Taiwan's Quest for Independence: Progress on the Margins for Recognition of Statehood

This article describes many substantive transformations in politics, national self-identification, and economy Taiwan has undergone over the last decade and offers an alternative approach to expediting de jure state status. The transformations speak to significant progress ‘on the margins’ for attaining international recognition. The disjuncture between liberal democracies clinging to an antiquated ‘One-China’ foreign policy approach and the realties of the situation is widening. An alternative avenue to state recognition acknowledges advancements on the margins that justify Taiwan's recognition by others. At the same time, however, Taiwan must hold self-proclamation in abeyance until the breadth of recognition it receives becomes an irresistible force with which the PRC must reckon. The recent transformations coupled with mainland China's growing force projection capability indicate the time is ripe and appropriate to recognize Taiwan's statehood. The United States would be remiss in its avowed commitment and leadership responsibilities for democratic enlargement by not recognizing Taiwan.     

Learning from the news: Experiments in media,modality, and reporting about star wars

This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.     

Muted criticism in Egypt (part 1)

Egypt, the heart of the Arab world, is the dominant player in Arab‐Israeli and inter‐Arab affairs. Close scrutiny of political and intellectual trends in Egypt tells us much about these trends throughout the Arab world. Reporting from a country such as Egypt, which has an authoritarian form of government, presents problems for journalists and researchers. There is much criticism of the government, but it is muted, often lying just below the surface. One must try to discern the underlying political reality without seeming to criticize the government. Journalists who are considered pro‐Israel are viewed with suspicion. Journalists who ask probing questions may be classified as pro‐Israel. This study examines the complex fabric of Egyptian political reality through interviews with prominent intellectuals and government leaders. The interviews focus on crucial areas of foreign policy.     

Generational change: regional security and Australian engagement with Asia

The rhetoric of US foreign policy since the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001, would suggest that there has been a fundamental shift in US foreign relations. This is often summarised as a shift from multilateralism to unilateralism and, in the context of the war on terrorism, concomitantly a shift from geo-economic to geopolitical priorities. The rhetoric of the fight against the ‘axis of evil’, however, may simply cloud underlying continuities in US relations with Asia. Nevertheless the process of coalition-building by the Bush administration in the ‘War on Terrorism’ has impacted on the distance Asian countries have been able to maintain in relation to the United States. The case studies presented in this special issue raise a number of important issues concerning perceptions and the practice of US hegemony and the complex links between leadership and ‘followership’ at the inter-state level. They also draw out the impacts engendered by US–Asia relations on the wider phenomenon of regionalisation in the Asia-Pacific region.     

South Korea under the United States–China rivalry: dynamics of the economic-security nexus in trade policymaking

With the advent of the Trump administration and the subsequent U.S.–China trade conflict, South Korea's trade policy is under immense pressure. The KORUS FTA has been pushed for renegotiation while the China–South Korea trade relations have stumbled after the THAAD deployment to South Korea. This challenge can be characterized by the economic-security nexus shifted from positive to negative: that is, South Korea is compelled to either sacrifice its economic benefits in favor of security interest or vice versa. In contrast to Japan that seeks to retain TPP as a way of benefitting from a regionwide trade integration and balancing both Trump unilateralism and Chinese mercantilist influence, South Korea is forced to play a more complex game. Given its deep yet asymmetric economic interdependence with China and North Korean security threats, South Korea needs to accommodate China while at the same time courting US engagement in resolving the North Korean nuclear problems.     

