Congratulations!! November 2009 Winners of the EWCA Email Update Drive drawing:

$50 Amazon.com Gift Card – Hidefumi Kinoshita – Japan

$50 Amazon.com Gift Card – Shan Feng (PI 98, Assoc 07) – China

$50 Amazon.com Gift Card – Kiran Kumar Bhattarai (TDI 75-77) – Nepal

These winning East-West Center Association (EWCA) members updated their contact information with the EWCA and as a result were entered in the EWCA Email Update Drive drawing! Each winner will receive a gift card code via e-mail that they can use to redeem for items of their choosing at Amazon.com. New winners will be chosen each month from now until December 2009. Make sure that you update your contact information and have your name entered in the next monthly drawing!

Act now: Update your contact information

As we approach our 50th Anniversary, we’re making a special effort to update our EWCA Alumni records. This is the second out of 5 Monthly Drawings that will award $50 Amazon.com Gift Cards (3 drawings each month from August 2009 to December 2009), so there’s still time to be a winner.

Enter the monthly drawings:Update your contact information

In addition to the monthly drawings, all entries received before January 1st, 2010 will be eligible for the Grand Prize Drawing awarding one free round trip airline ticket to attend the 2010 50th Anniversary Conference in Honolulu (valued at up to $1,750). Each entry will also be entered in a drawing for 3 second prize awards awarding free 2010 50th Anniversary Conference registration. Grand Prize Drawing and second prize awards will be awarded in January 2010.

Links:

• Learn more about the rules of this promotion
• Read about the EWC/EWCA 2010 International Conference celebrating 50 years of the East-West Center
• Learn more about the Amazon.com Gift Cards

The Asian International Justice Initiative
a collaboration between
the University of California Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center and the East-West Center
in partnership with
the (Komnas HAM)
is pleased to announce
THE 3RD ANNUAL SUMMER INSTITUTE IN
INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS
“Internal Conflicts in the Asia Pacific Region”
Monday, May 10 – Saturday, May 22, 2010
Bali / Aceh, Indonesia

Applications are now open for the third annual Summer Institute in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and Human Rights (Summer Institute 2010). Summer Institute 2010 will be held in partnership with the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) in Bali, followed by an optional field trip to Aceh, Sumatra.

This two-week workshop is designed for participants working across a broad range of fields and disciplines
related to IHL and human rights. The workshop is best suited to people working within the Asia Pacific region or with an Asia Pacific focus. Participants from Southeast Asia are strongly encouraged to apply. Lawyers, academics, journalists, non-governmental organization workers, investigators, monitors, government agency workers, as well advanced (graduate level) law students from across Asia and internationally will find the workshop relevant to their work.

This year’s course will focus on an area of study and practice that engages key IHL and human rights issues facing advocates, policy-makers and academics today: the rise of internal (or non-international) conflicts in the latter part of the twentieth century and the first decade of the new millennium, and their impact on both regional and international peace and security. The curriculum will focus on the emergence of conflict and approaches to conflict resolution in the Asia Pacific region, with a specific emphasis on conflicts, past and present, in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. The primary country case studies considered during this course will be:
Indonesia (particularly focusing on the conflicts in Aceh and Papua); the Philippines (particularly focusing on the conflict between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Mindanao); Sri Lanka; and southern Thailand.

Links:

For further information on the course content, download a course brochure

Note: Travel expenses for this field trip are the responsibility of each individual participant. However, those participants receiving full scholarships awarded by the East-West Center to participate in the Summer Institute will have their field trip expenses covered.

Carol Davis (Photo Credit, Franklin & Marshall College)

In August 2009, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001 and two-time Pullitzer Prize winner, announced at his New York Times Blog “On The Ground” a contest for readers with an interest in global poverty. This contest was launched by Kristof on the same week that the The New York Times Magazine issued a special Sunday issue focused on women in the developing world, including an excerpt from “Half the Sky,” a book by Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.

