Asian crisis,transparency and the international media in Singapore

Abstract

The issue of Taiwan and relations across the Taiwan Strait is not only of fundamental interest to China, but also crucial to peace and stability in the Asian Pacific, thereby also making it of key concern to major players such as the United States and Japan. Beijing has faced enormous challenges over how to solve its dilemma. I would like to achieve reunification with Taiwan through a peaceful path, but perceive that it must be prepared for a war scenario if Taiwan insists on breaking from the mainland for its independence. The dilemma facing Beijing in terms of war or peace with Taiwan has become more acute since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) moved to power in 2000. This article analyses Beijing's dilemma over the above policy choices by examining five stages of Beijing's assessment toward regime change in Taiwan from late 1999 to early 2005. It also illuminates the potential impact on major power relations in East Asia.     

Tensions in the Taiwan Strait

Despite China’s recent menacing rhetorical and military gestures, armed conflict in the Taiwan Strait remains unlikely in the near-term. Chinese military intimidation has failed to achieve its desired effects on the Taiwanese population, whose identity is increasingly distinct from that of mainland Chinese. It is possible, however, that a change of government in Taipei next year will lead to closer cross-strait relations.     

The Chinese People's Liberation Army and Space Warfare

Space warfare will be an integrated part of battle planning by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in any future conflict with the United States. The People's Liberation Army has carefully absorbed and is reacting to what the American armed forces have published on space warfare and counter-space operations. Chinese strategists and legal scholars are engaged in an internal debate on how traditional ideas of sovereignty and the laws of war apply in space. One authoritative volume explored the importance of ensuring that the People's Liberation Army sets out legal justifications for military actions in advance of any conflict. Chinese scholars believe that many of the concepts surrounding the conduct of war on the “common seas” apply in space. Also, there is disagreement between the United States and China on the American position on outer space. The United States treats “peaceful uses” to mean “non-aggressive,” whereas the Chinese interpretation is that to be peaceful uses, it must be “non-military.”     

The war novel and human rights

The war novel, a distinct genre of fiction, has typically been read as a type of humanitarian narrative. This article explains how the war novel participates in humanitarian discourse but also has another role to play that addresses human rights more specifically. In the effort to identify accountability, war novels explore complex historical events and offer us important insights on the challenges of historical narration more broadly. Furthermore, in offering explanations for “who?” and “why?,” war novels model how we can approach the complex history of conflict for human rights. To illustrate how accountability is a central theme of war fiction, the essay turns to examples of novels about the Vietnam War.     

Leadership,regime security,and China's policy toward Taiwan: prospect theory and Taiwan crises

Abstract

Traditional analyses of Taiwan crises have relied mainly on deterrence theory for their explanatory power. This approach fails to account for China's risk-taking behavior, which can be explained by prospect theory. We suggest that Chinese leaders are more likely to use more risky military coercion against Taiwan's pro-independence movements within a domain of losses, i.e., when their regime faces serious domestic and international challenges to its security. Conversely, Chinese leaders are more likely to employ less risky political pressure to oppose Taiwan's pro-independence forces if their decision making takes place in a domain of gains, i.e., when the security of China's regime is not challenged. We conclude that maintaining a good US–China relationship is the best strategy for the United States to help prevent military crises in the Taiwan Strait.     

Power Sharing: Institutions,Behavior, and Peace

Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power‐sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we compare the direct effect of formal power‐sharing institutions on peace with their indirect effect through power‐sharing behavior. Combining data on inclusive and territorially dispersive institutions with information on power‐sharing behavior, we empirically assess this relationship on a global scale. Our causal mediation analysis reveals that formal power‐sharing institutions affect the probability of ethnic conflict onset mostly through power‐sharing behavior that these institutions induce.     

Through a Glass Darkly: Afrocentrism,War, and World Politics

While the two dominant Eurocentric paradigms of world politics, realism and idealism, place greater emphasis on power and regime type, respectively, in their analyses of war, a recently promulgated Afrocentric paradigm of world politics suggests that cultural characteristics of states are significantly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. Drawing on these competing perspectives, I conduct a data analysis of the relationship between cultural homogeneity and interstate conflict in order to determine the extent to which Afrocentric theses on international conflict are borne out empirically. I find that cultural factors are significant correlates of interstate war as Afrocentrists suggest, although realist and idealist factors are more strongly associated with the likelihood of interstate war. In addition, the findings suggest that multiculturalism—especially ethnic diversity—is a more auspicious path for interstate peace.     

