Chandarith is currently a Ph.D candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU. His study has been sponsored by the Harvard Yenching Institute. In Cambodia, he is a lecturer in language education, and a founder of the International Studies Program at Institute of Foreign Languages Institute, Royal University of Phnom Penh.

Profile

Joint seminar with The ANU China Institute

Profile

Joint seminar with The ANU China Institute

Dr Andrew Walker graduated in anthropology from the University of Sydney in 1983. He then spent 10 years as a public servant and consultant, ending up as a public transport planner in rural New South Wales. He came to ANU in 1993 to do a PhD in anthropology. This resulted in The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (1999). Since 2002 he has been working in the Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program (RSPAS, ANU) focusing on environmental management, agricultural transformation and social change in northern Thailand. He co-authored (with Tim Forsyth of the London School of Economics) Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (2008) and edited Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Southeast Asia (2009). He is currently writing a book about supernatural, economic and political power based on his fieldwork in a northern Thai village. Andrew is co-convenor (with Nicholas Farrelly) of New Mandala a blog which provides "anecdote, analysis and new perspectives on mainland southeast Asia."

Prajak Kongkirati is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU. His study has been supported by an Australian Leadership Award of AusAID. In Thailand, he is a lecturer in Political Science Department at Thammasat University and serves as an executive board of the Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities textbooks Project, and Peace Information Center. He has been involved in many research projects and has published widely in the field of Thai politics, political conflicts, and social movements. His book, And Then The Movement Emerged: Cultural Politics of Thai Students and Intellectuals Movements before the October 14 Uprising (Thammasat University Press, 2005), which was based on his M.A. thesis, received the Toyota Foundation’s Best Book award of 2005 in the field of social sciences in Thailand.

Alasdair Bowie is associate professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University. A former Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Dr. Bowie’s research focuses on decentralizing government, democratization and local economic governance in Indonesia and Vietnam. He has published The Politics of Open Economies: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand (with Danny Unger)(Cambridge U.P.) and Crossing the Industrial Divide: State, Society and the Politics of Economic Transformation in Malaysia (Columbia U.P.). Prior to joining the faculty at the George Washington University, Dr. Bowie taught at Cornell University and the Catholic University of America. He has held visiting researcher/fellow positions in Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. His current research project has been funded by the Henry J. Luce Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the U.S. Indonesia Society and the George Washington University. He speaks Indonesian and is a student of the Vietnamese language.

Jeremy Kingsley joined the Asian Law Centre in 2003. He is a graduate of Deakin University, having completed a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws. Jeremy has completed the Master of Laws (Asian Law and Comparative Legal Studies) at the University of Melbourne. Jeremy is currently a PhD Candidate in the Melbourne Law School, under the supervision of Professor Tim Lindsey and Professor Abdullah Saeed. During 2007-2008, he undertook fieldwork in Lombok, Indonesia. This research was supported by an Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong Award and an ARC Federation Fellowship doctoral scholarship.

Dr Tyrell Haberkorn graduated from University of North Carolina and completed her MA and Ph.D. at Cornell University, where she graduated in 2007. She held a postdoctoral position in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Colgate University from 2007 to 2009. She specialises in research on human rights, political violence, social change and sovereignty. Her research interests also include arbitrary detention, comparative histories of state violence, comparative histories of socialism and Southeast Asia (Thailand). Her recent publication include 'An Unfinished Past: The 1974 Land Rent Control Act and Assassination in Northern Thailand' (Critical Asian Studies 41/1, 2009), 'At the limits of imagination: Ajarn Angun Malik and the meanings of politics' (Position: Thai Feminist Review, 2007) and 'Collusion and influence behind the assassinations of human rights defenders in Thailand' (article 2, 2005). She is currently working on various manuscripts to be published in late 2009.

