Like the postcolonial world more generally, Southeast Asia exhibits tremendous variation in state capacity and authoritarian durability. Ordering Power draws on theoretical insights dating back to ...Thomas Hobbes to develop a unified framework for explaining both of these political outcomes. States are especially strong and dictatorships especially durable when they have their origins in 'protection pacts': broad elite coalitions unified by shared support for heightened state power and tightened authoritarian controls as bulwarks against especially threatening and challenging types of contentious politics. These coalitions provide the elite collective action underpinning strong states, robust ruling parties, cohesive militaries, and durable authoritarian regimes - all at the same time. Comparative-historical analysis of seven Southeast Asian countries (Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand) reveals that subtly divergent patterns of contentious politics after World War II provide the best explanation for the dramatic divergence in Southeast Asia's contemporary states and regimes.
A Brookings Institution Press and the Council on Foreign Relations publication Something new is happening across East Asia. A region notable for its lack of internal economic links is discussing ...regional cooperation on trade, investment, and exchange rates. Because of negotiations elsewhere around the globe on regional trade--such as those that led to the consolidation of the European Union, the formation of the North American Free Trade Area, and the rapid proliferation of bilateral free trade areas--the talk is not surprising. Nevertheless, East Asia's past inertia with regard to forming a regional partnership raises many questions about its emerging regionalism. Why has the region suddenly shifted from taking a global approach to economic issues to discussing a regional bloc? How fast and how far will the new regionalism progress? Will the region become a version of the European Union, or something far less? What is the probable impact on American economic and strategic interests--are the likely developments something that the U.S. government should encourage or discourage? Edward Lincoln takes up these questions, exploring what is happening to regional trade and investment flows and what sort of regional arrangements are the most sensible. Lincoln argues that an exclusive grouping is unlikely. Free trade negotiations have brought some economies in the region together, but they also have led to links with nations outside the region. Some regional governments most notably Japan, continue to have difficulty embracing the concept of free trade, even with favored regional partners. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, governments also have looked at cooperating on exchange rates, but they have done little to move forward. The U.S. government must decide how to respond to these developments in East Asia. An exclusively
Asian form of regionalism could run counter to American economic interests, and the U.S. government has reacted negatively to some of these proposals in the past. Because trade and investment links between the co.
Based on extensive interviewing and access to a wide range of databases, this is an examination of the migration career of wealthy migrants who left East Asia and relocated to Canada, Australia, New ...Zealand, and the United States, in the 1980s and 1990s. * An interdisciplinary project based on over 15 years of research in Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, with additional comparative visits and consultations in Sydney, Beijing, and Singapore * Traces the histories of the migrants families over a 25 year period * Offers a critical view of the spatial presuppositions of neo-liberal globalization, and an insertion of geography into transnational theory
Centering the margin Alexander Horstmann, Reed L. Wadley / Alexander Horstmann, Reed L. Wadley
2009., 20060515, 2006, 2006-05-01, 20060101, Letnik:
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eBook
In a completely new approach to borders and border crossing, this volume suggests a re-conceptualization of the nation in Southeast Asia. Choosing an actor approach, the individual chapters in this ...volume capture the narratives of minorities, migrants and refugees who inhabit and cross borders as part of their everyday life. They show that people are not only constrained by borders; the crossing of borders also opens up new options of agency. Making active use of these, border-crossing actors construct their own live projects on the border in multiple ways against the original intention of the nation-state. Based on their intimate knowledge of the interaction of communities, anthropologists from Europe, the USA, Japan and Southeast Asia provide a vivid picture of the effects of state policies at the borders on these communities.
The mid-twentieth century marked one of the greatest watersheds of Asian history, when a range of imperial constructs were declared to be nation-states, either by revolution or decolonisation. ...Nationalism was the great alchemist, turning the base metal of empire into the gold of nations. To achieve such a transformation from the immense diversity of these Asian empires required a different set of forces from those that Europeans had needed in their transitions from multi-ethnic empires to culturally homogeneous nations. In this book Anthony Reid explores the mysterious alchemy by which new political identities have been formed. Taking Southeast Asia as his example, Reid tests contemporary theory about the relation between modernity, nationalism, and ethnic identity. Grappling with concepts emanating from a very different European experience of nationalism, Reid develops his own typology to better fit the formation of political identities such as the Indonesian, Malay, Chinese, Acehnese, Batak and Kadazan.
