Security architecture in Asia: the interplay of regional and global levels

I argue that there is a distinct and longstanding regional structure in East Asia that is of at least equal importance to the global level in shaping the region's security dynamics. Without considering this regional level neither ‘unipolar’ nor ‘multipolar’ designations can explain East Asian international security. To make this case, I deploy regional security complex theory both to characterize and explain developments in East Asia since the end of the Cold War. The shift from bipolarity to unipolarity is well understood in thinking about how the ending of the Cold War impacted on East Asia. Less written about in Western security literature are the parallel developments at the regional level. Prominent among these are the relative empowerment of China in relation to its neighbours, and the effect of this, as well as of the growth of regional institutions, and the attachment of security significance to East Asian economic developments, in merging the security dynamics of Northeast and Southeast Asia. How China relates to its East Asian region, and how the US and China relate to each other, are deeply intertwined issues which centrally affect not only the future of East Asian, but also global, security. With the notable exception of some crisis between China and Taiwan, this whole pattern looks mainly dependent on internal developments within China and the US. Also significant is whether the basic dynamic of interstate relations in East Asia is more defined by the Westphalian principle of balancing, or by the bandwagoning imperative more characteristic of suzerain-vassal relationships. The main probability is for more of the same, with East Asian security staying within a fairly narrow band between mild conflict formation and a rather odd and weak sort of security regime in which an outside power, the US, plays the key role.     

A new dynamism in Sino-Japanese security relations: Japan's strategic use of foreign aid

Abstract

In November 2004 a Chinese nuclear submarine cruised into Japan's territorial waters near the Okinawa Islands. In response, the Japanese government dispatched several Japanese naval ships and planes to chase the Chinese submarine until it navigated into international waters. This event, which potentially could have become the first exchange of fire between Japan and China since the Second World War, illuminated increasingly problematic security relations between the two neighbouring countries in the twenty-first century. In fact, deterioration of Sino-Japanese security relations is not a recent phenomenon but has already been evident since the mid-1990s, when Japan imposed a series of economic sanctions on China. Between 1995 and 2000 Japan had suspended its foreign aid to China in protest against: China's nuclear weapons tests; China's large scale war game including the launch of missiles across the Taiwan Strait; and Chinese naval activities in disputed areas in the East China Sea. This article looks at Sino-Japanese security relations since the mid-1990s through three case studies of the aid sanctions imposed by Japan on China. It clarifies the domestic political and bureaucratic interests that motivated aid sanctions and determined the decision-making process leading to these sanctions. The article argues, that with certain politico-security interests, Japanese governments actively used foreign aid as a strategic instrument to counter provocative military actions by China in the East Asian region since the mid-1990s. Despite the limited influence that Japanese aid sanctions have actually had on Chinese military behaviour, Japan's strategic use of foreign aid has undeniably created a new dynamism in security relations between the two neighbouring great powers in Asia.     

Not a Curse at All: Why Middle Eastern Oil States Fail and How it can be Prevented

Western scholarship has often noted that oil states in the Middle East are affected by the ‘resource curse’. Thus, such states are to eventually fail due to their plundering of resources and their neglect of the social contract with their citizens. However, this is not the case, as oil states are neither failed states, nor fully democratic. They hover in a middle ground in which they assure security through coercion, but lack representation and legitimacy. Due to the events of the Arab Spring, a pragmatic, insightful and comprehensive review of oil states in the region is necessary. Although oil states in the region thus far have remained stable, change can be expected in the future. How will oil states deal with the pressures of a more demanding society and an ever-challenging economic atmosphere? Furthermore, what can history teach us so that state failure can be averted?     

Crafting a Region While Intervening? Regional Discourses on Burundi

Peacemaking interventions do not only intend to facilitate desirable order in crisis contexts but, thereby, the participating interveners also struggle to attach meaning to their own position in the world. The African interveners, loosely organized around the ‘Regional Peace Initiative on Burundi’, engender an image of the self that affects the possibilities for political cooperation on the regional scale. Based on a discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of diverse voices from East and South Africa, it is shown that intervention politics increased regional awareness—but not in a linear manner. The idea of a progressive and autonomous East Africa was strongest in the first years of regional facilitation between 1996 and 1999, when the revival of the East African Community (EAC) was also simultaneously being negotiated. This regional impetus decreased with South Africa's more active participation in the intervention, which envisioned increasing its own country profile instead.     

