Single-Speaker Seminars – Sigur Center for Asian Studies

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[12/9/2025] Oasis Life in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Eastern Turkestan Through Swedish Archival Materials

November 21, 2025November 21, 2025Upcoming EventsLeave a Comment

Tuesday, December 9th, 2025

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET

Chung-wen Shih Asian Studies Conference Room, Suite 503

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

RSVP

In this lecture Dr. Hällzon will provide a brief overview of the diverse source materials kept in Swedish archives and museums dealing with Eastern Turkestan. These materials consist of thousands of photographs (many in color), samples of material culture, missionary reports and correspondence (written in Swedish), Eastern Turki manuscript sources and more. These rich and varied collections provide ample possibilities for engaging in historical research on matters related to Uyghur language and culture. While Dr. Hällzon will provide an overall description of what materials one can find in the Swedish archives (and how they came there), the focus in this lecture will be on the role of visual sources and how these can be used for research on oasis life in Eastern Turkestan.

Speaker:

Image of Patrick Hallzon looking at the camera

Dr. Patrick Hällzon (Uppsala University, Sweden) is currently a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies with his ongoing postdoctoral research project entitled Oasis Life in Eastern Turkestan: The Matrix of Culture, Language and Landscape in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries.

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[10/16/2025] Status Update: Human Rights in Xinjiang

October 13, 2025October 21, 2025Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Thursday, October 16th, 2025

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET

Chung-Wen Shih Asian Studies Conference Room

Suite 503, Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

On October 1, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a new statement expressing concern over continued human rights abuses in Xinjiang, China. OHCHR specifically cited cultural oppression and imprisonment of scholars. Yet Xinjiang has dropped out of the Western news cycle—so what’s actually going on? This just-in-time-talk offers expert perspectives on the OHCHR statement and an update on the Uyghur region of Xinjiang or East Turkestan.

Speaker:

Dr. Elise Anderson is a practitioner and scholar whose work focuses on Uyghur communities in the People’s Republic of China and across global diaspora communities. Dr. Anderson is widely recognized as an expert on Uyghur issues, having spent nearly the past two decades in close engagement on the topic, including a long stint living and conducting research in the Uyghur Region from 2012 to 2016. She has wide-ranging professional experience working in human rights and rule of law research, human rights advocacy, international development programming, academic and nonprofit grant-writing, university teaching, and editing. She is based in Washington, DC, where she works in a variety of consulting capacities and holds affiliations as a Professorial Lecturer in the Elliott School and Nonresident Visiting Scholar in the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University; Nonresident Senior Fellow at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy; and Developmental Editor for Stray Cats Ink.

Dr. Anderson is an experienced speaker who has given dozens of talks and lectures at universities and other institutions, testified before the Canadian House of Commons and Uyghur Tribunal, and interpreted between Uyghur and English before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Her commentary on the Uyghur crisis has appeared in a number of major media outlets, and her research has been published in both scholarly and public-facing journals. She is also a trained vocalist, musician, and dancer who has formally studied classic Uyghur music (among other idioms). She earned dual Ph.D. degrees in Central Eurasian Studies and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University-Bloomington. She is an alumna of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and Fulbright-Hays and was a National Finalist for the White House Fellowship in 2022.

Discussant:

Sean Roberts, pictured in professional attire

Sean R. Roberts is a Professor in the Practice of International Affairs and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He received his MA in Visual Anthropology (2001) and his PhD in Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the University of Southern California. Both during the completion of his PhD and following graduation, he worked for a total of 7 years for the United States Agency for International Development in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs in the five Central Asian Republics. He also taught for two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Europe, Eurasian, and Russian Studies before coming to the Elliott School in 2008. Academically, he has written extensively on the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia about whom he wrote his dissertation, and his 2020 book The War on the Uyghurs (Princeton University Press) was recognized by the journal Foreign Affairs as one of their “best of books” for 2021. He also continues to do analytical work for development organizations, particularly in the former Soviet Union. He is frequently consulted by development organizations on issues related to governance, democratization, human rights, and the rights of ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples, and he comments on current events in the media related both to the situation of the Uyghur people in China and to political developments in Central Asia. Dr. Roberts teaches core classes in the IDS program as well as two seminars open to all students: “Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Minorities, and Development” and “The Belt and Road Initiative: China’s Approach to International Development.”