Amina Rasul-Bernardo is the Lead Convenor of the Philippine Council for Islam and Democracy and Trustee of the Magbassa Kita Foundation Inc. She started The Moro Times, a monthly supplement of The Manila Times and the first major Philippines newspaper to provide regular coverage of Muslim issues.She was a member of the Philippine Cabinet under former President Fidel Ramos, as Presidential Advisor on Youth Affairs, appointed concurrently as the first Chair of the National Youth Commission. She also has held academic positions, as Senior Research Fellow with the Asian Institute of Management Policy Center; the first Filipino invited to be a Senior Fellow at the Washington DC-based United States Institute of Peace; and Visiting Professor at the Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, Manila. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Philippine National Oil Corporation, the Development Bank of the Philippines, and Founding Director of the Local Government Guarantee Corporation, and an advisor to the Development Bank of the Philippines Chairman on matters related to the Al Amanah Islamic Investment Bank. In 2007, she was honoured as “Muslim Democrat of the Year 2007” by the Center for Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) in Washington DC. Ms Rasul-Bernardo has a Master's degree in business management from the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines and a Master of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She has authored and edited several books, including The Road to Peace and Reconciliation: Muslim Perspectives on the Mindanao Conflict, Broken Peace? An Assessment of the 1996 GRP-MNLF Peace Agreement, and Radicalization of Muslim Communities in Southeast Asia (2007).

Robin Jeffrey worked in India for the first time between 1967-9 as a teacher and has been studying India since then. He worked for 25 years at La Trobe University and twice at the ANU. He will be a research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore for two years from November 2009. His current research interest is the cell phone in South Asia.

Joint seminar with Indonesia Project

Michael S. Malley is an assistant professor of political science in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He teaches courses on Southeast Asian politics and international relations. His research is focused on issues of state formation, state failure and survival, and regime change. He has a long-running interest in center-local relations, decentralization policy, and provincial politics in Indonesia. Recently, he has begun to examine the impact of domestic politics on regional security, paying special attention to the way Southeast Asian countries deal with nuclear energy. He earned his doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a master's degree in Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University, and a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. As part of these academic programs he also studied at the National University of Singapore and two Indonesian universities, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta and IKIP in Malang.

Waiweng Hew is a Ph.D. candidate in Dept of Political and Social Change. His doctoral thesis is on Contesting Chinese and Islamic identities in Malaysia and Indonesia: The case of Chinese Muslims.

Nathan Blank is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS), at the Australian National University. Prior to ANU Nathan completed his BA at Brigham Young University and his MA in International Affairs from Missouri State University. Nathan began his doctoral research in June 2008 which centers on Philippine migration policy making. Nathan has a strong interest in understanding how Filipino worker migrations abroad and the remittances they send home can play a greater role in national economic development. Nathan’s research interests include: Sustainable development, international relations, comparative politics, remittances and economic development strategies, policy decision making, international and regional organizations, NGO's and development, Southeast Asia, terrorism and security, and international migration.

Trevor Wilson retired in August 2003 after more than thirty-six years as a member of the Australian foreign service, the last fifteen as a member of the Senior Executive Service, after serving most recently as Australian Ambassador to Myanmar (2000-03). Since October 2003 he has been a Visiting Fellow on Myanmar/Burma at the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
Since 2004, Trevor Wilson has been co-convener of the Myanmar/Burma Update conference series at the Australian National University. He has (co)-edited three volumes of the conference papers, Myanmar’s Long Road to National Reconciliation (ISEAS 2006), Myanmar: the state, community and the environment (Asia Pacific Press, 2007), and Dictatorship, disorder and decline in Myanmar (ANU E-Press, 2008). With David Kinley, he co-authored a case study of Australia’s human rights training in Myanmar ‘Engaging a pariah: Human rights training in Burma/Myanmar’ (Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 29 No. 2, May 2007).