Focussing on music traditions, these essays explore the policy, ideology and practice of preservation and promotion of East Asian intangible cultural heritage. For the first time, Japan, Korea, China ...and Taiwan - states that were amongst the first to establish legislation and systems for indigenous traditions - are considered together. Calls to preserve the intangible heritage have recently become louder, not least with increasing UNESCO attention. The imperative to preserve is, throughout the region, cast as a way to counter the perceived loss of cultural diversity caused by globalization, modernization, urbanization and the spread of the mass media. Four chapters - one each on China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan - incorporate a foundational overview of preservation policy and practice of musical intangible cultural heritage at the state level. These chapters are complemented by a set of chapters that explore how the practice of policy has impacted on specific musics, from Confucian ritual through Kam big song to the Okinawan sanshin. Each chapter is based on rich ethnographic data collected through extended fieldwork. The team of international contributors give both insider and outsider perspectives as they both account for, and critique, policy, ideology and practice in East Asian music as intangible cultural heritage.
This Open Access book explains ASEAN’s strategic role in managing great power politics in East Asia. Constructing a theory of institutional strategy, this book argues that the regional security ...institutions in Southeast Asia, ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have devised their own institutional strategies vis-à-vis the South China Sea and navigated the great-power politics since the 1990s. ASEAN proliferated new security institutions in the 1990s and 2000s that assumed a different functionality, a different geopolitical scope, and thus a different institutional strategy. In so doing, ASEAN formed a “strategic institutional web” that nurtured a quasi-division of labor among the institutions to maintain relative stability in the South China Sea. Unlike the conventional analysis on ASEAN, this study disaggregates “ASEAN” as a collective regional actor into specific individual institutions—ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, ASEAN Summit, ASEAN-China dialogues, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit, and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus—and explains how each of these institutions has devised and/or shifted its institutional strategy to curb great powers’ ambition in dominating the South China Sea while navigating great power competition. The book sheds light on the strategic potential and limitations of ASEAN and ASEAN-led security institutions, offers implications for the future role of ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific region, and provides an alternative understanding of the strategic utilities of regional security institutions.
In Transparency and Authoritarian Rule in Southeast Asia , Rodan rejects the notion that the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis was further evidence that ultimately capitalism can only develop within ...liberal social and political institutions, and that new technology necessarily undermines authoritarian control. Instead, Rodan argues that in Singapore and Malaysia external pressures for transparency reform were, and are, in many respects, being met without serious compromise to authoritarian rule or the sanctioning of media freedom.
1. Information Control and Authoritarian Rule in East and Southeast Asia: Under Challenge? 2. Bedding Down Media and Information Control in Singapore and Malaysia 3. Bureaucratic Authoritarianism and Transparency Reform in Singapore 4. Keeping Civil Society at Bay: Media in Singapore After the Crisis 5. Crony Capitalism and Transparency Reform in Malaysia 6. Challenges to Media Control in Malaysia Conclusion: Advanced Market Systems, Information Flows and Political Regimes
Garry Rodan is Director of the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Australia.
'Readers committed to press freedom, justice and democracy will find Rodan's analysis compelling.'
Mustafa K. Anuar, Aliran Monthly , Vol. 24 (6).
'Rodan has written an enlightening, challenging and provocative book in which he questions the assertion that greater financial and economic transparency leads to a more open society.' - Far Eastern Economic Review
This open access IMISCOE Regional Reader explores the issues faced by migrant groups in Southeast Asia and the challenges of getting of their human rights recognized. It analyses the different ...responses, or lack thereof, of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to these highly complex situations which are shaped by contemporary debates around borders and concepts of states, migrants’ rights as well as access to citizenship and how these concepts and paradigms are intertwined with issues such as agency and resilience of migrants. Crucial attention is given to the region’s lesser known populations and issues such as the Vietnamese in Thailand, people of Indonesian descent (PIDs) in Southern Philippines, independent child migrants across the region, and the vulnerabilities of migrant workers facing the COVID-19 pandemic. With its unique regional focus, this book provides a valuable resource to those studying human rights and migration issues, policy makers and researchers and students.
In mid-May 1997, a financial crisis erupted in Asia after an attack by private investors on the baht, the Thai currency. The crisis spread quickly across the region, where investor confidence ...plummeted, resulting in massive capital outflows, stock market collapses, high unemployment, and even insurrection. The Asian 'economic miracle' that had stimulated so much awe and even dread, now invoked pity and apprehension in greater measure. The contributors to this volume investigated change in the innovation and production systems of Asian states in response to economic and political upheaval. They conducted empirical studies of several regional industries - autos, semiconductors, and hard disk drives - and seven different national economies: China, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan. In the face of crisis and global competition, the Asian states superimposed change at the margins, seeking unique technohybrid solutions to build capabilities to compete in local, regional, and even global markets.
