Southeast Asia and the politics of vulnerability

The economic and political crises that have engulfed Southeast Asia over recent years should not have come as such a surprise. A consideration of the region's historical position and economic development demonstrates just what formidable obstacles still constrain the nations of Southeast Asia as they attempt to restore growth and stability. This paper places the Southeast Asian experience in historical context, outlines the political and economic obstacles that continue to impede development, and considers some of the initiatives that have been undertaken at a regional level in the attempt to maintain a degree of stability and independence. Despite the novelty and potential importance of initiatives like the Asean +3 grouping, this paper argues that the continuing economic and strategic vulnerability of the Southeast Asian states will continue to profoundly shape their politics and limit their options.     

Southeast Asian industrialisation and the changing global production system

The diversion of foreign direct investment ( fdi ) flows into developing Asia, from Southeast Asia to China, has renewed doubts about whether Southeast Asia's traditional reliance on fdi has left the region without the local capabilities required to sustain the region's long-term competitiveness. Southeast Asia's industrialisation has involved deepening integration into international production networks, comprising internal exchanges between multinational corporations ( mnc s) and their subsidiaries, affiliates and subcontractors. While indigenous industry has been secondary to Southeast Asian industrialisation, this paper highlights three elements of local technological accumulation and clustering within foreign-dominated export industries: production deepening, co-location of design, engineering and R&D with off-shore manufacturing, and the spatial clustering of mnc s in particular industry segments. Southeast Asian governments have responded to these trends by broadening investment promotion from manufacturing to business services and regional headquarters operations, by targeting incentives and infrastructure development to foster industrial clusters, and by invigorating technical support programmes for local small and medium-sized enterprises ( sme s) in supporting industries. Taken together, these trends suggest that Southeast Asia will remain an important site within multinationals' international production networks.     

Sovereignty under siege: Globalisation and the state in Southeast Asia

It is commonly assumed that processes associated with globalisation are affecting the sovereignty of states. While the extent and implications of such processes may be debatable, globalisation presents even the most powerful states with new challenges to their autonomy and authority. In Southeast Asia, where the principle of sovereignty has been a crucial and jealously guarded part of regional governance structures, globalisation is an especially acute challenge for national governments. This paper examines the theoretical and policy implications of globalisation in Southeast Asia and argues that not only is globalisation threatening to unravel existing governmental practices in Southeast Asia, but that as a consequence we also need to re-think the way we understand core theoretical principles like sovereignty.     

中美贸易摩擦对台商经营及其投资布局影响的实证分析

中美贸易摩擦是在中国大陆快速崛起和世界经济大变局的背景下发生的。对台商问卷调查分析显示,大陆台商出口和经营业绩将受到较大影响,而且面对大陆经济高质量发展,台商转型升级进展缓慢。目前,虽然大陆仍是台商第一大市场和第一大的投资地,但是台商对东南亚地区的投资增长趋势明显,中美贸易摩擦可能加速台商重新布局。     

Democratisation and the prospects for participatory regionalism in Southeast Asia

This article explores the impact of democratic transitions in Southeast Asia on regional co-operation, and the relationship between this process and the development of a non-official regionalism. Until now, regionalism in Southeast Asia has been essentially elite-centred and politically illiberal. The emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was founded upon the common desire of its members, which had by then retreated significantly from their postcolonial experiments in liberal democracy, to ensure regime survival. This orientation was further institutionalised by asean 's doctrine of non-interference, which helped to shield its members from outside pressures towards democratisation. But with democratisation in the Philippines, Thailand and more recently Indonesia, the asean model of elite-centric regional socialisation has been challenged. The civil society in the region demands greater openness in Southeast Asian regionalism. The article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between democratisation and regionalism, with the key argument being that the displacement of traditional patterns of regional elite socialisation has been offset by potential gains such as advances in regional conflict management, transparency and rule-based interactions. But the realisation of a more 'participatory regionalism' in Southeast Asia faces a number of barriers, including obstacles to further democratisation, the continued salience of the non-interference doctrine and the diminished space for civil society in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks.     

