The post-cold war predicament: A conclusion

The 1997 Asian economic crisis discredited the international discussion about ‘Asian values’ in Pacific Asia, replacing it with a globalised ‘good governance’ discourse. The financial breakdown undermined claims by Asian autocrats that government should be based on authoritarian ‘Asian values’, not ‘Western democracy’. Yet, seven years later, authoritarian regimes in the region are flourishing while the new democracies flounder. Why have dictatorships, not democracies, prospered politically since the Asian financial crisis? Pacific Asia began as an ‘imagined community’ of developmental dictatorships, making authoritarian development the ‘original position’ against which democratic governance is judged. While the demise of ‘Asian values’ contributed to the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, it did less harm to authoritarian regimes in more economically developed Malaysia and Singapore. The US‐led anti‐terror coalition provided several authoritarian rulers in Pacific Asia with welcome support from the West, while allowing them to weaken internal opposition. The new democracies, by contrast, faced international pressures to combat terrorism, often arousing local protest. Finally, middle class‐based reformist movements have risked destabilising the region's new democracies in the name of good governance.     

Globalization,education, and the politics of identity in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

This essay examines a resurgent interest in “regionness” as a response to globalization, and it looks at how governments and citizens have participated in the discourse on forging a new Asia-Pacific community that has developed over the past fifteen years. Part one distinguishes between “regionalization” and “regionalism” as competing visions for the construction of a future Asia-Pacific community. Regionalization, the dominant paradigm during the postcolonial period, centers on interstate forums dominated by officially recognized political and economic elites who seek interstate cooperation in order to protect state interests, state power, and national identity from foreign as well as domestic challenges. Regionalism, as an alternative paradigm, envisions the creation of transnational networks inclusive of nonofficial actors, whose identification with a particular state and set of national interests does not preclude the creation of a regional identity (or identities) and support for regional interests. Part two considers the challenges that regionalism poses for the nation-state and its leadership. It does so by highlighting the pressure for reform that globalization has brought to bear upon one particular institution that theorists of nationalism have long identified as central to the perpetuation of national identity, national unity, and state authority: schooling. Part three assesses the current prospects for such reforms by briefly examining recent educational developments in Japan, Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore.     

The National Liberation Front and the transformation of Vietnamese society

Abstract

Like vultures swarming over a dying carcass, American establishment intellectuals have been swift to dissect the agonizing war in Vietnam. Yet poring through the massive scholarly, journalistic and official works heralding American attempts to crush the Vietnamese resistance, one is struck by the void of information concerning the National Liberation Front. The enemy remains almost as elusive in the literature as in the swamps of Vietnam. After more than a decade of fighting, the NLF is virtually as ‘faceless,’ unknown, unfathomable as ever to the American people. Indeed a careful search reveals not a single significant scholarly work on the subject. In the absence of independent scholarship, the officially sanctioned work of Douglas Pike, an officer of the United States Information Service with long tenure in Vietnam, has gone virtually unchallenged. Consider Pike's conclusions about the NFL:     

Unpacking Thailand's southern conflict: The poverty of structural explanations

Despite its importance and timeliness Peter Gowan's article “Triumphing toward International Disaster” falls short insofar as it fails to locate “American Grand Strategy” in the context of the global social relations of the capitalist order; particularly problematic is the way that he takes for granted the constitution of “global politics” as a system of nation-states. In our response we try to draw out some of the inconsistencies in Gowan's analysis by engaging the state-centeredness of his argument and discussing some of the implications of this for critical engagement with the changing world order and the current global crisis.     

Imperialism and Asia: A brief introduction to the literature

Abstract

From 1910 (formally, de facto earlier) until 1945 Korea was under extremely harsh occupation by Japan. During this period, when every component of Korean culture was cruelly suppressed, Korean women suffered specific oppression. Very large numbers of Korean women were forcibly driven into prostitution, both in Korea itself and throughout the Japanese empire. Many were forced into prostitution for Japanese troops in appalling conditions, often in the front lines, and many were killed in the trenches. Within general Japanese sexism, there was a specificity to the attempt to degrade and exploit Korean women. Certain aspects of contemporary Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) official culture must be understood as attempts to combat the legacy of this colonial past. The emphasis on “purity”—for women—which is articulated by both men and women in the DPRK is justified officially by reference to both the Japanese colonial past and the contemporary degradation of women in South Korea, which is usually attributed mainly to US and Japanese influences, such as sex tourism.     

Too Many People and Too Few Livestock in West Africa? An Evaluation of Sandford's Thesis

We examine whether Stephen Sandford's (2006 Sandford, S. 2006b. “Too many people, too few livestock: the crisis affecting pastoralists in the Greater Horn of Africa”. Accessed at: http://www.future-agricultures.org/pdf%20files/Sandford_thesis.pdf [Google Scholar]b) ‘too many people, too few livestock’ thesis for the Greater Horn of Africa applies to West Africa. In a comparative study of seven pastoral systems across West Africa we found that pastoralists have generally successfully adapted to pressures on grazing resources. We describe three adaptive strategies: 1) integration and intensification in the Sudanian zone; 2) movement to the Sub-Humid zone; and 3) extensification in the Sahelian zone. We end by proposing four interrelated factors that account for the differences in pastoral systems between West Africa and the Greater Horn of Africa.     

Safeguarding Common-Pool Resources in Transition Economies: Experimental Evidence from Central Asia

Empirical evidence suggests that the propensity to cooperate in common pool resource dilemmas is higher for small, homogeneous groups with efficacious monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms. Given that transition from socialist to market economies is associated with larger, more heterogeneous groups with diluted opportunities for monitoring and sanctioning, individuals in later-stage transition economies may be expected to be less cooperative than their early-stage counterparts. However, evidence from experiments conducted with subjects in two economies at different stages of transition suggests that this may not be the case. These findings have implications for both theorists and practitioners alike.     

Introduction

The idea of the Third World, which is usually traced to the late 1940s or early 1950s, was increasingly used to try and generate unity and support among an emergent group of nation-states whose governments were reluctant to take sides in the Cold War. These leaders and governments sought to displace the ‘East–West’ conflict with the ‘North–South’ conflict. The rise of Third Worldism in the 1950s and 1960s was closely connected to a range of national liberation projects and specific forms of regionalism in the erstwhile colonies of Asia and Africa, as well as the former mandates and new nation-states of the Middle East, and the ‘older’ nation-states of Latin America. Exponents of Third Worldism in this period linked it to national liberation and various forms of Pan-Asianism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Americanism. The weakening or demise of the first generation of Third Worldist regimes in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with or was followed by the emergence of a second generation of Third Worldist regimes that articulated a more radical, explicitly socialist, vision. A moderate form of Third Worldism also became significant at the United Nations in the 1970s: it was centred on the call for a New International Economic Order (nieo). By the 1980s, however, Third Worldism had entered into a period of dramatic decline. With the end of the Cold War, some movements, governments and commentators have sought to reorient and revitalise the idea of a Third World, while others have argued that it has lost its relevance. This introductory article provides a critical overview of the history of Third Worldism, while clarifying both its constraints and its appeal. As a world-historical movement, Third Worldism (in both its first and second generation modalities) emerged out of the activities and ideas of anti-colonial nationalists and their efforts to mesh highly romanticised interpretations of pre-colonial traditions and cultures with the utopianism embodied by Marxism and socialism specifically, and ‘Western’ visions of modernisation and development more generally. Apart from the problems associated with combining these different strands, Third Worldism also went into decline because of the contradictions inherent in the process of decolonisation and in the new international politico-economic order, in the context of the changing character, and eventual end, of the global political economy of the Cold War.