Chair: Paul Hutchcroft (Head, Department of Political and Social Change)
Speakers Edward Aspinall (ANU) on Aceh; Ron J. May (ANU) and Steven Rood (The Asia Foundation) on Southern Philippines; John Funston (ANU) and Thomas Parks (The Asia Foundation) on Southern Thailand
Presentations followed by open discussion

Dr .G.Gopa Kumar is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science in the University of Kerala, Trivandrum, India. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Australian Studies Centre in Monash University, Melbourne and is on a visit to the Australian National Uuniversity ,Canberra.

Virginia Hooker is a Visiting Fellow in Department of Political and Social Change. Before her retirement from the Faculty of Asian Studies in early 2007, she was Head of the Southeast Asia Centre and Coordinator of the Southeast Asia Graduate program. Her previous research includes manuscript traditions in the Malay world as well as Islam, social and cultural change in Indonesia and Malaysia. With Greg Fealy she edited Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook (2006, 2007).

Hyung-A Kim is Associate Professor of Korean Politics and Director of the Australia-Korea Leadership Forum in the College of Asia and the Pacific, the ANU. She is the author of Korea’s Development under Park Chung Hee: Rapid Industrialization, 1961-79 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) and co-editor of Reassessing the Park Chung Hee Era: Development, Political Thought, Democracy and Cultural Influence, Seattle: Washington University Press (forthcoming). She also authored “South Korea’s Nation Building: From Anticommunist Industrialization to Civic Democracy,” in S. C. M. Paine ed., Nation Building in the Twentieth Century: Case Studies and Analyses, New York: M.E. Sharp (forthcoming). She is currently working on a book on South Korean democracy.

Dr. Greg Fealy holds a joint appointment as fellow and senior lecturer in Southeast Asian politics at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, and the Faculty of Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra. His main research interests are Islam and post-independence Indonesian politics. He gained his PhD from Monash University in 1998 with a study of the history of Nahdlatul Ulama, published in Indonesian under the title Ijtihad Politik Ulama: Sejarah NU, 1952-1967. He is the co-author of Joining the Caravan? The Middle East, Islamism and Indonesia (2005), Radical Islam and Terrorism in Indonesia (2005) and Zealous Democrats (2008). He is also co-editor of Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia (2008), Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook (2006), Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation and Democratisation (2003) and Nahdlatul Ulama, Traditionalism and Modernity in Indonesia (1995). He was the C.V. Starr Visiting Professor in Indonesian Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington DC, in 2003, and has been a consultant to AusAID, USAID, The Asia Foundation and BP. From 1997 to 1999 he was an Indonesia analyst at the Australian Government’s Office of National Assessments.

Nattakant is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change. She obtained BA (Journalism and Mass Communication) and MA (Public Administration and Public Policy) from Thammasat University in Thailand and the University of York in UK accordingly. Her proposed dissertation topic is about land tenure and the implementation of land policies in Thailand (mainly from 1980s to the emergence of economic crisis in 2000) and the engagement of the state and the society, peasant movements in particular, in the formation and changes of land policies. Her research interest is about agrarian politics, policies on natural resources management in Thailand and Thailand's local politics. Part of this interest is reflected on her MA dissertation about the impact of the implementation of the Village Revolving Fund programme over rural communities in Thailand.

Rikki Kersten is Professor of Modern Japanese Political History in the Department of Political and Social Change. She has recently published on Japanese fascism in the Oxford Handbook on Fascism (2009), and on Marxist perspectives on the Emperor between the wars in The Emperors of Modern Japan (2008). Her research interests include modern Japanese political thought, particularly revisionism, democracy, and war responsibility discourse; and Japanese security policy.

Graeme's main research interests are the dynamics of state-society interactions in rural China, and what influence models of economic development have on the lives of ordinary citizens. He has worked on the demand for organic produce in urban areas, examined the political economy of China’s agricultural extension system and rural governance as whole, and is now exploring the redistribution of land among Chinese farmers for the ARC Discovery project 'Land, Community and Governance in Rural China'.

Donna Weeks is a lecturer in Japanese Studies and International Relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast. From January to June 2009, she is a visiting fellow in the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University. During March 2009, she will be visiting the Centre for Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS) at ANU, working with Professors Bill Tow and Rikki Kersten.

