The Creation and Implementation of the ASEAN Charter

Abstract

This review article analyzes and builds on arguments presented in two prominent books, The Making of the ASEAN Charter, by Koh, Manalo, and Woon, and ASEAN: Life after the Charter by Tiwari, on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Charter. The books envision future international cooperation and even international disputes as legal issues. I claim that by doing so, these books participate in the articulation of a reality where international politics and dispute resolution in Southeast Asia are something that belongs to the legal rather than military realm. As such, both books document and represent an effort to desecuritize (move the issue area away from the realm of security) disputes within ASEAN – an undertaking that the Copenhagen School of Security Studies claims cannot be done by means of declarations and speech only.     

Review Essay: Stabilizing Nuclear Southern Asia

ABSTRACT

This review article considers three significant volumes recently published in the field of Southern Asian security studies. These consist of Not War, Not Peace? Motivating Pakistan to Prevent Cross-Border Terrorism, by Toby Dalton and George Perkovich; Sameer Lalwani and Hannah Haegeland (eds.), Investigating Crises: South Asia’s Lessons, Evolving Dynamics, and Trajectories; and Mooed Yusuf, Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments: U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia. In the wake of the 2019 India–Pakistan Pulwama militarized crisis, each book focuses on a distinct element of the Southern Asian security milieu that is crucial to understanding drivers of regional insecurity and potential pathways toward greater stability. However, collectively, they leave room for greater exploration for the effects of emerging trends in this regional strategic competition. These include the evolving regional preferences and actions of China, the potential for Pakistan-based terrorist groups to become independent actors throughout a Southern Asian crisis, and the growing prominence of precision-strike standoff weapons in the strategic planning of China, India, and Pakistan. Still, these three volumes prove indispensable for understanding the contemporary political and security dynamics of Southern Asia.     

Editor's Note: Special Feature – China,India, and the Future of Great-Power Politics

Abstract

This review essay is based upon Shuja Nawaz' Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within and Ayesha Siddiqa's Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy. Based upon these two author's insightful volumes, this essay explores the roles of both military and civilian actors and institutions in the undermining of Pakistan's constitutional rule of law. While conventional wisdom places the onus disproportionately upon the military's penchant for interventionism, this review essay contends that the army has intervened only with the active assistance of civilian institutions which are subsequently further eroded with every military takeover. Thus any long-term solution to democratize Pakistan must focus both upon the army's presumed “right” and “obligation” to intervene in Pakistan's political system while simultaneously strengthening and professionalizing those civilian institutions needed for providing good governance with accountability.     

Quest for freedom: The United States and India's independence

Abstract

In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. For more information about short reviews as well as review essays, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 92 of this issue.     

Short reviews

Abstract

In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. For more information about short reviews as well as review essays, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 92 of this issue.     

The Risk of War in Nuclearized South Asia

Abstract

How did the introduction of nuclear weapons impact the security of the two South Asian rival states India and Pakistan? In this article, the author explores this question by looking at three books written by key experts in the field. The works explore this core question from three different angles, each of which represents an important strand in contemporary research on South Asian nuclear security. The article addresses three specific aspects in detail. First, it challenges the current trend to adopt structuralist explanatory models, which are unable to adequately appreciate the complex dynamics of the nuclear competition. Second, it explores the relationship between nuclear policy making and regime type. Third, it assesses the relevance of the Kargil conflict as test case for the existence of deterrence stability in South Asia.     

Hunger

Abstract

Books about hunger and its causes are nothing new, as anyone who follows development literature is well aware. This is probably because hunger itself has been around as long as people have been writing books. Nevertheless, 1974 was the year of a “world food crisis”: the United Nations saw fit to convene a world food conference in Rome, and a spate of new books has appeared in its aftermath to discuss the problem. Why a crisis should have congealed in 1974 from the world's perennial hunger is one of the subjects ably considered by Collins and Lappe's Food First and Susan George's How the Other Half Dies. Why so much has been written about it is a subject worth considering here.     

Soviet Economy: A Welcome Addition to an Important Field of Study

The results of the inaugural meeting of a panel on the Soviet economy, convened by the editors of Soviet Economy, are summarized. The panel noted that 1985 economic performance had been fairly good by recent Soviet standards, although the external trade balance had deteriorated sharply. Turning to the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (FYPXII) and the annual plan for 1986, the panel noted the clearly taut nature of both plans, and the apparent inconsistencies between them. The consensus was that the FYPXII targets would be very difficult to achieve, although outsiders may find it hard to judge due to the inherent ambiguities in measuring quality changes, and the potential for significant hidden inflation in growth statistics. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124).     

