Center for Global Studies
Southeast Asia Center
Friday February 15, 2013
3:30 - 5:00 pm
Thomson 317. University of Washington, Seattle Campus.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Sophal Ear. He will be giving a talk based on his new book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2012), this talk will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. While massive intervention by the U.N. in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule, the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Prof. Ear explores the issue of why the more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainable ways. As a post-conflict state, Cambodia is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance - a major impediment to balanced, equitable growth.
Sophal Ear, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School where he teaches courses on political economy and post-conflict reconstruction. He was a TED Fellow (2009), Fulbright Specialist (Chulalongkorn University, 2010), Council on Foreign Relations Term Member (2011), Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (2011), a Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar (2012), and an Independent Trustee of the Nathan Cummings Foundation (2012). Dr. Ear also serves as Vice-Chair of Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, a non-profit that builds laboratory capacity in the developing world. He advises the Master of Development Studies Program at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, and serves on the Editorial Review Boards of the International Public Management Journal and Journal of South-East Asian American Education & Advancement. He is the co-author of The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World (Routledge, 2013). Previously, he worked for the World Bank and the United Nations. A graduate of Princeton, and Berkeley, he moved to the United States from France as a Cambodian refugee at the age of ten.