Emma Campbell LLB(Hons) (Leeds), MSc (London) is from Newcastle upon Tyne in the United Kingdom. She graduated from the University of Leeds with a joint honours degree in law and Chinese studies before joining the investment bank N.M. Rothschild where she worked as an Analyst in the Eastern European Equity Capital Markets division. She then returned to studying, completing a MSc in Korean politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

On graduating from SOAS, Emma worked for John Swire and Sons seconded to Cathay Pacific Airways for six years, where her roles included managing Cathay's Northern India operations in Delhi, and in London, heading Cathay Pacific's commercial operations for the UK and Ireland.

Emma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change and joined ANU to begin her PhD research in March 2008. She is supported by a Korea Foundation Postgraduate Fellowship. This fieldwork is funded by a Cheung Kong Australia Endeavour Scholarship.

V.Thiruppugazh is a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service. After joining the Civil Service in 1991, he served in various district assignments before he was posted in 2001, as the Joint Chief Executive Officer of the Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority which was set up as the nodal agency for reconstruction following the Gujarat earthquake. In addition to his contribution in Gujarat earthquake reconstruction, he also has the experience of handing various disasters such as floods, cyclones, and droughts. He is currently on study leave doing his PhD in the Department of Political and Social Change in the Australian National University.

Dr Edward Aspinall is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. He is the author of 'Opposing Suharto': Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2005) and Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2009 (forthcoming)).

Quinton Temby is a first-year PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change, RSPAS. He holds a Bachelor of Asian Studies (Specialist) with First Class Honours from the Australian National University.

Shangpo Hsieh is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change, ANU. He received the M.A degree from the National Chinan University, Taiwan. Before studying at the ANU, he was a lecture at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Taiwan, and also an assistant research fellow at the Chung-hua Institution for Economic Research. He is the winner of both Studying Abroad Scholarship (Ministry of Education, Taiwan) and Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Taiwan).

Louise Merrington is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Change, RSPAS. She holds a BA (Hons) with majors in Media and Communications/Chinese Studies and a minor in Politics from the University of Melbourne and has spent significant time in China, including a semester studying Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She has also worked as a freelance journalist for the past five years, mostly for The Age newspaper (Melbourne), but also for the Bulletin magazine and ABC Radio Australia, and spent four months as an intern at the ABC China bureau in Beijing in 2006.

Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman is currently an associate research fellow with the Contemporary Islam Program, at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He is also a PHD candidate in the Deapartment of Political and Social Change, Research School for Australian National University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History and Political Science, National University of Singapore (NUS) and a Master of Arts (History), NUS. He has contributed articles in various newspapers including Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Today Zaman and India Daily Express. He has published an article in Southeast Asia Research and several of his articles will be featured in forthcoming volumes of Modern Asian Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and South Asia.

Joint seminar with Department of International Relations

Navitri Putri Guillaume is a PhD Candidate at the Political Science Department of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. While her main research interests are environmental politics, land conflicts and deforestation, she has been working on other issues including children right, land mine impacts on indigenous community, crisis prevention and recovery, and migrant detention.

Maev O'Collins taught at the University of Papua New Guinea from 1972-1989. She was appointed Professor of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in 1979, received an MBE in the Papua New Guinea Honours List in 1987, and was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus by the University Council in 1989. Now living in Canberra, she is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University and an Adjunct Professor at the Canberra Campus of the Australian Catholic University. The focus of her current research is on social justice in a multicultural context, and Australia's relationship with Papua New Guinea and other South Pacific island nations and dependent territories. Her publications include Social Development in Papua New Guinea: 1972-1990: Searching for Solutions in a Changing World 1993, An Uneasy Relationship: Norfolk Island and the Commonwealth of Australi 2002 and 'What if they don't want your kind of development? Reflections on the Southern Highlands', in Conflict and Resource Development in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, edited by Nicole Haley and Ronald J. May, 2007.