[9/30/2025] At Vision’s Edge: Modern China, the United States, and Global Encounters in Lost Photographs and Film

August 21, 2025October 21, 2025Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Tuesday, September 30th, 2025

2:00 – 3:30 PM ET

Room 505

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

This talk reconstructs the lives and afterlives of images and imaging technologies that linked Chinese communities, American missions, and Sino-US encounters over the first half of the twentieth century. Cameras accompanied Protestant and Catholic missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in Republican China through the first years of the People’s Republic. These evolving visual practices and products ultimately escaped their missionary molds and entered transpacific perspectives, coloring Chinese engagements with the world alongside US views of modern China and East Asia. This talk explores intersections between image-making, Sino-US imaginations, and historical trajectories of visual material – all of which framed transnational experiences on both sides of the lens

Speaker

Joseph W. Ho is a center associate at the University of Michigan Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and the academic program manager for the University of Michigan Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. He is a historian of modern China and Taiwan, Sino-US encounters, and transnational visual culture and media. He has published essays on his research in several edited volumes, as well as the UCLA Historical Journal, U.S. Catholic Historian, and Education About Asia. Ho is the co-author of Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming in 2025) and the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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[1/28/2025] 不亦樂乎: Foggy Bottom, Beijing, the Ways Between—and Now I’m Back?

January 14, 2025October 21, 2025Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Tuesday, January 28th, 2025

12:00 – 1:30 PM ET

Chung-Wen Shih Asian Studies Conference Room

Elliott School of International Affairs Suite 503

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

What strange paths make a life? Peter Rupert Lighte graduated from GW’s School of Public and International Affairs in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War protests. He went on to earn a PhD in Chinese history at Princeton in 1981. Doctorate in hand, his first port of call was academia and, then, perchance, banking. After postings in Beijing, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, he became the founding chairman of JP Morgan Chase Bank in China. Peter has authored several books on his adventures, including Straight Through The Labyrinth: Becoming a Gay Father in China (2022) and Host of Memories: Tales of Inevitable Happenstance (2015). Join us to learn of Peter’s views on the wisdom of taking risks, considering the lessons of the past which inform our futures, the roads we know and those we dare to take.

Panel One

A picture of Peter Lighte, smiling and looking at the camera

Peter Rupert Lighte (BA ’69), graduated from GW’s School of Public and International Affairs (now the Elliott School of International Affairs). A sinologist by training, in the early 1970s, Peter studied Chinese culture at Princeton University and subsequently taught Chinese history and philosophy to college students. In the early 1980s, he entered the world of international finance. He continued to live abroad for almost three decades, dividing his time between London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Beijing. In Beijing, he served as the founding chairman of JP Morgan Chase Bank in China. Currently, he serves on the boards of Half the Sky Foundation and the Council on International Educational Exchange and is active in Princeton alumni affairs. He’s on the boards of Prudential Financial, the Council for International Educational Exchange, and OneSky UK. He is the author of Straight Through The Labyrinth: Becoming A Gay Father in China, Host of Memories: Tales of Inevitable Happenstance, and Pieces of China. A calligrapher, mosaicist, and needlepointer, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his husband Julian Grant, a distinguished Anglo-American composer, and Fuqi, their pooch from Beijing. Their daughters, both Barnard women, are now well out in the world.

Moderater

A picture of Eric Schluessel, smiling in glasses and lookin gat the camera

Professor Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. It won the 2021 John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association.

Professor Schluessel is currently pursuing two research projects: Saints and Sojourners explores the economic history of the Uyghur region from the 1750s through the 1950s as seen from below, through the records of merchants, farmers, and managers of pious endowments. It ties changes at the village level to shifts in the global economy in places as far away as Manchester and Tianjin. Exiled Gods delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire.

