Category: New Books in Asian Studies

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

12:00 PM – 1:15 PM

Room 505

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW, Washington, DC 20052

Grounded in multidisciplinary and multi-pronged research, Dr. Rajput presents the results of an important scholarly work that enhances an understanding of conflict-induced internal displacement in comparative, institutional, and human perspectives. The content ranges from high-level interviews, ethnographic participant-observation and oral histories to policy analysis, taking the audience to not only the geographically dispersed societies across the globe, but across societal levels: comparing national elite policy and institutional actors with the lived experience of families within compartmentalized ‘migrant townships’.

Focused primarily on the forcibly displaced Kashmiri Pandits, forced out from Kashmir Valley in 1989, the analysis also includes case studies of similarly displaced communities of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Serbia, and Sudan (Darfur).

The book helps answer two of the most perplexing questions surrounding conflict-induced protracted displacement, namely:  how do positions embraced by key actors inform IDP policies, and why despite the official return policies, families remain reluctant to return and equally reluctant to embrace host communities?

About the Speaker:
Dr. Sudha G. Rajput is the author of Internal Displacement and Conflict: The Kashmiri Pandits in Comparative Perspective (Routledge). Her 31-year career at the World Bank touched on multiple aspects of international development, working on thirteen countries of the former Soviet Union. Her co-authored book chapters appear in Scientific Explorations of Cause and Consequence across Social Contexts (Praeger) and in State, Society, and Minorities in Southeast Asia (Lexington Books). She writes for the Forced Migration Review. Her doctoral research has investigated issues of conflict-induced displacement in Kashmir, with a focus on societal and policy reform, leading her efforts to the development of a graduate course, Refugees and IDP Issues, drawing students from fields of conflict resolution, international development, humanitarian assistance and peace-building.

She is a Senior Researcher at the Refugee Law Initiative, a U.K. based think-tank. She is a Consultant/Trainer for USAID, designing and conducting capacity building workshops in Khartoum, Sudan, promoting cross-border co-existence. As a Professional Lecturer, at George Washington University, she teaches at the
Elliott School of International Affairs, where she brings multi-disciplinary approaches to her course on Refugee and Migrant Crisis. She is a trainer for the Forage Center for Peacebuilding Education, where during a 4-day humanitarian assistance simulation, she coaches students on systematic understanding of protracted displacements. She teaches at the University of Maryland Global Campus, delivering the MBA program for the military students. Her interests on post-conflict issues include her past travels to: Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Sudan, and Ukraine. 

Monday, May 6th, 2019
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Room 505
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

About the Event:

This event is open to the public and media. Light Refreshments will be served.

The stories of North Korea and Myanmar (Burma) are two of Asia’s most difficult. For decades they were infamous as the region’s most militarized and repressed, self-isolated and under sanctions by the international community while, from Singapore to Japan, the rest of Asia saw historic wealth creation. Andray Abrahamian, author of the recent book North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018), examines and compares the recent histories of North Korea and Myanmar, asking how both became pariahs and why Myanmar has been able to find a path out of isolation while North Korea has not. He finds that both countries were faced with severe security threats following decolonization. Myanmar was able to largely take care of its main threats in the 1990s and 2000s, allowing it the space to address the reasons for its pariah status. North Korea’s response to its security threat has been to develop nuclear weapons, which in turn perpetuates and exacerbates its isolation and pariah status. In addition, Pyongyang has developed a state ideology and a coercive apparatus unmatched by Myanmar, insulating its decision makers from political pressures and issues of legitimacy to a greater degree.

Andray Abrahamian, Stanford University

Andray Abrahamian is the 2018-2019 Koret Fellow at Stanford University. He is also an Adjunct Fellow at Pacific Forum and an Adjunct Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute. Working for a non-profit, Choson Exchange, has taken him to the DPRK over 30 times; he has also lived in Myanmar and written a book comparing the two countries. He is the co-founder of Coreana Connect, a non-profit dedicated to increasing positive, cooperative US-DPRK exchanges through a focus on women’s issues.

Moderator: Jisoo M. Kim, GW Institute for Korean Studies

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at GW. She received her Ph.D. in Korean History from Columbia University. She is a specialist in gender and legal history of early modern Korea. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a new book project titled Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Chosŏn Korea.

Thursday, November 21, 2019
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Lindner Commons, Room 602
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

About the Event:

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies would like to invite you to attend this discussion in celebration of the forthcoming book, Informal Organizations in Tajik/Afghan Badakhshan by Suzanne Levi-Sanchez, Ph.D. This book explores the relationship of informal organizations to the state, civil society, and kinship networks. The fieldwork spanned six years on and off along both sides of the Tajik/Afghan border in Badakhshan doing ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing informal leaders, state officials, civil society leaders, and activists as well as doing focus group discussions. While in both Tajik and Afghan Badakhshan there are various civil society organizations and at the same time, strong kinship networks, there is also this layer in-between – the informal organizations. The context in which the informal organizations interact with the state and/or kinship ties changes their role and influence. Through detailed case studies, this research examines how informal organizations operate. Specifically, the book describes how they intersect with kinship networks and the state, and/or provide a buffer from state control as well as how they mediate between civil society and the state and familial networks, and how they differ depending on the context in which they are embedded.

Associate Director Dr. Deepa Ollapally will moderate the Q&A. 

The event is free and open to the public. Chatham House rules apply; not for public attribution. Lunch will be provided. 

Suzanne Levi-Sanchez, Ph.D. is the Assistant Professor for National Security Affairs at U.S. Naval War College. She is an experienced educator, field researcher, and analyst with subject matter expertise in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, political identity, informal institutions, local leadership, borders, ethnographic methods, and gender. Her background includes intensive research on Iranian culture and politics as well as six years on and off on the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan studying how local leaders and organizations impact border and state stability as well as drug, human, weapons, and gemstone trafficking.