Looking for the Pattern: Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia--The Genealogy of a Terror Network

The aim of this study is to analyze the process by which Al Qaeda has sought to co-opt essentially localized struggles in Southeast Asia into an evolving network of worldwide jihad. The article illustrates how, long before it was appropriate to speak of an entity called Al Qaeda, Islamists have been thinking transnationally since the 1980s. The argument attempts to piece together available evidence to reveal a plausible explanation of the origins, growth and direction of the main Islamist grouping in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah, and its deepening relationship with Al Qaeda. The article suggests that the roots of a Southeast Asian terror network can be traced to two geographically separate ethno-religious struggles in the Philippines and Indonesia. The analysis demonstrates that these guerrilla groups orchestrating their distinct struggles were eventually combined through the auspices of Al Qaeda and the globalized franchising opportunities it exploited from the early 1990s.‐     

Perilous presidentialism in Southeast Asia?

ABSTRACT

Regional patterns have long been crucial to debates about presidentialism starting with the Latin American cases in which presidential systems were seen to have contributed to political instability. This special issue examines four cases of presidentialism in Southeast Asia. Both the ‘first’ wave of the presidentialism literature which focuses on ‘pure’ cases of presidentialism, and the ‘second’ wave, which concentrates on a complex mixture of presidentialism and other institutions, are relevant to Southeast Asia. Among ‘pure’ presidential systems, the Philippines appears to provide support to ‘the perils of presidentialism’ thesis given the collapse of democracy there several decades ago and periodic instability since then. But Indonesia, despite ostensibly having the additional institutional perils of multipartism, has proved stable. Among the hybrid cases of presidentialism, both Myanmar and Timor Leste have forged elite accommodation through creating presidential-style institutions, including one considered particularly unpromising for achieving political stability in the literature. Because presidentialism has been associated both with elite accommodation and stability as well as political conflict and instability, the Southeast Asia cases do not clearly demonstrate the dangers of presidentialism. They point instead to the relative lack of explanatory power of this institutional arrangement in understanding political stability.     

Money-laundering in Southeast Asia: liberalism and governmentality at work

This article discusses the diffusion of a regulatory system against money-laundering in Southeast Asia. To this end, the article reconstructs how the Financial Action Task Force has securitised the issue of money-laundering into a global problem requiring a global solution and how this has spread to developing nations. The article seeks to demonstrate how these international norms and practices spread and are transformed into national law within Southeast Asia. The article further shows that these transformations reflect an increasing level of multilateral cooperation within the region and that this phenomena can be better understood as the articulation of a global expression of governmentality where a set of strategies and policing techniques emerges to effect control.     

Curbing Corruption in Government Procurement in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Constraints

Corruption in the government procurement of goods, services and public works has been commonplace in Southeast Asian states (with the exception of Singapore) over many years. It has affected the provision of vital services and infrastructure and has been a key factor in undermining standards of governance. In recent years, reforms have been introduced in the region to combat corruption in the procurement process. However, to date their impact in many of the states has been at best limited. The article will consider the nature, types and extent of corruption in government procurement in the various states of Southeast Asia, following which it will discuss the reforms that have been introduced to address the problem. The article will then assess the limited impact of the reforms, and discuss the two reasons for this. The first reason was that the reforms were not sufficiently comprehensive and precise in tackling the entire spectrum of corruption in procurement and in creating the necessary legal powers for watchdog and enforcement bodies when dealing with such practices. Second, there were serious weaknesses in the implementation of these reforms, especially in translating legal provisions into everyday practice. Of particular importance are the limited capacity and status of watchdog and enforcement bodies, and the extent to which they are also compromised through corruption. The conclusion will consider the lessons to be learnt in tackling procurement corruption from the experience of the states of Southeast Asia and the challenges they face in pursuing further reform in the future.     

Export-led Growth,Gateway Cities and Urban Systems Development in Pre-World War II Southeast Asia

Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialisation in a narrow range of primary commodity exports. A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban centres, typically primate and always ports. Drawing on historical census data, this article uses rank-size distributions and transition matrices to investigate the influence of commodity specialisation and exports on urban systems development in the region. It is argued that different commodities produced different spread effects, resulting in variation in degrees of urban concentration in the region. However, geography, path dependence and infrastructure also shaped urban systems development. The main cities that emerged during this period became the ‘gateways’ that connected frontier Southeast Asia to the global economy. Cities dominant in 1939 retain this status in today's Southeast Asia.     