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Professor Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

[9/30/24] Objects in Disruption: Oppression in Thailand

September 13, 2024November 19, 2024Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Monday, September 30th, 2024

3:00 PM – 5:00 PM ET

Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

In April 2024, the US State Department released the 2023 report on the Human Rights Practices in Thailand. The report painted a grim picture of the Thai human rights situation at a critical juncture in which the then government of Srettha Thavisin failed to address the human rights problems and the monarchy continued to challenge the constitution leading to intensifying application of laws to suppress its critics. Since the release of the report, Thailand made another dangerous turn, with Srettha forced to step down, the pro-reform opposition Move Forward Party dissolved, and now with Paethongtarn Shinawatra becoming the prime minister.

This talk will focus on the human rights problems facing Thailand in a specific context of the excessive use of lèse-majesté law, or Article 112 of the Criminal Code, which forbids anyone to criticize the monarchy. Since the enthronement of King Vajiralongkorn in 2016, there has been a sharp increase of lèse-majesté cases, particularly against young activists who called for immediate reforms of the monarchy and Article 112. In May 2024, a young activist, Netiporn Sanesangkhom, charged with lèse-majesté, died in prison due to hunger strike. Her death reiterated the fact that the monarchy has remained at the heart of the Thai political crisis. Meanwhile, the new Paethongtarn government has announced that it would not support the reform of Article 112, supposedly because of its close partnership with the monarchy. The speaker will discuss the lèse-majesté situation and his own international advocacy in raising awareness of the problems of lèse-majesté law.

The speaker will also bring with him a mobile exhibition. Titled “Objects of Disruption,” this exhibition will showcase 10 images that convey the ongoing activism among Thais who have sought to “disrupt” the political status quo. The speaker has worked with a group of Thai artists in Thailand in the production of these artworks.

Speaker

Pavin Chachavalpongpun is professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. He is also the chief editor of the online journal, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, in which all articles are translated from English into Japanese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Vietnamese and Burmese. In the aftermath of the coup, Pavin was summoned by the junta to have his “attitude adjusted.” He rejected the summons. As a result, a warrant was issued for his arrest and his passport revoked, forcing him to apply for a refugee with Japan. In 2021, he set up his own project “112WATCH” as an international advocacy to raise awareness of the lèse-majesté issue in Thailand and to seek global support for the reform/abolition of this law.

[4/17/24] Managing the Mekong: Infrastructure, Climate Change, and Geopolitics

April 10, 2024November 19, 2024Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

Room 505

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

The Mekong River basin is shared by six countries and home to over sixty million people, and it plays a defining role in terms of water, energy, and food security both locally and globally. The Mekong’s natural bounty and rich ecosystem is increasingly under threat—from the proliferation of upstream dams, from climate shifts impacting rainfall and extreme water events, and from a range of other pressures such as sand mining, overfishing, and pollution. Join Courtney Weatherby for a discussion about why the Mekong matters, how the river’s health is impacted by upstream dams and climate change, and what is needed in terms of environmental monitoring and political engagement to conserve the human and environmental benefits it provides.

Speaker

Courtney Weatherby is Deputy Director of the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia program and a Fellow with the Energy, Water, & Sustainability program. Her research focuses on sustainable infrastructure and energy development challenges in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific, particularly at the nexus of issues in food, water, and energy in the Greater Mekong Subregion. Weatherby was a lead author on a range of technical and policy studies, including Thailand’s Energy Development Pathways report in collaboration with Pact Thailand; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)Sekong, Sesan, Srepok Basin Energy Profile report; the Stimson Center’s Mekong Power Shiftreport; and the TRENDS Institution United Arab Emirates (UAE) Energy Diplomacy report. She provides support to the development and management of the Mekong Dam Monitor, a platform for near-real time monitoring of dams and environmental impacts in the Mekong Basin, and the winner of 2021 Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award, 1st Prize in the 2021 Prudence Foundation’s Disaster Tech Competition, and the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation’s 2021 Outstanding Achievement Award. She also supports the team’s data-driven work on the Mekong Infrastructure Tracker, a platform to track, monitor, and quantify the development of energy, transportation, and water infrastructure in South East Asia.