Libya’s conflict

With the battle for Tripoli, Libya’s civil war has entered a key stage. Powerful outside states are fuelling the conflict, and recent events have raised the prospect of more direct military intervention. No diplomatic solution is foreseeable while the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members support different factions. Moreover, each side in the conflict currently believes it can achieve more through fighting than through the necessary compromises of a peace settlement.     

Thailand: an old relationship renewed

The relationship between Thailand and China has been both long and complicated, with periods of conflict associated with, for example, the cold war. In recent years, and especially following the Asian Economic Crisis, there has been a blossoming of the relationship, built on careful diplomacy, a renewal of interest in ethnicity and expanding business dealings and rising bilateral investment. In the contemporary period, the relationship has reached a new high. Since Thailand's military junta came to power in 2014, China has been a significant diplomatic, economic and strategic partner. Part of the explanation for this has to do with the junta's inability to deal with the USA following the coup. This article suggests that the turn to China has much to do with Thailand's turbulent domestic politics. In examining this bilateral relationship, this article addresses issues related to infrastructure, business and trade, military co-operation and cultural relations.     

Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict

Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independently of conflict. Focusing on postcolonial states, we exploit differences in colonial empires' strategies of rule to model which ethnic groups were represented in government at the time of independence. This identification strategy allows estimating the exogenous effect of inclusiveness on conflict. We find that previous studies have tended to understate the conflict‐dampening impact of political inclusion. This finding suggests that grievances have been prematurely dismissed from conventional explanations of conflict, and that policy makers should consider conflict resolution methods based on power sharing and group rights.     

Mutual Optimism as a Rationalist Explanation of War

Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about their relative power. Fey and Ramsay (2007) claim that this widely used “mutual optimism” explanation is theoretically incoherent. Their criticism neglects the need to specify a behavioral causal mechanism that links beliefs to the outbreak of war. We show how the rationalist game‐theoretic work on the causes of war provides such mechanisms—the risk‐return trade‐off and costly signaling—and demonstrate that these models are immune to Fey and Ramsay's critiques. We also show that the class of models Fey and Ramsay propose make the substantively unwarranted assumption that an actor can unilaterally impose peace on an opponent who strictly prefers war. Their finding that war does not occur in equilibrium has nothing to do with mutual optimism. We conclude that the mutual optimism explanation can be grounded on firm rationalist foundations.     

Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one‐sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war—a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.     

China's security agenda after the cold war

The end of the cold war has changed China's basic perception of world politics and its conception of national security. In the cold war era, Chinese leaders tended to view national security from the perspective of global balance of power and China's strategic relations with the two superpowers. It was in Beijing's security interests to maintain a comfortable position in a strategic triangular relationship with the Soviet Union and the United States. When the Soviet Empire and the East European communist regimes collapsed, the structure of the postwar international system dissolved, and the old parameters for Beijing's security strategy disappeared. The Chinese leadership suddenly found itself in a totally new world in which China needed to reorient and redefine its security strategy on a new strategic axis.

Beijing's security strategy after the cold war is redefined by its domestic priorities, growing foreign economic relations, the new security environment in Asia, and concerns over territorial disputes. In a sense, the myopic conception of security based on war and peace is fading away. Beijing's thinking on national security becomes more inclusive, diverse, and complicated. The nature and intensity of external threats has changed. China's growing economic ties with the outside world have redirected Beijing's attention to economic interests and security. The Chinese leadership realizes that its security is affected not only by the military forces of other countries, but also by political, economic, societal, and environmental factors in international relations Beijing needs to employ both traditional military defence and non‐military actions to safeguard its territorial integrity and to realize its full capacity in world affairs.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse China's security agendas after the cold war. It first examines the impact of the end of the cold war on China's thinking on national security, then discusses Beijing's threat perception and changing defence strategy. This is followed by an examination of domestic stability considerations and economic interests in Beijing's security strategy. Finally, it discusses the implications of China's growing power for regional security.     

Military Integration,Demobilization, and the Recurrence of Civil War

ABSTRACT

Peace agreements often include provisions for the military integration of the conflict parties, involving an increase in government forces, and at the same time requesting demobilization and thus a reduction of military personnel. Depending on the modalities and magnitude both can be strong signals of a commitment to the peace process. However, tensions between these two concepts can also endanger post-conflict stability. The empirical analyses of 77 post-conflict societies show that civil war is more likely to recur if rebel forces are kept separate during the military integration process and if the military plays an important role in post-conflict economies.     

