Future of Democracy in Asia
The Fletcher Asia Forum (FAF) is an academic program within The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The program aims to bridge the growing gap between the scholarship and policy communities on Asia and promote Asia policy grounded in deep knowledge of the region’s own politics and history. FAF hosts an invited speaker series, expert panels on current policy challenges and the Annual Conference, its signature event.
This conference was made possible thanks to the generous contributions of the Republic of Korea Consulate General in Boston.
Annual Conference Info
Title: Fletcher Asia Forum 2025 Conference: Future of Democracy in Asia
Conference Date: April 25
Schedule, Friday, April 25, 2025
9:30 a.m. Breakfast, 7th Floor Reception Area
10:00 a.m. Opening Remarks: Jaehui Kim, Consul General of Republic of Korea, 7th Floor, Cabot 702
10:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Panel 1: What Asia Tells Us About Democracy, 7th Floor, Cabot 702
- Dan Slater
- Joseph Wong
- Aram Hur
12:00 p.m. - 1 p.m. Lunch, 7th Floor, Cabot 703
1:15 p.m. - 3 p.m. Panel 2: Challenges to Democracy in Asia, 7th Floor, Cabot 702
- William Grimes
- Gautam Nair
- Sheena Chestnut Greitens
3:15 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Panel 3: Practicing Democracy in Asia, 7th Floor, Cabot 702
- Katharine Moon
- Andrew Yeo
- Han-Koo Yeo
5:00 p.m. Closing Remarks & Reception, 7th Floor, Cabot 702
Register for the conference here.
Panelists
Aram Hur is assistant professor of political science and the Kim Koo Chair in Korean Studies at Fletcher. Her research focuses on nationalism and democracy in East Asia.
Professor Hur is the author of Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Robert A. Dahl Award for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy" from the American Political Science Association. Her research appears in leading disciplinary journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies and is widely cited in domestic and international media. She was selected as the 2021 Sherman Emerging Scholar by The Korea Society, a 2018-19 US-Korea NextGen Scholar by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is the recipient of the 2023 Gold Chalk Award for Graduate Teaching from the University of Missouri, where she previously served as faculty and co-director of the MU Institute for Korean Studies. She holds a PhD in politics from Princeton University, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a bachelor's with honors from Stanford University.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT's Asia Policy Program and serves as editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. Her research focuses on security, authoritarian politics and foreign policy, and East Asia.
She is currently on leave to serve as visiting associate professor of research in Indo-Pacific security at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. She is also a nonresident scholar with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her first book, Dictators and Their Secret Police (Cambridge, 2016), examined variations in internal security and repression in Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines during the Cold War and won multiple academic awards. Her second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora (Cambridge, 2023), focused on authoritarianism, security and diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which addresses how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy.
William Grimes
William W. Grimes is a professor of international relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, where he has taught since 1996. He has previously served as the Pardee School’s associate dean for academic affairs and as the founding director of the BU Center for the Study of Asia, as well as chair of the former Department of International Relations. He teaches courses in East Asian political economy and international relations.
Professor Grimes’s work bridges comparative and international political economy. His work on Japanese politics and political economy includes Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics, 1985–2000 (Cornell University Press, 2001) and his co-edited volume (with Ulrike Schaede) Japan’s Managed Globalization: Adapting to the 21st Century (M.E. Sharpe, 2002), as well as a variety of articles and book chapters on the impacts of financial globalization in Japan, Japanese monetary policy making, U.S.-Japan relations and related topics. His current research focuses on the political economy of regional financial cooperation as well as the evolution of financial markets in East Asia.
Katharine Moon
Katharine H.S. Moon is professor emerita at Wellesley College, where she taught for thirty years in the Department of Political Science. She is the author of Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia University, 1997) and Protesting America: Democracy and the U.S.-Korea Alliance (University of California, 2012), along with academic articles on U.S.-Korea relations, democratization, social movements, migration, and women and politics in Korea and East Asia. She was the inaugural holder of the Korea Studies Chair at The Brookings Institution (2014-16) and has appeared widely in international media on many topics related to the Koreas. Kathy Moon is a board member of the National Committee on North Korea.
Gautam Nair
Gautam Nair is assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a scholar of inequality, distribution and democracy with a focus on the politics of social policy, state-business relations and South Asia. He received his PhD in political science with distinction from Yale University.
His book manuscript, titled Retail State: The Politics of Consumption Welfare in India and Beyond, develops a new theory of redistribution and social policy. Other ongoing work studies the representation of consumer interests in public policy, the political economy of reparations and group-targeted transfers, the politics of finance, and democracy and development in contemporary India.