In 2019, she served as a US-Japan-Southeast Asia Fellow at the East-West Center, focusing her research on US-Japan collaboration on energy infrastructure in Southeast Asia. She has spoken publicly on panels at a variety of institutions including the National Bureau of Asian Research’s Pacific Energy Summit and the Greater Mekong Forum on Water, Food, and Energy. Before joining Stimson in 2014, Weatherby worked with the State Department, Center for Strategic International Studies, and Human Rights Watch. She holds a M.A. in Asian Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a B.A. in East Asian Studies with honors from Dickinson College.

Moderator

William M. Wise chairs the Southeast Asia Forum, a project to promote the study of Southeast Asia at colleges, universities and research centers in the Mid-Atlantic region. He is a former Non-Resident Fellow at the Stimson Center, affiliated with the Southeast Asia Program.

Professor Wise’s government and teaching career focused on defense, security and intelligence issues in Asia. From 2005 to 2019 he managed the Southeast Asia Studies program at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, and taught courses on Southeast Asia and intelligence problems in Asia. Prior to teaching at SAIS, he was Adjunct Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs (ESIA), George Washington University. He was a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington in 1999.

Professor Wise’s government experience spanned more than three decades. He was Deputy National Security Advisor to the Vice-President; Chief of Policy at the U.S. Pacific Command (now U.S. Indo-Pacific Command); and Deputy Director, for Policy Planning, East Asia & Pacific Region, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Earlier, he served in various positions in the U.S. Intelligence Community in Washington and overseas. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a Colonel in 1997.

Professor Wise received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and master’s degree from the University of Hawaii.

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[4/24/24] Evacuation Campaigns in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and the Case of Children in Vinh Linh Special Zone

April 9, 2024November 19, 2024Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Friday, April 24, 2024

12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Chung-wen Shih Asian Studies Conference Room

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

Evacuation campaigns were part of the systematic response strategy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to minimize human and property losses, protect labor forces and production resources, and preserve material and spiritual resources to serve the national liberation war for reunification of Vietnam. These evacuation campaigns began shortly after the French attempted to recolonize Vietnam after 1945 and lasted until the U.S. ceased their air strikes in the North Vietnam and then withdrew from Vietnam in 1973. By collecting archival materials in Vietnam related to these campaigns, this presentation clarifies the systematic efforts of the central and local governments of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in evacuating the people to cope with the destructive war in the North Vietnam by the air and naval forces of the U.S. Through interviews, the presentation will also delve into the memories of those who were children in the Vinh Linh Special Zone adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone evacuated to other provinces of North Vietnam. From there, it will analyze some of the impacts of the evacuation campaigns on people, especially children, during and after the Vietnam War.

Speaker

Dr. Lê Nam Trung Hiếu is a Vietnamese historian, with his field of interests in Vietnamese perspectives into the American war in Vietnam and diplomatic relations amongst relevant stakeholders of the war. He earned his PhD in International History in Hue University in 2017, with mobility periods at Ghent University for exchange MA program in Political Sciences and at Porto University for exchange PhD program in historiography. With the chapter “Another Kind of Vietnamization: Language Policies in Higher Education in the Two Vietnams”, he is a corresponding author in Vietnam over the Long Twentieth Century – Becoming Modern, Going Global (edited by Liam C.Kelly and Gerard Sasges) in the book series Global Vietnam published by Springer. He has also worked in a diplomatic history-pertaining project of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is based in Danang, Vietnam, and teaches at Duy Tan University.

Moderator

Linda J. Yarr is Research Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs and Director of Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia (PISA). She began her work for PISA in 1995, when PISA was located within the American Council for Learned Societies. PISA promotes international affairs education training and research in cooperation with leading agencies and universities in Asia. Ms. Yarr has secured foundation grants and private donations to underwrite all of PISA’s activities and designed its collaborative and path-breaking programs in Asia. Ms. Yarr taught at American University, Friends World College, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Denver. She has held visiting scholar appointments at the University of Helsinki, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Institute for Malaysian and International Studies of the National University of Malaysia, the School of International Service of American University, and the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. She serves on the board of directors of Critical Asian Studies and is a member of the National Committee on North Korea.

[Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture] The Future of American Policy Towards Southeast Asia

March 26, 2024May 31, 2024Archives & Recordings, Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture2 Comments

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm

City View Room

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

The lecture will analyze broad trends in the US approach towards Southeast Asia and the drivers of these trends in the context of global and regional developments. These developments include, but are not confined to, US-China strategic competition. It will suggest that American policy towards Southeast Asia and the region’s responses may offer clues towards the development of the broader Indo-Pacific.

Read the Text of the Speech Here

Speaker

Bilahari Kausikan is a Singaporean academic and retired diplomat. He was Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the former ambassador to the UN and Russia. Bilahari is currently Chairman of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Bilahari Kausikan joined the civil service in 1981. He was appointed as Singapore’s ambassador to the newly formed Russian Federation in 1994, and subsequently as ambassador to the United Nations (1995 – 1998). Bilahari was appointed Second Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2001, and promoted to Permanent Secretary in 2010.

After a 37-year career in Singapore’s foreign relations, Bilahari is known to speak his mind about the issues confronting the country and the wider region. He believes the civil service has become too accommodative and argues that ‘when you are polite, nothing gets done.’ He has called for Singapore to be more muscular in its own delicate diplomatic relations, saying that true neutrality means ‘knowing your own interests, taking positions based on your own interests and not allowing others to define your interests for you by default’. Furthermore, he warns of the danger of passivity in relation to the current US-China split, saying there is no ‘sweet spot’ to keep both the Chinese and Americans ‘happy’.

Bilahari studied political science at the University of Singapore before receiving a scholarship to embark on a PhD in international relations at Columbia University. However, he decided against an academic career and returned to Singapore to join the Foreign Ministry. He is the author of Singapore is Not an Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (2017).

Moderator

Janet Steele is professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs, and the interim director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University, and focuses on how culture is communicated through the mass media.

Dr. Steele is a frequent visitor to Southeast Asia where she lectures on topics ranging from the role of the press in a democratic society to specialized courses on narrative journalism. Her book, “Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia,” focuses on Tempo magazine and its relationship to the politics and culture of New Order Indonesia. “Mediating Islam, Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia,” explores the relationship between journalism and Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Awarded two Fulbright teaching and research grants to Indonesia and a third to Serbia, she has served as a State Department speaker-specialist in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Brunei, the Philippines, East Timor, Taiwan, Burma, Sudan, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Jamaica, and Kosovo. The author of numerous articles on journalism theory and practice, her 2014 book, “Email Dari Amerika,” (Email from America), is a collection of newspaper columns written in Indonesian and originally published in the newspaper Surya. Her most recent book, forthcoming in October 2023, is called “Malaysiakini and the power of independent media in Malaysia.”

[3/26/2024] Myanmar in Crisis: Human Rights, Regional Impacts, and Future Prospects

March 12, 2024May 14, 2024Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

Chung-Wen Shih Asian Studies Conference Room Suite 503

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

Three years after the military seized power from Myanmar’s elected government, a wide range of armed resistance groups continue to challenge the regime’s power. Many parts of the country are no longer under the regime’s control, while 2.7 million civilians have been displaced from their homes. Neighboring countries are confronting challenges of their own as ever more Myanmar citizens attempt to flee across borders. In conversation with Christina Fink, Wai Wai Nu will discuss the human rights implications of the regime’s and resistance groups’ policies and practices, neighboring countries’ responses, and the prospects for peace and a political settlement.

RSVP today! Free lunch will be provided.

Speaker

Wai Wai Nu is the founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Peace Network (WPN) and a counselor at the National Unity Consultative Council in Myanmar. She spent seven years as a political prisoner in Burma. Since her release from prison in 2012, she has devoted herself to promoting democracy and human rights. Through WPN, Wai Wai works to build peace and mutual understanding between Myanmar’s ethnic communities and aims to empower and advocate for the rights of marginalized women throughout Myanmar. To engage youth in the peacebuilding process and promote democracy education, Wai Wai founded the Yangon Youth Center, where young people from diverse backgrounds can come together to learn, share, and explore their ideas and promote leadership in social justice, political movements, and peace-building. She organized the My Friend Campaign, which involved hundreds of youth from different communities, that aimed to promote tolerance and reduce discrimination among diverse groups.