Preemptive strikes and the war on Iraq: a critique of Bush administration unilateralism and militarism

Bush administration foreign policy has exhibited a marked unilateralism and militarism in which US military power is used to advance US interests and geopolitical hegemony. The policy was first evident in the Afghanistan intervention following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and informed the 2003 war against Iraq. In From 9/11 to Terror War, I sketched out the genesis and origins of Bush administration foreign policy and its application in Afghanistan and the build‐up to the Iraq war. In this study, I update and develop my critique of the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes and its application in the 2003 Iraq invasion, concluding with a critique of unilateralism and militarism, and defense of multilateral and global solutions to problems such as terrorism, so‐called “weapons of mass destruction,” and “rogue regimes.”     

Federal Arrangements as a Peacemaking Device During South Africa's Transition to Democracy

Federal arrangements are often used as a way of keeping deeplydivided societies together. In particular, where divisions,be they ethnic, linguistic, or religious, develop in violentconflict or the threat of civil war, constitutional arrangementsfor self-rule and shared rule have been put forward as a keyto peace. The federal distribution of power is then used tosatisfy sectoral demands for self-determination.     

A sheriff, two bullets and three problems

This paper analyzes deterrence in international conflicts. Assume a strong country has several opponents and faces a military capacity constraint, which is not exhausted after just one war. Two main effects are at work. If the strong country is constrained, then reputation is more expensive and may occur less often. The problem is that the opponents may (but need not) be more aggressive compared to a world without a constraint. It may be that an “axis of evil” does not exist before a war occurs, but is implicitly formed even by moderate countries after the first war was waged. A point of interest is whether the constrained strong country should obtain additional capacity, given that the objective is to minimize the number of wars. The analysis sheds some new light on the U.S. foreign policy, the United Nations and the “axis of evil”     

War and pieces

There is increasing recognition among human geographers that conceptualising the spatiality of peace is a vital component of our collective disciplinary praxis. Within this emergent literature, this paper seeks to position anarchism as an ethical philosophy of nonviolence and the absolute rejection of war. Such an interpretation does not attempt to align nonviolence to any particular organised religious teaching, as has recently been advocated by some geographers. Instead, the paper argues that the current practices of religion undermine the geographies of peace by fragmenting our affinities into discrete pieces. Advancing a view of anarchism as nonviolence, the paper goes beyond religion to conceptualise peace as both the unqualified refusal of the manifold-cum-interlocking processes of domination, and a precognitive, pre-normative and presupposed category rooted in our inextricable entanglement with each other and all that exists. Yet far from proposing an essentialist view of humanity or engaging a naturalised argument that reconvenes the “noble savage”, the paper contextualises the arguments within the processual frameworks of radical democracy and agonism in seeking to redress the ageographical and ahistorical notions of politics that comprise the contemporary post-political zeitgeist.     

Information,Agreement Design,and the Durability of Civil War Settlements

Civil war is usually examined from the perspective of commitment problems. This approach provides considerable insight regarding which civil war agreement provisions reduce the chance of renewed fighting. Yet, additional insight can be gained by examining information asymmetries as a potential cause of civil war recurrence. We argue that significant uncertainty regarding military capabilities may persist after fighting ends and that this uncertainty may lead to the breakdown of peace. However, carefully designed peace agreements can guard against renewed civil war by calling for international monitoring, making the belligerents submit military information to third parties, and providing for verification of this information. Our empirical analysis of 51 civil war settlements between 1945 and 2005 shows that these provisions significantly reduce the risk of new civil war. Encouraging the adoption of these provisions may be a useful policy in the international community's effort to establish peace in civil‐war‐torn societies.     

儒家君子观与为政之道的德行实践

传统儒家"君子"称谓作为一种行为规范,向古人指明了恰当的作为方向,也凸显了中国古代政治的德性追求.挖掘儒家"君子"之良善观念,重点在于厘清中国古典政治理念与现代政治思想之间的会通,探究"君子儒"所蕴含的理想人格,分析君子养成"三达德"君子之道的行为规范,归纳儒家"修己安人""尊五美屏四恶""内圣外王"的为政之道.借由中国传统道德与当代公共责任伦理的契合,探讨儒家君子观之国家治理的德性意义.