Towards a More Comprehensive Analysis of Warlord Politics: Constitutive Agency,Patron–Client Networks and Robust Action

This article serves as a critique of a recent American foreign policy formulation proposing to eradicate ‘warlordism’ and asserting that democratic institutions can be directly created out of the post-eradication anarchic chaos. Against this background, recent years have indeed seen a bourgeoning literature on ‘warlord politics’ in Southeast Asia. The majority commonly portray political actors as faithful followers of economic rationality and self-interest. Therefore, most are conceived as selfish predators who ruthlessly use violence for private gains at the expense of public interest. By suggesting that comparative studies on warlordism have been heavily influenced by the political economy perspective, the article develops a more comprehensive analysis of warlord politics. Along the lines of patron–client network analysis, insights from moral economy and agency-structure sociological dualism are considered. Contrasting case studies are used to illustrate how the alleged warlords of Southeast Asia do not fit entirely into the political economy perspective. Caught in a vast patron–client network of competing interests and diverse powers across state and society, one's agency is constantly constituted by discursive arrays of contending interests, juxtaposing rationalities and multiple intentions. In state building, this complication is regarded as paradoxically necessary for compelling the alleged warlord-actor to re-define and elevate multiple private interests into public interest.     

Democratization and women’s representation in presidential cabinets: evidence from East and Southeast Asia

This article examines patterns of women’s cabinet representation across all presidential democracies in East and Southeast Asia since democratization. It demonstrates how the choice of female ministers differs across career backgrounds in presidential systems and further examines why young presidential systems in Asia are conducive to women’s access to ministerial power through professional career tracks. We argue that despite women’s successful performance in national legislative elections, women have been restricted to access the power resources necessary to target other political goals, such as cabinet positions, whereas democratic transition has provided broader avenues for women to emerge as professionals outside party politics. By analyzing original data on female ministers in East and Southeast Asia, the study finds that the share of women among professional ministers has increased over time, but women’s share among political ministers has not changed significantly. Additionally, the different qualifications of female politicians and professionals also make them eligible for appointment to different types of policy areas in terms of prestige and gender. Our analysis suggests that women’s cabinet representation has improved overall since democratic transition in Asia, but this improvement disguises contrasting outcomes in women’s cabinet status according to their career backgrounds.     

Reviving the Caliphate in Malaysia

Operating in over 43 countries in the world, Hizbut Tahrir (HT) is presently active in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and more recently in Asia. Today, HT is becoming increasingly prominent in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia. Yet despite its rapid growth in the region, little is known about HT chapters in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia. In light of the dearth in scholarship on Hizbut Tahrir Malaysia (HTM), this article aims to shed some light on the HTM and analyze the likelihood of its emergence as a political force in the country.     

Naturalizing Racism in the Center of Athens in May 2011: Lessons from Greece

In Greece, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn entered parliament in 2012 after receiving 7% of the national vote; at the same time, anti-migrant rhetoric and racist violence was transformed into an everyday phenomenon, tolerated by the authorities, and mainstreamed in official political and media discourse. Departing from a series of racist attacks in the center of Athens (May 2011), this article examines how far-right ideology became normalized in terms of public discourse. Speaking on behalf of the “average citizen” and against the political establishment, the actors interviewed feel free to castigate immigration and naturalize racism.     

Separatism and Southeast Asia: The Islamic Factor in Southern Thailand,Mindanao, and Aceh

Islamic insurgent movements in southern Thailand, the southern Philippines and Aceh represent, arguably, the most visible signs of armed separatism in Southeast Asia today. The roots of ethnoreligious unrest in each of these regions stem from the same basic factors: insensitivity to local concerns, regional neglect, military repression and the contemporary force of militant Islam. The longevity of the movements that have arisen in southern Thailand, the southern Philippines and Aceh has largely been determined by the degree of popular support each has been able to call on as well as operational considerations such as external support and access to weaponry.     

