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SEMINAR SCHEDULE - WOLLONGONG - 2004: ABSTRACTS11 October: Approaches to eliminate unfair competition monopolies in Vietnam and IndonesiaLe-Thuy Tran Abstract: Vietnam and Indonesia need to eliminate unfair competition monopolies. Recent developments in those countries suggest that the antitrust regulator of each is developing a special role in price control and other activities in the public interest. The question that remains unanswered is whether or not Vietnam and Indonesia will fashion original and effective solutions to their unique problems of protecting and fostering economic competition. Biography: Dr Tran is a lecturer and research fellow with CAPSTRANS. She previously worked as a company president, office manager, consultant and public servant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vietnam. She carried out her postgraduate studies in Rusia, Norway, and Japan. Dr Tran's research interest is corporate governance and business law including corporations, foreign investment, competition, equity and contract law. Her forthcomming book Corporate governance and legal frameworks in Asian transitionaleconomies: the case of Vietnam is a document for Vietnemse law-makers in preparation for the amendment of the Vietnamese Corporations Law in 2005. 7 October: Affordable Drugs for People Living with HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries: Legal and Trade IssuesJakkrit
Kuanpoth Abstract: The most pressing challenge in the fight against HIV/AIDS is to increase access to life-saving antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). Access is affected by the pricing structure of the drugs, in turn based on the patent law environment, which affects production and/or importation of affordable treatments. This seminar explores: international intellectual property agreements; pharmaceutical patenting; and the growing corporate-driven FTA and their effect on access to affordable ARVs. The focus is Vietnam and Thailand. Options will be suggested for utilizing current law to improve access to ARVs in those countries. It will be suggested that changes to patent law, and the way current domestic and international law is interpreted and practiced, will increase access to ARVs. This would enable the governments of those countries to meet the social and economic challenges of HIV/AIDS. Biography: Dr Kuanpoth is currently Associate Professor, School of Law, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, Thailand and a Visiting Senior Fellow, CAPSTRANS, Wollongong. He has published widely in the areas of intellectual property law, international economic law and law and technology. LLB (Hons) Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand, 1983; Barrister-at-Law, The Institute of Legal Education Thai Bar Association, Thailand, 1984; LLM, International Economic Law, University of Warwick, UK, 1992; PhD, University of Aberdeen, UK, 1995; Post-doctoral fellowship, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law, Munich, Germany, 1996. 24 September: Australian-Indonesian Relations in the light of the Jakarta BombingAdrian Vickers Public Seminar: A discussion led by Professor Adrian Vickers (Associate Dean—Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts) and a panel of commentators on the up-and-down history of relations, issues of terrorism, and media coverage between the two countries. 20 September: Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor: A look at the work of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor LesteJohn
Littrich Abstract: In June 2000, almost a year after the historic vote for independence, the East Timorese National Council proposed the formation of a reconciliation commission to hear and record human rights violations committed on all sides between April 1974 and October 1999, facilitate community reconciliation and provide information to prosecuting authorities. The Commission commenced work in early 2002 and after thousands of victim interviews, hundreds of hearings and community workshops, the Commission's final report to the East Timorese Government will soon be released. This seminar will give an overview of the work of the Commission, some of the problems it encountered and the likely recommendations in its final report. Biography: John Littrich is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong, and formerly, a solicitor. John is recently returned from a trip to East Timor where he met with members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 1 September: Islamic EducationProfessor A Quodri Azizy Abstract:
Biography: Qodri A. Azizy was born in Kendal, Central Java, 24 October 1955. Having finished his elementary school in 1969, he went to the Madrasah Tsanawiyah (Islamic Junior High School) “Futuhiyah” (finished in 1971) and the Madrasah Aliyah (Islamic Senior High School) “Futuhiyah” (finished in 1974). In 1975 he pursued his study at the Faculty of Shari'a IAIN Walisongo, Semarang, graduating in 1980. In 1981 he was appointed teaching assistant in the institution. In 1986, he continued his study in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago, USA, and gained his MA degree in 1988. After an interlude of about 2 years teaching in his home campus, he went back to Chicago in 1990 to complete his Ph.D degree in 1996. Since 1997 he had been involved in establishing the Graduate Program at IAIN Walisongo Semarang, and appointed as the director of the Program for three months. By the end of 1997, he was appointed Vice Rector I of IAIN Walisongo, Semarang. In 1999 he was appointed the rector of the institution for the period of 1999 to 2003. In February 5th, 2003, he was honored to be the Director of Islamic Institutions of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. In addition to be a permanent lecturer at the Faculty of Shari'a IAIN Walisongo, he has been teaching in graduate programs at many different universities. Qodri is a prolific writer in various newspapers, such as Suara Merdeka, Jawa
Pos, Republika and Kompas. He was a visiting professor in McGill University Montreal, Canada,
in 1998, where he taught (a) Islamic Law in Indonesia, and (b) Social History of Islamic Law.
