"Civil Society and Human Security: Raum Jai"
The Royal Orchid Sheraton Hotel
Bangkok, Thailand
July 9-12, 2006
ISTR Seventh International Conference
Plenary Sessions
Opening Plenary and Keynote Address
Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn has been recognized as an active and energetic promoter and practitioner in the Third Sector. She has set up her own foundation—Saijai Thai Foundation—to help soldiers and their families affected in the line of duty. She also serves as the Vice Chairperson of the Thai Red Cross Society which is chaired by Her Majesty the Queen.
ISTR is honored to have Professor Mark Sidel deliver the keynote address "The Third Sector, Human Security, and Anti-Terrorism Regulation in 
Comparative Perspective.”
Mark Sidel is Professor of Law at the University of Iowa and a research scholar at the University’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. His research focuses on law, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, and on comparative law in Asia with a focus on Vietnam, China, and India and South Asia. Professor Sidel teaches philanthropy and nonprofit institutions, contracts, and comparative and international law. In the 2005-2006 academic year, Professor Sidel is serving as Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Vermont Law School. Sidel has also been named a University of Iowa Faculty Scholar beginning in fall 2006.
Professor Sidel has also taught Vietnamese and Chinese law at Harvard Law School (1998), served as W.G. Hart Lecturer in Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London (2003), served as visiting professor of Asian law in “chaire Asie” at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) (2004), and taught comparative law in Asia at the University of Melbourne Law School (2005). Sidel studied at Princeton University (history), Yale University (history), and Columbia Law School.
Professor Sidel has published extensively on comparative law in Asia, and on philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and civil society. His most recent book is More Secure, Less Free? Antiterrrorism Policy and Civil Liberties After September 11. The book is an analysis of U.S. antiterror initiatives implemented after the 2001 terrorist attaches. Sidel also includes its effects on the American academic world and the nonprofit sector. And he provides the first international comparisons of antiterrror policy contrasting security initiatives in Great Britian, Australia, and India with the American experience.
Since 2000 Sidel has served as academic director of a five nation research and policy project on Philanthropy and Law in South Asia, funded by the Ford, Asia, Himalaya, Myer and Rockefeller foundations and convened by the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium. A volume from the research study, Philanthropy and Law in South Asia, was published in fall 2004.
Plenary - Theorizing Global Civil Society
This plenary session will address the challenging contemporary issue of how to theorize global civil society. In this session, two widely acclaimed speakers—Helmut Anheier and Ronaldo Munck—will present very different social scientific positions in the debate of how best one should interpret the meaning and significance of global civil society.
Professor Helmut Anheier is Director of the Center for Civil Society at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-editor of the Global Civil Society Yearbook (now in its fifth year of publication). Professor Ronaldo Munck, Dublin City University, is author of over 20 books, including the recently published Globalization and Social Exclusion: A Transformationalist Perspective (Kumarian Press, 2004). The session will be moderated by Professor Rupert Taylor, editor of Voluntas and editor of Creating a Better World: Interpreting Global Civil Society (Kumarian Press, 2004).
Plenary - The Third Sector in Thailand
This plenary session will introduce the complex and diverse landscape of the Thai Third Sector. Speakers will include both scholars and practitioners and will provide an overview and highlights of the sector. Experiences of diversity will be presented and analyzed in terms of the role and function, contraints and limitations that Third Sector organizations confront in the Thai socio-cultural and political context. The session will include unique cases like collaboration among Third Sector groups for the Tsunami disaster.