Wai Wai has been recognized as a Champion of Prevention by the United Nations Office of the Prevention of Genocide and Responsibility to Protect. She is an Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University and a Bush Institute Liberty Leadership Scholar. Wai Wai is the recipient of various awards, including the N-Peace Awards (2014), Democracy Courage Tributes, World Movement for Democracy (2015), Hillary Rodham Clinton Award (2018), City of Athens Democracy Award (2021), and International DVF Award (2021). She was also named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum; among “100 Top Women,” by BBC (2014); among 100 World Thinkers, by Foreign Policy Magazine (2015); Next Generation Leader, by Time Magazine (2017); Women of the Year, Financial Times (2018).

Wai Wai obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of Yangon in Myanmar and her Master’s degree in Law (LLM) from UC Berkeley’s School of Law. In recent years, she was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

Discussant

Christina Fink joined the Elliott School in 2011 as an associate professor in the International Development Studies Program. Since 2022, she has also been serving as the Director of the BA and BS in International Affairs Program.

She received her B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.

She has combined research, teaching, and international development work throughout her career. Primarily based in mainland Southeast Asia from 1995-2010, her full-time positions and program evaluation consultancies addressed civil society capacity building in Myanmar with particular attention to gender and social inclusion, and political, economic, and social reforms. During this time, she also wrote Living Silence in Burma: Surviving Under Military Rule (Zed Books: 1st edition 2001, 2nd edition 2009) and served as a lecturer and program associate at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Thailand.

In recent years she has contributed to the development of the GenderPro capacity-building and credentialing program run by GW’s Global Women’s Institute in partnership with UNICEF. She also served on the United States Institute of Peace senior study group on Myanmar which produced two reports: China’s Role in Burma’s Internal Conflicts (2018) and Anatomy of the Military Coup and Recommendations for the US Response (2022).Her latest publications have addressed the position of religious and ethnic minorities in Myanmar, anti-Muslim violence and the role of Facebook, and the many facets of civil society engagement in development in Myanmar.

Moderator

Professor Wise received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and master’s degree from the University of Hawaii.

[2/28/24] Southeast Asia’s Place in the US-China Competition

February 20, 2024March 19, 2024Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

Chung-Wen Shih Asian Studies Conference Room Suite 503

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052

Many Southeast Asian nations have found themselves caught between the United States and China as tensions continue to increase between the two states. The region’s key military and economic positions have only served to intensify that pressure. The decisions that these countries will make will undoubtedly have global impacts felt around the world. Prof. William M. Wise, the Chair of the Southeast Asia Forum, and Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran from the Woodrow Wilson Center will discuss the complicated position that these countries face as well as the interests the United States and China have within the region.

Join the Sigur Center and the Southeast Asia Forum as we discuss the role that Southeast Asia will play and its impacts on US-China relations. RSVP today! Free lunch will be provided.

Speaker

Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran is a fellow with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, where he produces analysis on Southeast Asian political and security issues, Asian defense affairs, and U.S. foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific. He is also the CEO and Founder of ASEAN Wonk Global, a research hub that produces the weekly ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief newsletter; Senior Columnist at The Diplomat, one of Asia’s leading current affairs publications; and an Advisor at BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm focused on the Indo-Pacific region.

A political scientist by training, Dr. Parameswaran is a recognized expert on Asian affairs and U.S. foreign policy in the region, with a focus on Southeast Asia and politics and security issues. He has conducted grant-based field research across the region, consulted for companies and governments, and taught courses affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State. His policy insights, research and commentary have been published widely in the United States and across the region in leading publications and journals including CNN, The Washington Post, The South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Asia Policy and Contemporary Southeast Asia.

Moderator

Professor Wise received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and master’s degree from the University of Hawaii.