Workshop

Please join us for a special afternoon workshop with a panel of distinguished speakers from Korea and the US as they discuss a wide cross-section of the most current and pressing concerns relating to North Korea. Topics will include the worsening food crisis, the ROK's shift away from the engagement efforts of the last decade and lessons learned from past failures that have led to the continued impasse. The Ven. Pomnyun leads a delegation of experts from the Peace Foundation—including Baek Seung-joo—and will be joined by Leon Sigal of the Social Science Research Council.

Monday, September 22, 2008

with

The Venerable Pomnyun
Chairman, Good Friends and Peace Foundation

Baek Seung-Joo
Research Follow, Peace Foundation

Leon Sigal
Director, Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project, the Social Science Research Council

About the Speakers
The Venerable Pomnyun is the chairman of The Peace Foundation and a Zen master in the Jungto Society. He also currently serves as the chairman of Good Friends for Peace, Human Rights and Refugee Issues and The Joint Togetherness Society. Venerable Pomnyun has been advocating for peace on the Korean Peninsula since 1997. He has also worked extensively to supply humanitarian aid to famine victims in North Korea and defend the human rights of North Korean refugees in China. In recognition of his efforts, Venerable Pomnyun won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding in September of 2002.

Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. His book, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, published by Princeton University Press, was one of five nominees for the Lionel Gelber Prize as the most outstanding book in international relations for 1997-98 and was named the 1998 book of distinction by the American Academy of Diplomacy.

Sigal was a member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 1989-1995. He served in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, in 1979 as International Affairs Fellow and in 1980 as Special Assistant to the Director.

Sigal was a Rockefeller Younger Scholar in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in 1972-1974 and a guest scholar there in 1981-1984. From 1974-1989 he was a professor of government at Wesleyan University. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs from 1985-1989 and from 1996-2000, and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School in 1988 and 2000.

His most recent book, Negotiating Minefields: The Landmines Ban in American Politics, was published in 2006. Sigal is also the author of Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking; Alliance Security: NATO and the No-First-Use Question (with John Steinbruner); Nuclear Forces in Europe: Enduring Dilemmas, Present Prospects; Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945; and Hang Separately: Cooperative Security Between the United States and Russia, 1985-1994; as well as numerous articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic Monthly, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, among others. He edited The Changing Dynamics of U.S. Defense Spending.

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