Best Events of 2000

Eighteen months in the making, the Project on Development, Trade and International Finance's Final Report maps out global financial strategies which would support the growth of the middle class in emerging economies by promoting long-term, private sector capital flows from industrialized countries to developing economies.

Program directors Walter Russell Mead and Sherle Schwenninger will outline their proposals and make the case that such reform serves the long-term interests of developed and developing countries alike, and Robert Dugger, Jeff Faux and… more

Robert Kaplan's books on travel and foreign affairs have carried his readers to some of the world's least likely tourist destinations -- Bosnia, the horn of Africa, Afghanistan -- and illuminated the fault lines reshaping world affairs. Now he turns his attention to the lands of Central Asia, a region all but ignored in American strategic thinking, but simmering with ethnic antagonisms and marked by a dangerous maldistribution of natural resources. In writing marked by clarity, eloquence, and startling insight,… more

Since the publication of his groundbreaking work The End of History and the Last Man, Frank Fukuyama has stayed ahead of the curve, describing the present historical moment with a lucidity and boldness shaped by his rich knowledge of the past and extraordinary sense for the future. Now he has turned his attention to an emerging family of technologies with the potential to change the trajectory of civilization and even what it means to be human -- the biotechnology revolution… more

According to conventional wisdom, Japan's Emperor Hirohito was a man of peace, forced by Japan's militarist elites to support his country's wartime aggression. In his provocative new book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, historian Herbert Bix offers a dramatic reappraisal of the emperor's wartime role, arguing that Hirohito was in fact far more hawkish and closely involved in Japan's war plans than has been previously acknowledged.

Bix goes on to argue that the post-war whitewash of… more

Kiyoshi Sugawa serves as one of the most significant and senior policy analysts and advisors to the leaders of the Democratic Party of Japan and has just spent a sabbatical at Brookings researching U.S.­Japan security architecture questions and attempting to benchmark American attitudes and concerns about potential operational and constitutional changes in Japan's willingness to use force in international disputes. He has recently completed a paper which he plans to discuss at this meeting.

Sugawa, who had a… more

We are pleased to announce a meeting with Eric Brewer, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Inktomi as well as the founder and funder of the FirstGov.gov search engine which presently enables people to search more than 27 million state and federal documents over the web. Eric Brewer also chairs the Federal Search Foundation, which he personally funded to generate this important search engine and portal providing a new benchmark for government transparency in the information age.

The Digital Age has brought abundance to the connected, but one commodity is growing perilously scarce: privacy. The Internet and other information technologies have made sensitive information about individuals' private lives available to employers, vendors, government authorities -- to anyone, in fact, with the right knowledge and a little money. In his new book, Jeffrey Rosen argues that legal, technological, and cultural changes undermine an individual's ability to control how much personal information is communicated to others, and he proposes… more

A public affairs forum sponsored jointly by the New America Foundation and the Republican Main Street Partnership.