Tag: Single-Speaker Seminars

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

12:45pm – 2:00pm

Suite 503, Chung-wen Shih Conference Room

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052

Following an evaluation of the legacy of the Cold War the author assesses the uncertainties of the post-Cold War era, the weakening of America by its prolonged warfare in the greater Middle East, by the enlarged war on terror and by the financial crisis of 2007-8. Amid the decline of the liberal world order and the rise of China, the author examines Chinese attempts to establish a new order. Analyzing politics in terms of the interplay between global, regional and local developments.

About the Event:
From 1907 to 1911, some 4,000 commoners from the Sichuan Basin ventured west. Enticed by promises of large tracts of presumably uncultivated land, they ascended the Tibetan Plateau seeking new lives for their families — and new benefits for a changing province and Qing China. Their presence was the result of intensifying competition for authority within Kham between the provincial government and Lhasa, and perceived regional pressures from British India and Imperial Russia. Using Kham as a case study, this presentation will focus on the role such state-supported settlement played in the consolidation of provincial rule within a state’s ‘borderland’ regions. It will explore the relationship between shifting conceptions of territoriality within a globalizing structure of international law and how such settlement could substantiate assertions of sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served.

About the Speaker:
Scott Relyea is assistant professor of Asian history at Appalachian State University. He received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from the University of Chicago and M.A. degrees from the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. A historian of late imperial and modern China, his research centres on nationalism, state-building, and the transition from imperial to state formation, with a regional focus on the southwest borderlands of China. His recent project, funded by a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant and a Luce/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in China Studies, focuses on the global circulation of concepts of statecraft and international law, particularly as received in eastern and central Asia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Benjamin D. Hopkins (moderator) is the Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center, and Associate Professor of History and International Affairs. He is a specialist in modern South Asian history, in particular that of Afghanistan, as well as British imperialism. His first book, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, examined the efforts of the British East India Company to construct an Afghan state in the early part of the nineteenth century and provides a corrective to the history of the so-called ‘Great Game.’ His second book, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier is co-authored with anthropologist Magnus Marsden. He has additionally co-edited Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier with Magnus Marsden. Hopkins has a forthcoming book on a comparative history of frontiers across empires from Harvard University. His research has been funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, the Nuffield Foundation (UK), the British Academy, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, the Leverhulme Trust and the National University of Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. (Cantab) and was educated at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University.

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies cordially invites you to a book talk with author Dr. Azeem Ibrahim, Director of the Displacement and Global Migration Program at the Center for Global Policy, and Q&A moderated by Professor of Practice of International Affairs Dr. Christina Fink.

Dr. Ibrahim will introduce what is happening to the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group who are from the Rakhine state in western Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country. He will discuss the reality facing the Rohingyas as a slow-motion genocide. According to the United Nations, the Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.

This event is free and open to the public. A book sale and signing will follow the book talk. Light refreshments will be served.

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is the Director of the Displacement and Migration Program at the Center for Global Policy in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge after which he completed fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Harvard, and Yale. Dr. Ibrahim has been researching the Rohingya crisis for over a decade and is the author of the award winning book The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. To undertake research for his book, Dr. Ibrahim made a number of trips to Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Dr. Ibrahim continues to research and write on the Rohingya crisis with regular publications in the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, CNN and others. In 2019 he received the International Association of Genocide Scholars Engaged Scholar Prize for his pioneering work on the Rohingya.

Professor Christina Fink joined the Elliott School in 2011. She is a cultural anthropologist who has combined teaching, research, and development work throughout her career. She served as a visiting lecturer at the Pacific and Asian Studies Department at the University of Victoria in 1995, and from 2001-2010, she was a lecturer and program associate at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Thailand. During the same period, she also ran a bi-annual capacity building training and internship program which she developed for members of Burmese civil society organizations, including women’s groups. 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.

Thursday, October 17, 2019

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Room 505

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW, Washington, DC 20052

Dr. James Gomez, Chair of the Board of Directors, will visit Washington D.C. and New York to introduce his organization and its three-year project on Fake News and the Impact on Freedom of Expression in Southeast Asia. He will be sharing the findings from Asia Centre’s international conference on “Fake News and Elections in Asia,” which was held in Thailand in July this year. A Q&A session will follow the presentation, and a light lunch will be provided.

The Asia Center is a not-for-profit organization that seeks to create social impact in the Southeast Asia region. The Centre is based in Bangkok, Thailand. It serves as a think-tank, meeting space, project partner and social enterprise.

This event is free and open to the public.

Thursday, September 26th, 2019

12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

Chung-wen Shih Conference. Room – Suite 503

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052

What should we expect for the future of the Korean peninsula? There are at least four possible scenarios: one good, two bad, and one tricky. Dr. Michishita will discuss what happens in each scenario, and how Japan might respond to it.

Narushige Michishita is vice president of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo. He acquired his Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. A specialist in Japanese security and foreign policy as well as security issues on the Korean Peninsula, he is the author of North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966-2008 (Routledge, 2009) and Lessons of the Cold War in the Pacific: U.S. Maritime Strategy, Crisis Prevention, and Japan’s Role (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2016) (co-authored with Peter M. Swartz and David F. Winkler).

Monday, September 30, 2019

11:45 AM – 1:00 PM

Lindner Commons, Room 602

Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street NW, Washington, DC 20052

About the Speakers:
Dr. Tara Kartha has served in the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) for the Government of India during the tenure of 5 National Security Advisors. Her period of appointment at NSCS covered the Kargil War and the reform of the national security system that followed it. At NSCS she was also in charge of the National Security Advisory Board, which prepared the first Defense Review and the first National Security Review. Prior to this, she was nine years at the Institute of Defense Studies & Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. She is now a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), New Delhi. At present, she is the Senior Jennings Randolph Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, where she is co-authoring a monograph with Ambassador Jalil Jillani, former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan. She writes regularly for the Indian media, and tweets at @kartha_tara.

Dr. 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, the Rising Powers Initiative. 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.