Selected Recent Books on Soviet Energy

This compilation comprises a special bibliography of recent books on Soviet energy prepared and annotated by the editor of Soviet Geography. An initial section contains five books with sections on nuclear power of particular interest in connection with the Chernobyl' accident. A second section of four entries is devoted to general issues of energy policy, consumption and demand, conservation, and impacts of energy development on Soviet foreign policy and world markets. The final section includes ten books addressing problems of fossil fuel development in the USSR, and efforts to overcome organizational and logistical obstacles to West Siberian oil and gas development in particular. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 027, 124, 723.     

Do Nuclear Weapons Stabilize South Asian Militarized Crises? Evidence from the 1990 Case

Abstract

Scholars have claimed that nuclear weapons help to stabilize South Asia by preventing Indo-Pakistani militarized crises from escalating to the level of all-out conventional war. This article argues that while nuclear weapons have had cautionary effects on Indian and Pakistani decision makers, proliferation also has played a role in fomenting some of the very crises that scholars credit nuclear weapons with defusing. Moreover, nuclear deterrence was not always essential to preventing these crises from escalating to the level of outright war. The article illustrates its argument with evidence from the Indo-Pakistani militarized crisis of 1990.

Leading scholars and analysts have argued that nuclear weapons help to prevent South Asian militarized crises from escalating to the level of all-out conventional war. ¹ 1. See, e.g., Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 109–110; Devin Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 133–170; Kenneth N. Waltz, “For Better,” in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 109–124; K. Subrahmanyam, “India and the International Nuclear Order,” in D. R. SarDesai and G. C. Raju Thomas, eds., Nuclear India in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), pp. 63–84, at pp. 82–83; Raja Menon, A Nuclear Strategy for India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 197–198. A considerable literature exists regarding nuclear weapons’ general effects on the South Asian security environment. Scholars optimistic that nuclear weapons will help to pacify South Asia include Waltz, “For Better”; Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation; John J. Mearsheimer, “Here We Go Again,” New York Times, May 17, 1998; Subrahmanyam, “India and the International Nuclear Order”; Bharat Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2002). Scholars pessimistic as to nuclear weapons’ likely effects on the regional security environment include Scott D. Sagan, “For the Worse: Till Death Do Us Part,” in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons; P. R. Chari, “Nuclear Restraint, Nuclear Risk Reduction, and the Security–Insecurity Paradox in South Asia,” in Michael Krepon and Chris Gagné, eds., The Stability–Instability Paradox: Nuclear Weapons and Brinksmanship in South Asia (Washington, DC: The Stimson Center, 2001), pp. 15–36; Kanti Bajpai, “The Fallacy of an Indian Deterrent,” in Amitabh Mattoo, ed., India’s Nuclear Deterrent: Pokhran II and Beyond (New Delhi: HarAnand, 1999); Samina Ahmed, “Security Dilemmas of Nuclear-Armed Pakistan,” Third World Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 5 (October 2000), pp. 781–793; S. R. Valluri, “Lest We Forget: The Futility and Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons for India,” in Raju G.C. Thomas and Amit Gupta, eds., India’s Nuclear Security (United States: Lynne Rienner, 2000), pp. 263–273. This claim has important implications for the regional security environment and beyond. Given the volatile nature of Indo-Pakistani relations, reducing the likelihood of crisis escalation would make the subcontinent significantly safer. The claim also suggests that nuclear weapons could lower the probability of war in crisis-prone conflict dyads elsewhere in the world.

This article takes a less sanguine view of nuclear weapons’ impact on South Asian militarized crises. It argues that while nuclear weapons have at times had important cautionary effects on Indian and Pakistani decision makers, proliferation has played a role in fomenting a number of the very crises that scholars credit nuclear weapons with defusing. Moreover, it is not clear that nuclear deterrence was essential to preventing some of these crises from escalating to the level of outright war. I illustrate my argument with evidence from the period when India and Pakistan were acquiring nascent nuclear weapons capabilities. I show that during the late 1980s, Pakistan’s emerging nuclear capacity emboldened Pakistani decision makers to provide extensive support to the emerging insurgency against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir. In early 1990, India responded with large-scale force deployments along the Line of Control and International Border, in an attempt to stem militant infiltration into Indian territory, and potentially to intimidate Pakistan into abandoning its Kashmir policy. Pakistan countered with large deployments of its own, and the result was a major Indo-Pakistani militarized standoff. Although scholars have credited Pakistani nuclear weapons with deterring India from attacking Pakistan during this crisis, the preponderance of available evidence suggests that Indian leaders never seriously considered striking Pakistan, and therefore were not in fact deterred from launching a war in 1990. Thus nuclear weapons played an important role in fomenting a major Indo-Pakistani crisis during this period, but probably were not instrumental in preventing the crisis from escalating to the level of outright war.

