Category: Visiting Scholar Roundtables

Thursday, November 1, 2018 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Chung-wen Shih Conference Room, Suite 503

The Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW

Washington, DC 20052

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies  invite you to a discussion with Ms. Julia Lau – former lecturer at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, and McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. – to discuss her research into war memory in Southeast Asia and China.

Light refreshments will be available. This event is public, but off the record and not for attribution to allow for candid discussion of Ms. Lau’s research.

About the Event:

This lecture examines questions and themes on war memory pertaining to Japanese Imperial Army actions in World War II on the Pacific front, including the Nanjing Massacre and the Occupation of Singapore. Building on book research and the speaker’s personal and field visits to war memorials and sites, museums, and other commemorative locations in China and Singapore, as well as the examination of a small selection of history textbooks for school children of both countries, the lecture focuses on the primary puzzle of why war memory differs in its tenor and expression in China and Singapore, despite similarities in the deprivations and suffering of their civilians during the war. A secondary question is how this affects Sino-Japanese relations and Singapore’s bilateral ties with Tokyo today. Some new directions might be emerging with regard to how younger citizens of China (including the Chinese diaspora) and Singapore who have no direct or received experience of the war or Occupation are finding ways to reconcile their views on Japanese actions in WWII, while juggling conflicting tensions between nationalism and pacifist globalism or regionalism.

Specific sites of war memory discussed include the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Wanping, China; the Japanese Cemetery in Singapore; Yasukuni Shrine and the Yushukan War Museum in Tokyo, and various other war-related sites and memorials. This lecture also draws upon working papers that the speaker has presented at past conferences, including the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies and its regional conferences.

About the Speaker:

Julia M. Lau is now an independent scholar and writer based in Phoenix, AZ. A native of Singapore, she attended the National University of Singapore and Georgetown University, and has graduate degrees in law, security studies, and government. She has taught as a lecturer at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, and McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. Her current research interests include war memory in Southeast Asia and China, and gender politics. She is also a member of the American Political Science Association’s status committee on Contingent Faculty, advocating for better working conditions and understanding of contingent and adjunct faculty in the political science profession.

About the Moderator:

Professor Ronald Spector received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins and his MA and Ph.D. from Yale. He has served in various government positions and on active duty in the Marine Corps from 1967-1969 and 1983-1984, and was the first civilian to become Director of Naval History and the head of the Naval Historical Center. He has served on the faculties of LSU, Alabama and Princeton and has been a senior Fulbright lecturer in India and Israel. In 1995-1996 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Strategy at the National War College and was the Distinguished Guest Professor at Keio University, Tokyo in 2000. At the Elliott School, Spector offers undergraduate and graduate courses on US-East Asia Relations, World War II, and the Vietnam War as well as a graduate seminar on Naval history and one on strategy.

Image above: The Civilian War Memorial, Singapore, by moonlight. Original photo.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

Room 505
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies  and the GW Institute for Korean Studies invite you to a discussion with Dr. Woondo Choi – currently a Visiting Scholar with the Sigur Center – to discuss Korean strategic and historical perspectives regarding the US-Japan post-war settlement.

Light refreshments will be available. This event is public and open to the media.

About the Event:

In several aspects, the Korea-Japan friendship is constrained by the mutual lack of confidence whose root originates from the history. This relationship breeds negative impacts on the tri-lateral cooperation among the US, Korea and Japan. Understanding the beginning of the US-Japan relationship would make current Japanese foreign policy more transparent, deepen the historical reconciliation between Japan and Korea, and provide clues for the US role in improving the relationship between the two allied partners. For that purpose, we will look into the three frequently-mentioned factors in the US Post-war settlement with Japan: 1) strategic interests, 2) decision-making participants’ view on Japan and 3) safety assurances vis-a-vis Japan’s military resurgence. This research will deal with the period starting with the attack on Pearl Harbor until the end of the Occupation and San Francisco Peace Treaty.

About the Speaker:

Woondo Choi is a research fellow at the Institute of Korea-Japan Relations at Northeast Asian History Foundation, Seoul, Korea, at which he has been working since 2008. He received his B.A. from Yonsei University in 1987 and Ph.D. from University of Colorado, Boulder in 1997. For 1 year between 2011 and 2012, he stayed in Japan as a Visiting Professor, at Nagasaki University, Japan, and in 2018, at the Sigur Center of the George Washington University as a Visiting Scholar. He has published more than 50 articles and book chapters on Japanese foreign policy, US-Japan security relations, territorial disputes, and historical reconciliation. His recent works include “East Asian Community, the Japanese Policy Suggestion: Tracking the Changes in Japan’s Regional Perception.” (2012), “Japan’s Right for Self-Defense: Concept, Interpretation, and Constitutional Revision” (2013) “Abe’s Visit to Yasukuni Shrine and the Impact on East Asian Regional Security” (2014.), “Korean Independence and 70 Years Thereafter: Japanese Colonial Rule and Post-War Settlement” (2015).

Moderated by:

Benjamin D. Hopkins – Director, Sigur Center for Asian Studies; Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

Monday, May 7, 2018

12:00 PM – 1:15 PM

Chung-wen Shih Conference Room, Suite 503

The Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E St. NW,  Washington, DC 20052

Recent decades have seen an increase in the adoption of diaspora engagement strategies by states, but also by a more complex global network of non-state governance actors, including the World Bank, NGOs and the private sector. Interestingly, as diaspora engagement is ‘globalized’, it also tends to become depoliticised. Especially in the field of international development diaspora engagement is now overwhelmingly framed as an operational strategy or management tool. And yet, far from an apolitical best practice, diaspora engagement in any policy field necessarily produces hierarchies within and among diaspora groups, and it can create and reify oppressive and exclusionary categories related to diasporas and migrants more widely (the terrorist, or the “model minority”, for example). The politics of diaspora engagement thus deserve critical attention. However, existing scholarship has tended to bracket either the global dynamics or the local context of such politics. In contrast, my thesis proposes to locate the global politics of diaspora engagement in the realm of practice. Practices embody political struggles informed by the hierarchical distribution of capital within emergent global social fields, which I conceptualize as assemblages.

Based on 6 months of multi-method fieldwork, the presentation will focus on mapping the practices of my first case study, the engagement of the Tamil diaspora for development in Toronto. The mapping suggests a complex interplay of global and local practices – both by the diaspora and the engagers – that are deeply intertwined with the places of engagement. Preliminary analysis of the prevalence of certain practices suggests that both social capital (in the form of elite professional networks and the ability to scale jump), and cultural capital (informed by both UN sustainable development norms, and Canadian national identity) significantly shape the politics of diaspora engagement in this context.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the Speaker:

Catherine Craven is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London and currently a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies inside the Elliott School of International Affairs at GW. Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, her research explores the global and local politics of diaspora engagement in governance through the lens of Tamil diasporans. She has also been a visiting scholar at York University’s Centre for Asian Research, a research associate at the Free University of Berlin’s collaborative research centre (SFB 700) ‘Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood’, and a research assistant at the Global Public Policy Institute. She received her MSc in Global Politics from the London School of Economics, and her BA in Anthropology from the University of Sussex. Her research interests include globalization and global governance, cities, diasporas and transnationalism, practice theory and post-positive thinking in political science.