Events this Week
On June 20th, Barnett Baron, The Asia Foundation’s Executive Vice President, moderated the World Affairs Council panel, Afghanistan – Progress or Decline, in honor of World Refugee Day. The panel included Khaled Hosseini, UNHCR Goodwill Envoy and Author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns; Ewen MacLeod, Deputy Representative, UNHCR Afghanistan; and Fariba Nawa, Afghan-American Journalist. For Bay Area residents, KQED’s It’s Your World will air the program in its entirety on Monday, July 7 at 8pm. For more information, click here.
From June 20-21, The Asia Foundation co-sponsored a major international conference in Taipei, Taiwan on “The State of Democratic Governance in Asia.” Organized under the auspices of the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) – an ongoing, rigorous, multi-year research effort designed to track the progress of individual countries in the region against a range of variables related to democratic institutions, values, and practices — the conference sponsors also included the Program for East Asia Democratic Studies at National Taiwan University and the Institute of Political Science at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. A main thrust of the conference was to examine current developments in the processes of democratic change and democratic consolidation in Asia, with a special eye to the difficulties and challenges that have emerged in recent years, especially those relating to the failure of new democracies to deliver concrete improvements in the lives of Asia’s citizens. For more information on the conference outcomes, please contact Gordon Hein at ghein@asiafound.org.
