Thursday, October 28, 2021
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM EDT | 9:30 AM – 10:45 AM PDT
WebEx Event
Cemented by decades of positive engagement and shared history, the United States and Taiwan enjoy a very robust relationship that spans a multitude of public and foreign policy issues. Important to these efforts are the people-to-people ties between researchers, scholars, and practitioners that explore new avenues for cooperation and collaboration between both sides. Join us for a conversation with scholars from the U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group, a program administered by UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies designed to build a community of American public policy intellectuals across a wide range of sectors with sustained interest in Taiwan affairs, as they identify and discuss new ways to deepen U.S.-Taiwan ties.
This event will be on the record and a recording will be available on the NRC YouTube channel after the event.
Registration
The event is open to the public. Registered guests will receive details for joining the WebEx meeting.
Speakers
- Sara Newland, Assistant Professor of Government, Smith College
- Brandon Lee, President and CEO, Anacostia Consulting Group
- James Lee, Postdoctoral Research Associate, UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation
- Richard J. Haddock, Program Manager, GW
Moderator
Robert Sutter, Professor of Practice of International Affairs, GW
Speakers
Sara Newland is an Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College and a scholar of local politics in China and Taiwan. She has conducted research on public goods and services in rural China, collaboration between civil society organizations and the local state, local government responsiveness in Taiwan, ethnic politics, and political science pedagogy.
Her research has been published in China Quarterly (2016, 2018) and The Journal of Political Science Education (2019). She is also the coeditor, with Vinod Aggarwal, of Responding to China’s Rise: US and EU Strategies (Springer, 2014). She teaches courses on China, East Asia, comparative politics, and political economy. She is an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. Previously, she was an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University and a China public policy postdoctoral fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Brandon Lee is the President and CEO of Anacostia Consulting Group, leading the practice’s environmental, economic, and security issues. His work focuses on analyzing the risks posed in maritime operations domestically and internationally.
Mr. Lee’s work has included reviewing potential methods to create regional stability and establishing cooperative and defensive approaches to maintaining regional balance of power in the South China Sea; developing feasible, implementable, and achievable policy recommendations to improve maritime capacity in Southeast Asia; and identifying opportunities for maritime capacity building support by the U.S. Coast Guard, the Japan Coast Guard, and Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration.
Mr. Lee’s work on assessing maritime capacity building in Southeast Asia and opportunities for cooperation between the U.S. and Japan Coast Guards has been turned into a three-volume set for use by the Japan Coast Guard Academy. He has also written an article on maritime capacity building opportunities for the Taiwan Coast Guard Administration in the “Perspectives on Taiwan: Insights from the 2019 Taiwan-U.S. Policy Program” published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
Prior to this work, he worked as a Policy Analyst for the Institute for European Environmental Policy conducting research on international regulations and policies. Mr. Lee is an AmeriCorps alumnus and received his M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, his M.P.A. from Columbia University, and his B.S. from the University of Utah.
James Lee is a postdoctoral research associate at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), a research center for the UC system that is based at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. His research is on U.S. grand strategy in Europe and East Asia, with a focus on the Taiwan question in U.S.-China relations. At IGCC, he is working on a project on how Taiwan’s semiconductor industry relates to the United States’ strategic interest in the security of Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2018, and he was a fellow in the Max Weber Program for Postdoctoral Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2018-2019. He also previously served as the Senior Editor of Taiwan Security Research (TSR) from 2017-2020. Starting in August 2022, he will be an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
Lee’s research interests are at the intersection of international security, international political economy, and international history. He studies grand strategy and great power politics in periods ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the Cold War to the present day. He is particularly interested in geoeconomics and economic statecraft. His academic research has been published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and the Journal of Chinese Political Science. He is currently working on a book that compares the United States’ strategy toward economic reconstruction and development in Western Europe and East Asia during the Cold War.
Lee is also interested in public policy. He has served as a contributor for East Asia Forum, with opinion pieces on Taiwan’s security. At IGCC, he has published a policy brief on 5G and U.S. national security. At the European University Institute, he published a policy brief on the Taiwan question in U.S.-China relations and its implications for the European Union.
Richard J. Haddock is currently the Program Manager for the East Asia National Resource Center (NRC), which is supported by a Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education. In this role, Mr. Haddock is primarily responsible for East Asia learning content development, strategic planning and grant management, liaising with key community and educational stakeholders, and reporting to the Department of Education. He is also a member of the UC Berkeley U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group, where he is conducting a research project on the current state and future prospects of Taiwan Studies in the United States. He has held positions at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the National Democratic Institute’s Asia team, the American Institute in Taiwan’s Public Diplomacy Section, and the U.S. Department of State. Mr. Haddock is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University, focusing on digital democracy and e-governance development in the Asia-Pacific. He holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the Elliott School, with a concentration on domestic politics and foreign policy of East Asia. He graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.A. in Political Science and minors in Asian Studies and Diplomacy.
Moderator
Robert Sutter is Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliott School of George Washington University (2011-Present ). He also served as Director of the School’s main undergraduate program involving over 2,000 students from 2013-2019. His earlier full-time position was Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University (2001-2011).
A Ph.D. graduate in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University, Sutter has published 22 books (four with multiple editions), over 300 articles and several hundred government reports dealing with contemporary East Asian and Pacific countries and their relations with the United States. His most recent book is Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy of an Emerging Global Force, Fifth Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Sutter’s government career (1968-2001) saw service as senior specialist and director of the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division of the Congressional Research Service, the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and the Pacific at the US Government’s National Intelligence Council, the China division director at the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
