The consequences of populism on foreign policy have been a rising topic of academic inquiry in recent years. The latest literature exposes diverse propensities in the state governments' international ...behaviour led by populist leaders. In comparison, foreign policies of populists in the Americas and Europe exhibit anti-elitism and anti-pluralism toward the outside world. Those in Asia tend to be populist domestically, not in foreign policy. This article focuses on the foreign policies of Asian populist government leaders and addresses the question as to why are their foreign policies sterile from populism? It presents the case of Indonesia under President Joko Widodo (Jokowi). The argument is that the enduring pragmatism and domestic constraints have hindered Jokowi's populist motive from shaping the role of the state foreign policy as the defender of the suppressed people against the repressive elite. Hence, Jokowi is unable to make any substantial change to the foreign policy of his non-populist predecessors, and he has to maintain Indonesia's traditional foreign policy pillars. Nevertheless, the case of Jokowi's Indonesia can open up the space to challenge the established Euro-American scholarship advancing a positive connection between leaders' populism and foreign policy.
In an era of climate change, extractivist economies, and forced mobility, who and what belongs? Throughout her prolific career, Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves has focused precisely on this ...question. Perhaps her most iconic, generative, and expansive work is Seeds of Change, a twenty-year investigation into the hidden history of ballast flora—displaced plant seeds found in the soil used to balance shipping vessels during the colonial period. The project examines the influx and significance of imported plants, materializing at port cities across several continents: Marseille, Reposaari, Liverpool, Exeter and Topsham, Dunkerque, Bristol, Antwerp, and most recently New York, where it was awarded the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. In each city, Seeds of Change has revealed the entangled relationship between “alien” plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples, contrasting their seemingly innocuous beauty with the violent history associated with their arrival. By focusing on ballast flora, Alves invites us to de-border postcolonial historical narratives and consider a “borderless history.” The first monograph of Alves’s historic project, Seeds of Change is edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch and features essays by the artist as well as Katayoun Chamany, Seth Denizen, Jean Fisher, Yrjö Haila, Richard William Hill, Heli M. Jutila, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Lara Khaldi, Tomaž Mastnak, Marisa Prefer, and Radhika Subramaniam.
"This is the extraordinary story of the author's twenty year quest to find gold coins which his father's family buried in their backyard in Poland just prior to being deported by the Nazis into ...concentration camps. His father survived the war but died when the author was a teenager, leaving him only with the knowledge that he had buried coins somewhere in Poland, and no information about his family. During his quest, Biederman uncovers many interesting and disturbing facts about his father and mother and their families, such as the fact that his father was the third person on Oskar Schindler's list and had a chance meeting with Adolph Hitler, and that his mother was selected as a cook for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. The book details the author's quest to unearth his family's past and hist father's treasure and continues with his parent's amazing post-war years in Europe and their eventual arrival in North America"--.
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War opens in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva accords that ended the eight-year-long Franco-Indochinese War and created two Vietnams. In agreeing to the accords, Ho Chi ...Minh and other leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam anticipated a new period of peace leading to national reunification under their rule; they never imagined that within a decade they would be engaged in an even bigger feud with the United States. Basing his work on new and largely inaccessible Vietnamese materials as well as French, British, Canadian, and American documents, Pierre Asselin explores the communist path to war. Specifically, he examines the internal debates and other elements that shaped Hanoi's revolutionary strategy in the decade preceding U.S. military intervention, and resulting domestic and foreign programs. Without exonerating Washington for its role in the advent of hostilities in 1965, Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War demonstrates that those who directed the effort against the United States and its allies in Saigon were at least equally responsible for creating the circumstances that culminated in arguably the most tragic conflict of the Cold War era.
Although most Americans paid little attention to Cambodia during Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency, the nation's proximity to China and the global ideological struggle with the Soviet Union ...guaranteed US vigilance throughout Southeast Asia. Cambodia's leader, Norodom Sihanouk, refused to take sides in the Cold War, a policy that disturbed US officials. From 1953 to 1961, his government avoided the political and military crises of neighboring Laos and South Vietnam. However, relations between Cambodia and the United States suffered a blow in 1959 when Sihanouk discovered CIA involvement in a plot to overthrow him. The coup, supported by South Vietnam and Thailand, was a failure that succeeded only in increasing Sihanouk's power and prestige, presenting new foreign policy challenges in the region.
InEisenhower and Cambodia,William J. Rust examines the United States' efforts to lure Cambodia from neutrality to alliance. He conclusively demonstrates that, as with Laos in 1958 and 1960, covert intervention in the internal political affairs of neutral Cambodia proved to be a counterproductive tactic for advancing the United States' anticommunist goals. Drawing on recently declassified sources, Rust skillfully traces the impact of "plausible deniability" on the formulation and execution of foreign policy. His meticulous study not only reveals a neglected chapter in Cold War history but also illuminates the intellectual and political origins of US strategy in Vietnam and the often-hidden influence of intelligence operations in foreign affairs.