Below, I briefly describe the emergence of the Kashmir insurgency. I then explain how Pakistan’s nuclear capacity encouraged it to support the uprising. Next, I show how conflict between Pakistan-supported guerillas and Indian security forces in Kashmir drove a spiral of tension between the two countries, which led to a stand-off between Indian and Pakistani armed forces in early 1990. Finally, I discuss the end of the 1990 crisis, and address the role that nuclear weapons played in its peaceful deescalation.     

Re-Imagining Identity: The Transformation of the Alevi Semah

Until the early 1990s, the Alevi community, a heterodox Islamic sect in Turkey, actively avoided explaining their beliefs to outsiders and were against permitting non-Alevis to enter their cem rituals. By the mid-1990s they began to hold their rituals publicly in the cemevi (lit. cem house) in Turkish cities and in their cultural centres in the diaspora. Almost all Alevi associations or the cemevis in the diaspora and ‘at home' have a semah group educated and organized by the executive. As opposed to rural/traditional cem rituals in which everybody may take part in the dance, the semahs performed in the urban cems are carried out by the semah groups consisting of young men and women. Moreover, these semah groups also perform in the non-ritual context. Thus, if the predominance of semah within the Alevi cem ritual is a ‘fact' to be studied, then differences in their present interpretations in Turkish cities and in the diaspora is another. This article examines these differences in the context of the transformation of the semah from the representation of religious identity to that of ethno-political identity.     

Loyalty,disloyalty, and semi-loyalty in Pakistan’s hybrid regime

The 2013 election in Pakistan was a significant point in a presumed transition from autocracy towards democracy, since for the first time an elected government completed a full term and was replaced by another freely elected government. Pakistan’s hybrid regime, however, continues to be threatened by a significant ‘disloyal opposition’, in the form of secessionists in Balochistan and jihadi Islamists of the Tehrik-e-Taliban (the so-called Pakistan Taliban). Drawing on the literature on hybrid regimes, and using Juan Linz’s framework that focused on both ‘disloyal’ and ‘semi-loyal’ oppositions to democratic rule, this article examines the threat to a continuing movement towards democracy posed by secessionists, Islamists, and the military.     

The outsider in the novels of Naguib Mahfouz

The novels of Najib Mahfūz, or — to use the more familiar Western spelling of his name, Naguib Mahfouz — offer a progressive study of the outsider in relation to Egyptian middle‐class society. In the early novels it was poverty which set the character outside the gale of a normally functioning community. The poverty of Mahjub in Modern Cairo (al‐Qahira al‐jadida) (1945) and of Hasanayn in A Beginning and an End (Bidaya wa‐nihaya) (1949) is the cause of their isolation in those novels.

The Trilogy (i: Bayn al‐Qasrayn; ii: Qasr al‐shawq: iii: al‐Sukkariyya) (1956–7) offers a large‐scale study of an alienated personality. It is Kamal, who, with the house in Bayn al‐Qasrayn, provides the link between the three generations depicted in the Trilogy. Alienation here is rooted in disappointment and frustration brought about by the mere process of growing up and disillusionment, religious, social and emotional.

The post‐realistic novels after the Trilogy offer bold sketches of a series of outsiders and exiles: the outlaw in The Thief and the Dogs (al‐Liss wa‐1‐kilab) (1961), the disgraced politician in Autumn Quail (al‐Summan wa‐1‐kharif) (1962) , and a group of social and political exiles in a small pension called ‘Miramar’ in Miramar (1967).

In the late seventies Mahfouz was still writing short novels on outsiders, but the wheel has come full circle. They are the young men who have obtained their degree, got the standard government or public sector jobs, been accepted by the sweetheart and her family and are formally engaged, but still cannot find themselves a place in a society highly inflated with petrol dollars and mushrooming wealth, where it is near impossible for a young couple to afford the huge sums necessary for any new accommodation.     