Developmental states in transition: adapting,dismantling, innovating,not ‘normalizing’

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasingly vigorous debate by a wide range of participants over the past, present and future of Japanese security and the national defence policy. Ever since the end of the Cold War, international relations theorists have cast their gaze to Japan, and have been given to re-examining ‘comprehensive security’ with a particular eye for the meaning of ‘security’. The 1990s were a particularly interesting time for this scholarly revisionism, while events of September 2001 have cast an entirely different spectre on the nature and expectations of Japanese security, both domestically and internationally. This article is particularly concerned with the developments in the 1990s as scholars sought to reassert the ‘defence’ component of the comprehensive security policy hitherto pursued by Japan. This re-examination has elevated former Japanese Defence Agency (JDA) bureaucrat Kubo Takuya as the key architect in crafting Japan's security policy. Tsuyoshi Kawasaki's contributions to the debate are especially interesting on this point. He rightly challenges the short-comings of the so-called ‘domestic-constructivists’, especially Berger and Katzenstein. However, in attempting to demolish their cases for ‘selective biases’ he then proceeds to selectively argue a similarly biased case in asserting the superiority of yet another derivation of the realist cause – ‘postclassical realism’. His key premises are based on his interpretations of the architect of Japan's National Defence Program Outline, Kubo, and in doing so ‘proves’ the military aspect of Japan's security policy and its ‘inherent superiority’ as an explanatory framework. Equally, one can mount a case for the ‘comprehensive security’ proponents by citing the work and presence of the late Okita Saburo in his contributions to understanding post-war security policy. This article will demonstrate a similar argument to that of Kawasaki's based on an analogous analytical framework which grounds Japanese security consciousness in a deeper historical context. It is part of a larger project which seeks to give empirical substance to constructivist interpretations of Japanese security.     

Pacific drift: Southeast Asia and the US‐Australia relationship

There has been much discussion of the economic rise of Asia and an emerging Pacific community. This is nowhere more true than in Australia and the United States. And yet an interesting by‐product of the tremendous change in Asia is that it has contributed directly to a drift in the bilateral relationship between Canberra and Washington. Notwithstanding the universally enthusiastic official rhetoric about Asia, the region is in fact of much greater importance to Australia than the United States. It is no coincidence that as Australia finds itself being increasingly pulled towards Asia, its traditionally very close relationsip with the United States is gradually weakening. This trend can be illustrated by focusing on developments in Southeast Asia and the differential way they are affecting US and Australian interests in three key policy areas: trade, politics and human rights, and security.     

‘Lending by numbers’: credit scoring and the constitution of risk within American consumer credit

Abstract

This paper examines how statistical credit-scoring technologies, sanctioned by the state in the interests of promoting equality, became applied by lenders to the problem of controlling levels of default within American consumer credit. However, these technologies, constituting consumers as ‘risks’, are themselves seen to be problematic, subject to their own conceived sets of methodological, procedural and temporal risks. Nevertheless, as this article will show, such technologies have increasingly been applied to other areas of consumer lending, thus interpreting a wider array of operational contingencies in terms of risk. Finally, it is argued that, since the 1980s, the constitution of credit consumers as risks has been deployed to new ends through technologies of ‘profit scoring’ and new practices of ‘risk pricing’.     

News Management and New Managerialism

Abstract

This article examines the public communication activities of “Quangos” (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations). These non-elected organizations fulfill diverse public functions-such as, providing services, advising policy makers, regulating other institutions, representing the interests of certain social and cultural groups, supporting private enterprise, and promoting pro-social values and practices.

Focusing mainly on news management strategies in the sector, the article shows that the popular image of quangos as highly introverted organizations needs revision, and that many place considerable emphasis on public communication issues. However, this recognition contextualises rather than invalidates concerns about accountability within this tier of government, as publicity activities in the sector are geared towards facilitating the external promotion of organizations' roles rather than scrutiny of their conduct.     

非政府组织与联合国发展活动

随着非政府组织在国际事务中的影响力日益引人注目 ,它通过会议机制、论坛机制和组织机制等联系途径 ,对联合国发展观念的更新、联合国发展政策和规划的制定、实施与监督都发挥着越来越重要的作用。在非政府组织不断深化对联合国发展活动的介入的同时 ,一些影响双方发展合作的因素也逐步暴露 ,预示着双方的合作道路并不平坦。