Southeast Asia in the study of international relations: The rise and decline of a region

Three features stand out from the literature on Southeast Asia's international relations, written over the last fifty years: the dominance of extra‐regional scholarship; an overwhelming emphasis on regional security, and a related preponderance of realist perspectives; and the appearance, consolidation, and ebbing of the perceived utility of Southeast Asia as a useful analytical region. During the 1990s, there has been a questioning of the realist assumptions which have underlain international relations writing on the region, and there has been increased emphasis on economic issues. Southeast Asians are making an increasingly important contribution to the study of their own region's international relations, though mainly in terms of policy‐oriented research. The most important recent development has been the questioning of Southeast Asia's usefulness as an analytical region, in view of the growing intensity of economic and security relations between Northeast and Southeast Asia.     

Refining the prize: Chinese oil refineries and its energy security

Since China became a net oil importer in 1993, oil refineries have played integral roles in China's quest for oil security. And yet, the capacity, security, and configurations of refineries were rarely featured in the discussions about China's oil policy. To fill this gap, this paper explains the basics of refinery economics and technology, and details the development in China's refining industry since the early 1990s. By taking refineries into consideration, it then revisits and reassesses the existing literature regarding the motives and drivers behind China's foreign oil policy, its effectiveness, and the political interactions between China and crude oil producers.     

Local actors and international regionalism: The case of the Sea of Japan zone

The Sea of Japan Zone (SJZ) is an area that has been shaped essentially by transnational relations between the localities of western Japan, northeastern China and the Russian Far East. The emergence of this new type of space, based on interlocal cooperation, is a significant aspect of what could be called the ‘new’ regionalism, i.e. the polymorphous and multicen‐tred movement that is affecting international relations today as opposed to its more rigid version of the late 1950s. The shape of the new regionalism reflects the transformation of international relations in general: this particular regionalization process, that gave shape to the SJZ, is linked to the transnationalization of local actors. The idea of creating the SJZ, in the late 1960s, was first an external answer (interlocal cooperation) to an internal problem (uneven development in Japan). It became a reality some twenty years later as Russian and Chinese localism eventually converged with Japanese localism. Despite important domestic differences the need for local actors around the Sea of Japan to look outside for better development conditions made the synergy possible. It produced a new regional entity that needs to be defined and, for that purpose, that could be compared to other transnational zones in East Asia or even in Europe. Their common characteristic appears to be a functional approach to regional cooperation.     

The theme of indivisibility in the post-war struggle against prejudice in the United States

Whitfield's essay seeks to identify and explain a tendency that emerged in the United States in the 1940s and extended through the 1950s. It was then that a notion became commonplace, especially among liberals, that the victims of prejudice were interchangeable and that bigotry was undifferentiated. Before the 1940s, the problem of prejudice was not widely believed to be urgent; but the war against the Third Reich heightened awareness of the price of an irrational hostility to minorities. American liberals in particular came to the understanding that bigotry was indivisible; and, for its objects, the cards of identity could easily be shuffled. Whether the victims were Jews or Negroes or homosexuals, the hatred that they elicited appeared to be formed without making any distinctions among them. Evidence can be found in the culture of those two decades, in novels, plays and films. The unitary view of the character of prejudice had some support in social science, including in the authoritative volume The Authoritarian Personality. The theory would also be reflected in a major shift in the agenda of Jewish civil rights organizations, which redefined their mission as promoting the democratic rights of all minorities rather than the particular interests of American Jews. This distinctive tendency vanished in the 1960s, however. One reason for the change was a fuller appreciation of the hostility that minorities could harbour towards other minorities. The realization also deepened of the singular vulnerability of black Americans under the pressure of racism, which demonstrated a tenacity as well as a proclivity for violence that had been largely absent from other forms of bigotry. Finally, a broader legitimation of difference itself emerged in the 1960s to bury the notion that minorities were fungible.