印尼民主化进程、中国印尼关系及国际形势评析

应暨南大学的邀请,2006年5月27-30日,印尼前国家领导人———印尼人民协商会议(MPR)主席、印尼国民使命党前任总主席、穆罕默迪亚前任总主席、现印尼国民使命党荣誉主席、印尼知名学者阿敏.赖斯教授(Prof.Dr.HM Amien Rais)对暨南大学进行了为期3天的学术访问,并被聘请为暨南大学客座教授。期间,阿敏.赖斯教授做了两场学术报告,分别就印尼民主化进程、中国印尼关系、国际形势等诸多问题发表了看法。参加学术报告会的有暨南大学东南亚研究所暨国际关系学系师生、印尼留学生、广东外语外贸大学印尼语专业师生和广州市、中山市、珠海市的印尼归侨代表等130人,东南亚研究所所长曹云华教授主持了学术报告会。现对其主要观点和看法进行整理,以飨广大     

Kidnap for Ransom in South East Asia

Kidnapping for ransom is not a new phenomenon. According to the Control Risk Group, an international risk consultancy, kidnappings of foreign nationals globally have increased by 275% over the past 10 years. High profile incidents such as the tourist kidnappings in 2000 by the Abu Sayyaf group, operating out of the troubled southern region of the Philippines, show that South East Asia has its own regionalised kidnapping hotspots. It is suspected that a high proportion of kidnappings are perpetrated by economically motivated crime groups but it is not possible to estimate with any degree of accuracy what percentage can be attributed to organised crime. This article will provide an overview of the problem, drawing upon existing literature available in the public domain. A typological discussion will show the critical differences between the various categories of kidnapping. The reliability of existing statistics, categorisation and recording of kidnapping for ransom will also be scrutinised, in particular for their variability across the region, to see whether this presents a barrier to a better understanding of the size and seriousness of the problem. As kidnapping for ransom incidents are becoming increasingly transnational in character, the final section will highlight the desirability of formulating and agreeing upon regional standardised definitions and counting rules for kidnap.     

Delegation and Institutional Design in Health‐Care Rationing

The delegation of decision‐making powers to nonmajoritarian, independent agencies has become a significant phenomenon in more and more policy areas. One of these is the health‐care sector, where decisions on the range of services covered within public systems have, in most developed countries, been delegated to specialized bodies. This article offers an analytical framework that seeks to grasp the empirical variety and complexity of delegative processes and appointed institutions. The framework is used to describe decision‐making processes and institutions in six countries: Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. We find that, although constrained by preexisting institutional structures and traditions, delegators enjoy a considerable degree of discretion in their institutional design choices and engage in strategic design and redesign of appointed bodies.     

Constructing the Nation’s Enemy: Hindutva,popular culture and the Muslim ‘other’ in Bollywood cinema

This paper aims to investigate how in contemporary India the process of ‘othering’ of the Muslim minority has been the product of politically motivated and manipulated majoritarian cultural assertiveness, reflected in the Hindu right’s clamour to underline the significance of drawing the geographic and cultural boundaries of what its ideologues call the Hindu nation. Situating cinema as a crucial distribution source of popular culture, the paper contends that Bollywood cinema has exhibited an overt bias towards producing films that capitulate to this radical nationalist discourse professed by the Hindutva ideologues. Making a discourse analysis of selected films produced by Bollywood since the 1990s, the premise of this contention is interrogated by examining how Hindi cinema’s portrayal of the image of Muslims has been carried out in a pejorative manner which stems from the strong grounding of its stories in a Hindu majoritarian setting. The paper concludes by arguing that, with such a penchant, Bollywood cinema has actively engaged in the politics of nationalism engendered by the right-wing neo-fundamentalist Hindutva movement.