23 August: New anti-capitalist Movement, Civil Society and Global FinanceProfessor
Lord Meghnad Desai Biography: Professor Lord Desai is one of LSE's longest-serving and most well-known academics. Professor Desai was born in 1940 in Baroda, India. After studying at the University of Bombay, he gained a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania 1964, and came to LSE as a lecturer in 1965. He was made a professor of economics in 1983, and became director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance in 1992. His books, among numerous publications, include Marx's Revenge: the resurgence of capitalism and the death of statist socialism (Verso, 2002). He became a life peer in 1991 taking the title Lord Desai of St Clement Danes. View a full list of Lord Desai's publications. 26 July: Ali G, Borat and the Mythology of a Converging “Asian” LawJeremy
Kingsley Abstract: Through a critique of comparative law, Jeremy contends that projects aiming to harmonise Asian legal systems can be absurd both in their conception and implementation. Jeremy considers a number of questions, including whether global legal convergence is necessary/inevitable, who is promoting such harmonisation and what is their motivation, what mitigates and guides legal diversity in the Asian region and whose voice is not being heard in this debate. While understanding that we live in a technologically interconnected world, Jeremy contends that there needs to be careful consideration given to how this global interconnectedness translates into international/regional law reform and policy debates. If this is not done, the global village may represent a village without much community. 2 June: The Social Investment Family in Crisis: Education, Modernity and Globalization in South KoreaKyung-Sup Chang Abstract: South Koreans are well known for their educational enthusiasm. Many observers of South Korea rightly acknowledge that education has been a key factor for rapid economic development, democratisation, etc. An interesting aspect of the South Korean educational fervor is the heavy public dependence on private educational investment. In this society, private families have spent one of the highest levels in the world on education, whereas the state has invested in education at a level that even worries the United Nations as a human rights issue. I will address this matter by introducing the concept of the social investment family, as opposed to the social investment state proposed by Anthony Giddens as a core scheme for the “renewal of social democracy”. In this paper, the concept of the social investment family is brought in and compared with the social investment state as defined by Anthony Giddens. Then I discuss the historical and social context in which private families came to recognize the prime importance of education in their economic, social, cultural and even political advancement. I next appraise the recent economic crisis and the neo-liberal reform to cope with it as fundamental threats to the sustainability of the social investment family. Finally, I will examine the educational situations of two East Asian neighbors, ie. Japan and China, so as to evaluate to what extent the social investment family is an East Asian, not just South Korean, phenomenon. 26 May: Corporatisation and Hindustani Music: Cultural Consequences of Marketing TraditionAdrian
McNeil Abstract: The networks and structures of patronage that sustain Hindustani classical music have experienced a series of ruptures over the last three hundred years. These ruptures have coincided with the succession of political economies in India, from the feudal pre-modern to the corporatised present. Each effects of each shift in patronage has been felt in similar ways, namely through significant changes in the social organisation of hereditary musician communities, the reformulation of modes through which knowledge was transmitted, the recasting of performance practices, the revision of aesthetic sensibilities and the re-imagining of the past. This paper focuses specifically on the experience of one group of musicians (sarodiyas) in order to examine how the ongoing tendency of contesting the past has now become particularly charged in the present climate of corporate sponsorship, cultural revisionism and communal violence. 13 May: The Hermeneutics of (Japanese) Law: Modernity and Community—Translating TanaseLuke Nottage Abstract: This presentation draws on a Japanese government-funded translation of a selection of essays by one of Japan's leading sociologists of law, Kyoto University Professor Takao Tanase. It first introduces a strong tradition of legal realism and legal sociology developed in Japan, as the nation bedded down a modern legal system “received” from the West from the late 19th century. The presentation locates Tanase within that tradition, especially as “the last disciple” of Tokyo University Professor Takeyoshi Kawashima, whose works in English in the 1970s underpinned “culturalist” and “modernisation” theories of Japanese law. From the 1980s, however, foreign commentators developed competing theories to explain legal behaviour that emphasised “institutional barriers”, social management by elites, or rational choice. Two early works by Tanase in English tended to be read as supporting the latter approaches. However, his publications from around 1990—exemplified by those selected for this translation project—demonstrate his “interpretive” turn