There were over 700 submissions highlighting individual and group efforts to eradicate poverty and extremism in the world. Kristof selected Carol’s project, Nepal Health Project, as one of the winners of the “Half the Sky” contest. Here’s what Kristof wrote about Carol’s submission:

Cover of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book

A teacher uses her salary to fund a street theater troupe and school workshop program in rural Nepal focusing on personal health and hygiene, girl’s education and maternal mortality: “Full of information, witty dialog and slapstick, the traveling play keeps audiences laughing while they learn about washing hands, building latrines away from water sources, hydrating babies with diarrhea and taking children for inoculations before they contract preventable diseases.”

You can review the full entry of Carol at Kristof’s blog.

Currently, Carol is associate professor of theater at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. In 2000, when she was on the faculty of Pomona College, she participated in the East-West Center/National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Religions, Philosophies, and Culture of India. Carol reported: “That was a valuable program and I have stayed in touch with the East West Center since then. I appreciate being part of the East-West Center family.”

Links:

Book Cover

THE PERFECT SPY
The Double Life of Pham Xuan An,
TIME Magazine Reporter and
Vietnamese Communist Agent

Hosted by
East West Center Seminars

During the Vietnam War, distinguished Time reporter Pham Xuan An befriended everyone who was anyone in Saigon. Leading American journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan regarded him as a trusted source and friend. But none of An’s friends knew that he was a spy providing strategic intelligence to North Vietnam, smuggling invisible ink messages out to the jungle in egg rolls and living a dangerous double life. After the war, An, now a general in the Vietnamese army, was named a “Hero of the People’s Army” but his close friendships with Americans made him suspect in the eyes of Vietnam’s Communist leaders, and he was never allowed to return to the United States. In Perfect Spy, Larry Berman, who made more than a dozen trips to Vietnam to interview An, and whom An considered his American biographer chronicles the extraordinary life of one of the most fascinating spies of the twentieth century.

Berman is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California Davis and Director of the UC Davis Washington Program. The author of numerous books on the Vietnam War, two of which have been translated in to Vietnamese, Professor Berman also actively participated in advancing US-Vietnam relations.

Berman has been featured on C-Span’s Book TV, the History Channel’s Secrets of War, Bill Moyers The Public Mind; David McCullough’s American Experience, and Vietnam: A Television History. He received the Bernath Lecture Prize, given annually by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations to a scholar whose work has most contributed to our understanding of foreign relations.

Links:

• Preview pages of Perfect Spy at Amazon.com
• Learn about more events from East-West Center Seminars

EWC Graduate Fellow, Sugato Dutt with Poltu Rava, a member of the community near the Buxa Tiger Reserve in North Bengal.

His paper entitled “Masked by the tiger: an evaluative study of rural livelihoods and conservation values in Northeast India” was presented at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers held at San Diego, California from Sept. 30th to Oct 3rd 2009. This paper was one of the results of his field research project at the Buxa Tiger Reserve, West Bengal State in India, while working on his dissertation, “Crafting the Conservation Landscape: Resource Use and Participatory Forest Management in the Buxa Tiger Reserve, West Bengal.”

Sponsored by the EWC Research Program, Sugato’s paper won the Committee Award for the Best Regional paper. Sugato’s research examines the attitudes of the local community residing at the vicinity of one of India’s several Tiger Reserves. The reserves, regarded as a symbol of the Indian government’s commitment to protect the tiger, have come under some controversy recently as tiger populations have been reported to decline in India. Much is reported in the Indian and international media about the lack of support for the project at the grassroots level.

Sugato’s research finds that the local community is concerned about the future of the tiger and is willing to help reduce incidents of (timber and wildlife) poaching but cannot give up its economic dependence on minor forest produce including fodder and fuelwood.

Links:

• Read about the EWC Student Programs
• Learn more about the EWC Research Program
• Visit the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers‘ website