Dan Slater
Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and director for the Center of Emerging Democracies at the International Institute. He specializes in the politics and history of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. He came to Michigan after 12 years on the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he served as director of the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), associate professor in the Department of Political Science and associate member in the Department of Sociology.
His book examining how divergent historical patterns of contentious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in Southeast Asian countries, entitled Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010.
Joseph Wong
Joseph Wong is a professor in the Department of Political Science and serves as the vice president, international, for the University of Toronto. He was the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at The Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy through June 2023. In 2017, Professor Wong was appointed associate vice-president and vice-provost of the University of Toronto, overseeing international student experience. Wong’s research interests are in comparative public policy and political economy. His published articles have appeared in The Bulletin of the WHO, The Lancet, Perspectives on Politics, Politics and Society, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, Governance, Studies in Comparative International Development and Journal of East Asian Studies, among others.
Andrew Yeo
Andrew Yeo is a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Asia Policy Studies. He is also a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington.
Yeo is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Great Power Competition and Overseas Bases: Chinese, Russian, and American Force Posture in the 21st Century (Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming). He is also the author or co-editor of five other books including, Asia’s Regional Architecture: Alliances and Institutions in the Pacific Century (Stanford University Press, 2019), State, Society, and Markets in North Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2021), North Korean Human Rights: Activists and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Living in an Age of Mistrust: An Interdisciplinary Study of Declining Trust in Contemporary Society and Politics and How to Get it Back (Routledge Press, 2017).
Yeo is currently working on a project that examines the role of narratives in the formation of grand strategy, particularly in the context of South Korea.
Han-Koo Yeo
Yeo Han-Koo, former trade minister of the Republic of Korea, has been senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since June 2023. His research focuses on international trade policy, industrial policy, supply chain resilience, economic security and international trade negotiations including the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
Yeo completed almost three decades of public service as trade minister of the Republic of Korea in 2022, in the final year of the Moon Jae-in presidency. A veteran international trade negotiator, Yeo has been involved in a number of bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations, including as the chief negotiator for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Korea-U.K. Free Trade Agreement, Korea–Central America Free Trade Agreement, Korea-Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, and Korea-Philippines Free Trade Agreement.
A graduate of Seoul National University, Yeo has served as visiting professor at the Seoul National University Business School, teaching international trade, negotiation and economic security issues. Yeo holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School.
Fletcher Asia Forum Executive Committee
Aram Hur, Founding Faculty Director
John Cho
John Cho is a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) student studying International Security Studies and International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. He graduated in May, 2024 from Tufts University with a bachelor's in international relations.
John is particularly interested in East Asia-Pacific Affairs, modern Korean history and Korean unification. Though from New Jersey, John lived in Seoul, South Korea from 2014 to 2020. His professional experiences range from interning at the International Vaccine Institute and interning at the State Department in Washington and Lesotho through the U.S. Foreign Service Internship Program. At present, he teaches a course at the Tufts ExCollege on modern Korean history.
Serena Chow
Serena Chow is a MALD student at Fletcher studying International Security Studies and International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution with a focus on the Indo-Pacific. She received her bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University with specializations in international relations, East Asian studies and religion.
Prior to attending Fletcher, Serena worked as a journalist and audio producer, with her work appearing in NPR, Sony, iHeart, NBC and PBS. She lived and worked in Taiwan in 2022, where she attended language immersion programs and researched Taiwan’s period of democratization at National Taiwan University. Her research areas of interest include civil-military relations, military recruitment and retention challenges, identity fault lines and strategy in the Asia-Pacific.
Deborah Jeong
Deborah Jeong is a first-year MALD student specializing in International Security Studies and International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution.
Prior to Fletcher, she served as the communications and programs associate at International Student Conferences, a Washington-based non-profit that facilitates student-led exchange programs with Japan, South Korea and China. She spent a year in Icheon, South Korea as a native English teacher with the EPIK (English Program in Korea) opportunity after graduating from U.C. San Diego with a bachelor's in international studies, political science. At Fletcher, she is deepening her understanding of security priorities within Northeast Asia and, specifically, researching historical grievances between South Korea and Japan.
Armaan Mathur
Armaan is a first-year MALD student at Fletcher. He holds a bachelor’s in political science from Delhi University.
Before Fletcher, Armaan was working with an Indian Member of Parliament and had a brief stint with Pratham Education Foundation. His interests include Indian foreign policy and diplomacy, history, politics, culture and technology. His co-authored book chapter was recently published in a Routledge anthology, and he has previously written for The Diplomat, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, New Indian Express, Deccan Herald and India Forum, among others.
Learn more about the conference and sign up here.