away from more functionalist legal sociology. Tanase has elaborated a post-modern communitarian approach to a broad array of topics, including family law, tort liability, human rights, legal ethics, and civil dispute resolution. These more recent works therefore represent a major counterweight to those supporting extensive reforms already underway in Japanese civil and criminal justice, aimed instead at more pervasive “modernisation” and a liberal model of law. Tanase's studies, drawing on wide-ranging research from the social sciences to elaborate more general legal theory, also often compare the problems of modern liberal law more clearly evidence in the United States. His arguments, evidence and conclusions therefore have a significance and resonance for beyond Japan, and for all complex industrialised democracies nowadays. 12 May: The Post-September 11th Politics of Global Fundamentalisms: Localism/Globalism, Mahathir and the Malaysian StatePeter Kell Abstract: This paper explores the interplay of globalisation and local politics of Malaysia in the post-September 11th 2001 and in the final period of Dr Mohammad Mahathir's leadership. The interplay involves the often conflicting themes of neo-conservative globalisation, Pan-Islamic views of globalisation and the nation-state project of contemporary Malaysia. This paper presentation details the dilemmas of these often contradictory trajectories of globalisation, localisation and nationalism. The paper incorporates a case study of the introduction of English as a medium for the teaching of Mathematics and English that coincided with several by-elections in 2002 and the proposed introduction of Islamic laws in the state of Kelantan. 28 April: Problems of Writing the History of Colonialism in IndonesiaAdrian Vickers Abstract: This paper will examine the historiographic problems in writing the history of the late colonial period (1898-1942) in Indonesia. These problems include: flaws in the statistical data, identification of the state, narrative strategies, and limitations in the sources. I demonstrate how the domination of a neo-liberal paradigm has produced a rosy picture of colonialism, but that even those sources that do not actively reproduce this paradigm are limited by problems of presentism. 14 April: Migration and the Nation: Is there a Filipino Diaspora?Kathleen Weekley Abstract: This paper will discuss the theoretical bases for considering Filipinos living outside the Philippines as a diaspora. Do they meet the requirement set out by Tölöyan and Schnapper, for example, that there be at least minimal institutional exchanges between the scattered individuals and communities? Or is the condition of diaspora met by the looser criteria of subjective feelings of belonging/connectedness among people who experience longing for a distant “homeland”? If so, then to what extent is it more than a “deterritorialised ethnicity”? Linked to these theoretical questions are some basic political ones: who is interested in the creation of a Filipino diaspora and how do they go about it? How do diaspora-making activities by state and non-government political actors affect individual and collective self-perceptions and representations among Filipinos living abroad? The paper is a preliminary investigation of these and other questions in preparation for a book-length study. 31 March: Approaches to Indian Ocean History: themes, networks and systemsHeather Sutherland Abstract: From the mid-19th to the late 20th-century, the state provided the dominant framework for conceptualising space in historical writing. In the past few decades, increasing interest in community, local and transnational linkages has led historians to seek new ways of demarcating geographies, while the geographers themselves are emphasising the contingent and constructed nature of their own categories. Sea-centred approaches are increasingly popular—see, for example, the Routledge series on seas in history, and various attempts to use Braudelian models in Asian history. In this seminar I will consider how Indian Ocean history has been structured around such themes as the role of the European Companies, and commodity flows, and ideas such as “diaspora community” and “port polity”. I will suggest that these approaches are far from satisfactory, and that we need to move to a more issue-centred and theorised conceptualisation of space, rather than create apparently new categories which in fact share the deficiencies of the old. 17 March: Human Rights in the 1950s: Indonesian criticism of Australian indentureJulia Martínez Abstract: From the late 1800s Indonesians were engaged as indentured labour in the Australian pearling industry. The Dutch colonial administration supported this trade, providing Australia with a source of cheap and controlled labour. In 1950 the independent Indonesian government began negotiating on behalf of Indonesian indents for improved conditions. Both Australian and Indonesian reports confirmed that employment practices breached the workers' human rights, but the Menzies government was unwilling to consider reforms. The Indonesian government, determined to pursue equality of treatment for its nationals, placed a ban on indenture to Australia. 3 March: Conformity, Contestation and Culture in the Globalization of Insolvency Regimes: International Institutions and Law-making in Indonesia and ChinaTerence Halliday
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