Taking the “Poison Pill”: A Commentary on a Case Study

A prominent American specialist on legal affairs in the former Soviet Union and Russia comments upon a case study focused on managerial strategies to privatize a large industrial conglomerate. Efforts to prevent outsiders from buying the enterprise are likened to “poison pills” used in the United States to thwart hostile corporate takeovers. The commentary includes references to the tradition of corruption in Russian bureaucracy before and after the October Revolution and notes the difficulties encountered by Western lawyers advising foreign investors in recent years. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: K22, P13, P31.     

Notes from the field

Abstract

In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. If you are interested in writing a short review, please contact Peter Zarrow (for more information, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 84 of this issue).

As someone who proudly served in the antiwar movement, I tend to believe we can't have too many books about the righteous struggle waged in the United States to end the Indochina wars. So on one level I welcome Tom Wells's expansion of his Berkeley Ph.D. thesis into the volume under review here. The War Within has many strengths. It mercilessly exposes the ignorant, reflexive anticommunism of such war managers as CIA director Richard Helms, White House advisor (and ideological architect of the wars in Indochina) Walt Rostow, the Nixon entourage, and others. Furthermore, Wells does what no other writer has done: narrate the interfamilial generational conflict between government officials and their children brought on by the Indochina conflicts. Offspring of Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Spiro Agnew, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman joined (or as in the case of Kim Agnew, wanted to join) the movement. Daniel Ellsberg has told us how pressures from those he loved helped transform a once gung-ho Marine and prowar government policy maker into an antiwar militant, and Wells cites Ellsberg's experiences, adding horrifying details on the savage assaults mounted on him by the Nixon administration.     

The historical significance of the japanese textbook lawsuit

Abstract

In 1960, Ienaga Saburō, Professor of Japanese History at Tokyo University of Education and the author of many books on Japanese history, began a long series of court actions to have the Ministry of Education's system of certifying all textbooks used in Japanese schools declared unconstitutional. In the following essay, written exclusively for the Bulletin Professor Ienaga provides an historical background to government control of education in Japan and reviews his long struggle against government censorship of books used in Japan's schools.     

The great game: Russia's role in the Persian Empire and Tibet

Formerly Professor of History and Central Asian Studies at the Panjab University, Chandigarh, Parshotam Mehra has written largely on India's northern frontiers and relations with Tibet and China. His publications include The North‐West Frontier Drama 1945–47 (1998), An ‘Agreed’ Frontier, Ladakh and India's Northern Borders (1992) and The McMahon Line and After (1974). Two of his books, From Conflict to Conciliation: Tibetan Polity Re‐visited and The Younghusband Expedition, an Interpretation (2^nd edition), are due to appear later this year.     

Spontaneous Privatization: A Comment

A prominent American economist and leading foreign advisor to Russian President Boris Yel'tsin comments on prospects for privatization by focusing on selected aspects discussed in a paper on managerial strategies for spontaneous privatization. Issues raised here include the need for more thorough understanding of the economic consequences of privatization, the precise characteristics of legal changes designed to bring it about, the role and relative importance of “insiders” and “outsiders” in the privatization process, and the potential of latent reserves of entrepreneurial talent in privatizing struggling enterprises. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P20, L2.     

Servants of Empire: An Imperial Memoir of a British Family

This article assesses three recently published books on various aspects of Afghanistan:-

- A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, an assistant professor of history at the University of Amsterdam;

-The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Francis J. West, a US Marine combat veteran;

-Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan. by Dov S. Zakheim, a US Government official;

The background and training of these authors largely shape their viewpoints. However a careful reading of their books can sharpen our understanding of how the Soviet and US wars resembled and differed from each other, particularly with respect to nation-building, decision making, use of technology, and conflict termination. For the Russians, the similarities outweigh the differences, but there are still Americans who want to prove that they can win a war that the Soviets lost. From their perspective, the differences between the wars outweigh the similarities. The international context is completely different, the US has spent fifty times more money than the Russians and has deployed far more most sophisticated technology. Equally important, the outcome of the end-game is, as yet, unknown. But to most Afghans, comparisons are pointless; the Soviets and Americans both equally deserve to be labelled imperialists.     

Toward Olympics 2008: China's development in the reform period

Owen Bennett-Jones presents ‘Newshour’ and ‘The Interview’ for BBC World Service Radio. He has reported from all over the world and was the BBC Correspondent in Islamabad between 1998 and 2001. He is currently preparing a second edition of his book Pakistan: Eye of the Storm.