Political enthusiasm for social pensions and its eventual decline in Taiwan: an institutional account of pension dynamics in a new democracy

Over the last two decades, there has been a remarkable transformation of the demography and political economy of East and Southeast Asia, thus raising pensions as an important policy issue. In addressing the pension needs of those outside formal sector employment, Taiwan was the regional forerunner regarding social pension provision. However, the immense political popularity of these schemes waned and from the mid-2000s onwards the government began to substitute them with a contributory system for the socially disadvantaged. This paper analyses the political dynamics of social pensions in Taiwan, from expansion of coverage through to gradual dismantlement. The politics surrounding these benefits has received scant attention in international scholarship, with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank Institute, in particular, having focused most of their attention on policy design issues. The contention here is that a specific configuration of political factors featured prominently in Taiwan, thus providing an explanation for the evolution of its pension policy. Also, these political dimensions can shed light on how this type of pension could evolve in other East and Southeast Asian countries, which is pertinent given that many have increasingly ageing populations.     

HRM Reform in Decentralised Local Government: Empirical Perspectives on Recruitment and Selection in the Philippines and Thailand

Over the recent decades decentralisation has been an influential process for public sector reform. Like many countries in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Thailand have experienced a transitional period of decentralisation since the 1990s, but its corresponding results are considered to be poor, allowing for an increase in corruption associated with local elites and other interested parties. This article addresses the problem by focusing on Human Resource Management (HRM), with an emphasis on recruitment and selection in decentralised local governments, as there exists limited research in this area. Despite similar outlook of decentralisation reforms in these countries, the comparative analysis will illustrate differences in HRM policy arrangements between the central and local government, which reflect on the roots and backgrounds of the reform initiatives in each country. Moreover, empirical case observations at the local level from four case cities will present positive HRM practices, as well as the negative ones. Such evidence cannot be explained by contemporary theories on decentralisation, most of which doubt feasibility of the reform in developing countries.     

The spaces of economic crisis: Asia and the reconfiguration of neo-Marxist crisis theory

Neo-Weberian and Marxist theories of crisis have typically been built around analysis of crisis tendencies in a single industrially developed national economy. While neo-Marxist theories of development have noted various implications of analyses that take seriously the specificities of capitalism in developing countries, there is somewhat less work from neo-Marxist perspectives on theories of crisis. The economic crisis that hit Asia in 1997 has important transnational and subnational dimensions that invite further elaboration of such a neo-Marxist perspective. This article engages such elaboration through critical reconfiguration of Samir Amin’s core-periphery spatial ontology and deployment of this reconfigured ontology to explain specific features of the uneven development of the Asian crisis. Jim Glassman is assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His interests are in state theory and the political economy of development in newly industrializing countries of Southeast Asia. He has conducted previous research on industrial development in Thailand, as well as on the economic crisis and structural adjustment in Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia. His current research focuses on populist and nationalist political reactions to the Asian economic crisis. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Global Economic Geography Conference in Singapore, December 1999. The author would like to thank participants in that conference, along with Ruth Berins Collier, Eric Sheppard, and two anonymous SCID reviewers for valuable comments and criticisms. Some of the research for the article was undertaken with the assistance of an Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.     

Millennium Development Goal 1: poverty, hunger and decent work in Southeast Asia

This article considers three questions: 1) what progress has been made in achieving MDG1 targets?; 2) what challenges remain?; and 3) what more could and should be done? To examine these questions, the article assesses the progress of Southeast Asia in seeking to achieve MDG1. It argues that the region is 'on track' to achieve MDG 1 targets, although significant challenges such as inequality remain. Economic growth, significant structural change and incorporation into global value chains have contributed to MDG progress. However, this is a double-edged sword as exposure to global economic turbulence can increase. The longer-term reduction of poverty, inequality and social exclusion is a question of empowerment of local producers within value chains-a shift in economic power and control through pro-poor strategies strong enough to effect substantive structural change. The article outlines key concepts; identifies the main characteristics of Southeast Asian poverty; outlines what more needs to be done; and concludes by reprising the article's findings and weighing the prospects for 2010-15 and beyond.     

Maritime tensions in the South China Sea and the neighborhood: Some solutions

The Spratlys are a collection of islands which represent a nexus in the maritime interests of the South China Sea littoral states, and are symptomatic of a much wider and more complex range of maritime problems facing Asia, and Southeast Asia in particular. The diplomatic resolution of the dispute raised by these problems is important to the continuing stability of the region.