Skills Development and Capacity Building: Vietnam and Laos

As part of the new emphasis on Asian Studies at the University of Louisville and the particular interest in Southeast Asia, the Center is initiating a program for Vietnam and Laos, starting in 2007, that aims at building skills in specific subjects, such as negotiation, mediation, arbitration, peace building, and conflict resolution, and in general fields, such as international relations and political science.

The Center for Asian Democracy has a two-phase program, with funds supervised by the U.S. State Department, in place working with the training wings of the ministries of foreign affairs in Vietnam and Laos.  In the first phase Professor Michael Fowler directed two international negotiation workshops in Vientiane and Hanoi in 2008 and 2009 for about four-dozen mid-career diplomats and other officials. Those workshops used Harvard Program on Negotiation simulations of actual and hypothetical international negotiations, designed to teach sound fundamental and advanced techniques of negotiation. The chief objective was to help to prepare the participants to learn and practice an array of practical negotiation skills and to think through issues of how best to manage and resolve conflict.

 In the ongoing second phase the Center is hosting one Lao and two Vietnamese graduate students, studying for Master’s degrees in the University of Louisville’s Department of Political Science. Their academic program includes courses in the scope of political science and the methods of political research, seminars in American government, international relations, and the comparative politics of Asia, and a particular focus on the political science sub-fields of international law and organization and negotiation and conflict resolution. The visiting students plan to be in residence in Louisville through the summer of 2011. Since the study of political science is relatively new in Laos and Vietnam, the chief objective is to equip graduate students from those countries with a sound background in the discipline both in terms of an understanding of quantitative and qualitative research and of recent developments in the international and comparative sub-fields of particular interest to them. 

This program will be directed by Michael Fowler, Associate Professor of Political Science.  Holly Wallace, Esq., of Dinsmore & Shohl in Louisville, an adjunct DOPS instructor and the former assistant director of the University's Muhammad Ali Institute for Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution will assist in teaching the off-site workshops.  Both have considerable experience teaching abroad, including seminars in Vietnam and Laos.