The Canadian Government Response to Africa's Refugee Problem

La Côte d’Ivoire a longtemps fait figure de pays marginal et d’importance secondaire sur la scène islamique ouest-africaine, du fait notamment du statut minoritaire de l’Islam — une réalité qui se situe désormais moins au plan démographique qu’au plan politique — et de la discrétion des ordres soufis. De manière contrastée, depuis les années 1990, la société musulmane ivoirienne et sa culture religieuse “réformiste,” portée par une élite “moderne” centrée sur Abidjan, gagnent progressivement en influence dans la sous-région et au-delà. Cet article explore les processus socioéconomiques, politiques et culturels à l’oeuvre dans cette transformation, ainsi que l’interface entre le local et le global dans l’Islam ivoirien. Les migrations internationales vers la Côte d’Ivoire sont l’objet d’une attention particulière, dans la mesure où les nombreux immigrants ouest-africains, pour la plupart musulmans, ont pu jouer à l’étranger un rôle de traducteurs culturels dans la transmission des idées et du modus operandi propres aux réformistes ivoiriens. L’émigration de musulmans ivoiriens en Occident et en particulier aux Etats-Unis est aussi prise en compte. L’article se demande en outre pourquoi l’élite réformiste ivoirienne s’est efforcée de nouer des contacts avec des organismes islamiques internationaux basés hors du monde arabe et de l’Iran et comment les échanges avec les musulmans d’Occident ont marqué son développement de manière décisive et originale. Ces mouvements d’hommes et d’idées ont contribué au dynamisme local de l’Islam ivoirien et à son rayonnement transnational en Afrique de l’Ouest francophone et dans les milieux de la diaspora africaine musulmane aux Etats-Unis. La conclusion situe cette mondialisation de l’Islam ivoirien dans une perspective historique.     

Art et artisanat en Afrique Noire: Problèmes d'une définition différentielle

In 1977, John Lonsdale published a review of William R. Ochieng's study APre-Colonial History of the Gusii of Western Kenya in the Kenya Historical Review. Entitled “When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a ‘Tribe’?”, the ten-page article was less a book review and more a treatise on the practice of history in Africa. Taking Lonsdale's question as a point of inspiration, this article provides a critical rethinking of the theories of “tribe”, ethnicity and identity politics that continue to dominate African scholarship by examining the particular case of the Luyia in western Kenya. Through the seemingly incongruous and stubbornly diverse accounting of Luyia political community, this study suggests that histories of ethnic identity remain trapped by their own constructivist logic, elevating the “inventors” of traditional accounts at the expense of the plural and dissenting voices that characterise the multiple forms of political imagination practised across Africa that, while diverse, continue to rely on the idiom of the “tribe”.     

俄罗斯远东地区运输系统现代化改造问题研究

交通运输系统将俄罗斯远东地区内部各主体之间以及与俄罗斯其他地区之间联系起来,是远东地区融入俄罗斯统一经济空间、“确保领土完整和国家统一”的必要硬件条件。也是俄罗斯与亚太地区国家往来的重要基础。面对蓬勃发展的亚太地区,俄罗斯希望通过远东地区实现与亚太地区的经济一体化。为此,俄罗斯着手大力开发远东地区,前不久成立了远东发展部。俄罗斯对该地区交通运输系统进行现代化改造,是改变当地经济硬环境的一个重要举措。     

The Method is the Message: The Current State of Political Communication Research

Formal journalism ethics, as laid out in codes of ethics by journalism associations and the like, is part of a wider debate on media ethics that has been triggered in the Middle East due to the advent of global media in the region. This study compares journalism codes from Europe and the Islamic world in order to revisit the widespread academic assumption of a deep divide between Western and Oriental philosophies of journalism that has played a role in many debates on political communication in the area. The analysis shows that there is a broad intercultural consensus that standards of truth and objectivity should be central values of journalism. Norms protecting the private sphere are, in fact, more pronounced in countries of the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and in the majority of Muslim states in Asia than is generally the case in Europe, although the weighing of privacy protection against the public's right to information is today a component of most journalistic codes of behavior in Islamic countries. Obvious differences between the West and many Islamic countries are to be found in the status accorded to freedom of expression. Although ideas of freedom have entered formal media ethics in the Middle East and the Islamic world, only a minority of documents limit the interference into freedom to cases where other fundamental rights (e.g., privacy) are touched, whereas the majority would have journalists accept political, national, religious, or cultural boundaries to their work. Despite existing differences between Western and Middle Eastern/Islamic journalism ethics and in contrast to the overall neoconservative (Islamist) trends in societal norms, formal journalism ethics has been a sphere of growing universalization throughout the last decades.     

Migration and the reconfiguration of Malaysia

This article examines the social impact of the 1997 financial crisis in South Korea. Although the crisis was short-lived, it has created major ripples all across the country, profoundly affecting the Koreans' lifestyle and family life as well as their values and worldview. In spite of the magnitude of the financial crisis and its social impact, scant scholarly attention has been paid to the issue, although the causes and economic impact of the crisis have been amply discussed. In view of this, the article examines major social changes brought upon by the financial crisis. The article probes, for example, how employment patterns have been deeply affected, whereby a majority of workers are now irregular workers or are underemployed. The article also demonstrates how the people's perception of work has changed and how the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened. Also discussed are, among others, the continuing discrimination against women in the workplace, rising divorce rate, increase in immigration and value conflicts over the relevance of Confucianism in contemporary Korea. In addition, the article examines the agency of the Korean people in reacting to or coping with the changing circumstances.     

Creating the National/Border Security Nexus: Counter-Terrorist Operations and Monitoring Middle Eastern and North African Visitors to the UK in the 1970s–1980s

Abstract

This article looks at an earlier episode in the history of the UK border security apparatus by examining how the immigration control system was used in the 1970s and 1980s to detect potential terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa. Using recently opened archival records, it shows that the UK government introduced a strict system of visa checks, interviews, and other measures to nearly all Middle Eastern and North African visitors to the UK to prevent the entry of suspected terrorist personnel. By using these highly arbitrary measures, it became the modus operandi of the UK authorities to treat all Middle Eastern and North Africans as potential terrorists until convinced otherwise.