efforts in the western Pacific? Policymakers in Washington, Canberra, and regional capitals would be well-advised to accept that many trajectories—some sharply divergent—are possible.
This essay offers a preliminary attempt at illustrating some of those sharply divergent scenarios. It uses a novel alternative futures methodology known as major/minor trends to derive scenarios of Indian and U.S. strategic behavior and their resulting effects on the Indian Ocean region. The essay briefly introduces the methodology and then sketches three alternative futures designed around a relatively weaker India, an aggressive India, and a retrenching United States, respectively. Each scenario is designed to convey a key lesson for policymakers on the fragility of the assumptions that underpin current policy.
Cross-strait deterrence is arguably weaker today than at any point since the Korean War. Impressive Chinese military modernization, U.S. failure to build robust coalitions to counter Chinese regional aggression, and Xi Jinping’s personal ambition, all coalesce to create a situation in which Chinese leaders may see some aggregate benefit to using force. Mastro supports this assessment in her response to the Commission’s specific questions.
