How to Engage Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Burma

Richard Horsey is a former International Labor Organization (ILO) representative to Burma, where he helped develop and implement the organization's strategy of engaging with the government while applying pressure to curb abuses. The ILO’s efforts eventually compelled the Burmese regime to take significant steps to outlaw, deter, and prosecute forced labor crimes.

As an Open Society Fellow, he wrote the first comprehensive account of ILO efforts to address forced labor in Burma, Ending Forced Labor in Myanmar: Engaging a Pariah Regime (Routledge, 2011). He also co-authored an input paper for the World Bank's 2011 World Development Report, which applies lessons learned during the fellowship to Zimbabwe and North Korea.

After leaving the ILO in 2007, Horsey advised the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on the international response to Cyclone Nargis. Today, he serves as an advisor to the International Crisis Group and recently completed a major research project in Zimbabwe as part of a multi-country study looking at community coping mechanisms in different kinds of crisis (Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Sudan). 

Priscilla Clapp is a retired minister-counselor in the U.S. Foreign Service.  During her 30-year career with the U.S. government, Clapp served as chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Burma (1999-2002), deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in South Africa (1993-1996), principal deputy assistant secretary of state for refugee programs (1989-1993), deputy political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Moscow (1986-1988), and chief of political-military affairs at the U.S. embassy in Japan (1981-1985).  She also worked on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, in its East Asian, Political Military and International Organizations bureaus, and with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. 

Prior to government service, Clapp spent 10 years in foreign policy and arms control research, under contract to the MIT Center for International Studies and as a research associate at the Brookings Institution. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Her books include Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (with Morton Halperin), Managing an Alliance: The Politics of U.S.-Japanese Relations (with I.M.Destler et al.), U.S.-Japanese Relations in the 1970s (with Morton Halperin). She is author of numerous chapters, articles, and other publications, including a chapter on Burma in Robert Rotberg ed., The Worst of the Worst; “Burma’s Long Road to Democracy,” a US Institute of Peace Special Report; “Burma’s Dramatic Year: Harbingers of Transition?” Asia Pacific Bulletin; and “Modifying U.S. Burma Policy,” Asia Pacific Bulletin.

Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro is commissioner and rapporteur on the rights of children at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of the American States.

He is the former independent expert for the UN secretary-general's study on violence against children (2003-2007).  He presented to the UN General Assembly the World Report on Violence Against Children on November 2006 . He was appointed by the UN secretary-General to chair  the Independent Special Commission of Inquiry on Timor Leste (July-October 2006).  He was also UN special rapporteur on Myanmar (2000-2008) and on Burundi (1995-1998), as well as a member of the former UN Subcommission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, where he developed and presented the United Nations Principles on Housing and Property Restitutions for Refugees and  Displaced Persons.

Pinheiro is adjunct professor of International Studies at the Center for Latin American Studies, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.  He is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo, which he founded in 1987.  He received his PhD in political science at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, France, and has taught at several institutions, including the State University of  Campinas and the USP in Brazil, Columbia University, the University of Notre Dame, Oxford University and Ėcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of a wide range of publications in the areas of violence, democracy and human rights.

Pinheiro also served as secretary of state for human rights under President Cardoso of Brazil, during which time he prepared the Brazilian National Human Rights Plan. He was made chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite, France, in 1998.

Maureen Aung-Thwin is director of the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative at the Open Society Institute. Aung-Thwin, who was born in Burma, attended Northwestern University in Illinois and New York University.

She is on the Asia Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch and a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation which oversees the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. She has also worked as a freelance journalist based in Asia and as program staff of the Asia Society in New York City.