Deepa Ollapally (moderator) is directing a major research project on power and identity and the worldviews of rising and aspiring powers in Asia and Eurasia. Her research focuses on domestic foreign policy debates in India and its implications for regional security and global leadership of the U.S.

Dr. Ollapally has received major grants from the Carnegie Corporation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Asia Foundation for projects related to India and Asia.

She is a frequent commentator in the media, including appearances on CNN, BBC, CBS, Reuters TV, and the Diane Rehm Show.

Friday, April 19, 2019
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Room 505
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

About the Book:

Love is all that is certain… As a fifteen-year-old coming of age during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945), Sa Mi revels in her status as her parents’ youngest and most beloved daughter as she seeks to stave off her recent ascent into womanhood. Fate’s mighty hand, however, strikes down, leaving Sa Mi to grasp at love and memory as her life makes an abrupt and inevitable turn. Beloved Sa Mi is Book One of the series A River Han. This historical family drama follows Sa Mi as she navigates her life and raises her growing family amidst the threat of the Japanese and a society upended. Throughout her trials, her mother’s words regarding the certainty of love and love alone, echo within Sa Mi as she finds herself constrained in her roles as a wife to a man who cannot control his vice, and as a mother to a growing arsenal of strangers. At the end of the colonial period, Sa Mi’s children are forced to reckon with a new world order, a social status that is no longer relevant, and an ideological conflict that threatens to split their country and families apart. Beloved Sa Mi provides a glimmer into the folly, frailty, and fortitude of the human heart.

*Copies of A River Han: Beloved Sa Mi will be available for sale!

Dr. Jennifer Hong is the author of this book and currently has a role in education policy at the U.S. Department of Education.

Monday, March 25, 2019
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
Room 505
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

About the Event:

Will the future of great power relations lead to a bipolar world order dominated by the United States and China? If this international framework is likely to develop, what does this mean for the future of the international system? Drawing on his latest book, Professor Øystein Tunsjø will examine this new international order and its ramifications for world politics. 

About the Speaker:

Dr. Øystein Tunsjø is Professor of International Relations and Head of Asia Program at Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS) and Norwegian Defence University College (FHS) both in Oslo, Norway. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK.

 Monday, March 18, 2019
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Chung-wen Shih Conference Room
Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

Light refreshments will be provided and the event is free and open to the public. The lecture is open to the media and on the record. This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Chino Cienega Foundation.

About the Event

Celebrated for its natural beauty and its abundance of wildlife, the Mekong river runs thousands of miles through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Its basin is home to more than 70 million people and has for centuries been one of the world’s richest agricultural areas and a biodynamic wonder. Today, however, it is undergoing profound changes. Development policies, led by a rising China in particular, aim to interconnect the region and urbanize the inhabitants. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, Brian Eyler travels from the river’s headwaters in China to its delta in southern Vietnam to explore its modern evolution. Along the way he meets the region’s diverse peoples, from villagers to community leaders, politicians to policy makers. Through conversations with them he reveals the urgent struggle to save the Mekong and its unique ecosystem. Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia (PISA), the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and the Organization of Asian Studies invite you to a lecture by Brian Eyler about his seminal book. 

About the Speaker:

Brian Eyler is the director of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program in Washington, DC. Previously, he directed study abroad centers in Beijing and Kunming, China for IES Abroad and led numerous study tours throughout the Mekong region.

Friday, February 15, 2019 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Elliott School of International Affairs

Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

1957 E Street, NW, Washington, District Of Columbia 20052

Join Asian American Author and Activist, Helen Zia as she presents her new book, “Last Boat Out of Shanghai”. As her book title suggests, “Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Fled Mao’s Revolution” is about war and revolution in China and the exodus that accompanied crisis and social turmoil.

The book is a narrative of real people, their personal lives in Shanghai 1937-1949, and later as migrants and refugees to the US and elsewhere as they got caught up in Korean War and the Cold War’s global politics. “Last Boat out of Shanghai” is as much about Asian Americans as global migration and is very relevant to current concerns about immigration and refugee crises.

Speakers:

Moderated by Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch, President, U.S.-China Education Trust and former U.S Ambassador to Nepal with introductory remarks by Ambassador Reuben Brigety II, Dean of the Elliott School.

Program:

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.- Event
12:30 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. – Book signing with author, Helen Zia and a light lunch

This event is on the record and open to the media. 

Friday, February 1, 2019 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Rome Hall 459
801 22nd Street, NW
Washington District Of Columbia 20052

Co-hosted by the GW Department of East Asian Languages and Literature and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies.

What is time made of? We might balk at such a question, and reply that time is not made of anything—it is an abstract and universal phenomenon. But the time measurement practices of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868)—practices rooted in a timekeeping system in which hours changed their lengths with the seasons—tell us otherwise. Exploring the logic of Tokugawa clockmakers who designed mechanical clocks that measured time in variable hours, this talk will show how concepts of time are rooted in very concrete images and tangible practices.

Dr. Yulia Frumer (Ph.D., Princeton) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of the book Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Monday, January 28, 2019 5:30 PM – 6:40 PM

National Churchill Library & Center
Gelman Library, 1st Floor
2130 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she is founding co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. She holds the Middlebury College John M. Kirk, Jr. Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the Bread Loaf School of English, and was appointed Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Shakespeare studies at Queen Mary University of London. As research affiliate in literature at MIT, Alexa is founding co-editor of the open-access digital performance archive Global Shakespeares. Her latest book is Race, which is co-authored with Martin Orkin and is part of the Routledge Critical Idiom series.