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During the Malaysian prime minister's inaugural visit to China in April 2023, Anwar Ibrahim proposed the idea of establishing an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF), an idea that had previously been proposed at the height of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The proposal in 1997 was due to frustration with the performance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Today, it is identified, together with de-dollarization, as part of efforts to reshape the global order. This paper explores the factors driving countries towards initiatives like the AMF and de-dollarization, and their prospects of successfully transforming the existing global order. This paper finds that initiatives such as the AMF and de-dollarization are driven by multiple factors, which include achieving monetary autonomy, and for a few, geostrategic objectives. This study argues that instead of replacing the liberal international order, the objective of the countries seeking change through the AMF or de-dollarization is to strengthen their voices in the international system by reducing those of the US. Nevertheless, these initiatives are hampered because they lack the qualities that give shape to and maintain the architecture of the international order: power and legitimacy. This study concludes that both initiatives are unlikely to significantly reshape the global order. De-dollarization still has a long way to go before it can displace the dollar in the global economy. Likewise, the establishment of the AMF may not in the end reshape the global order but could instead complement the existing one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydropower development taking place on the Mekong River's mainstream and tributaries across the river basin, including Cambodia, is threatening livelihoods and food security by altering critical mobilities associated with the unique ecosystems of the Mekong River. In this paper, we seek to understand how a politics of mobility around hydropower development links both human and nonhuman entities along the Mekong River in Cambodia. We examine how dams transform myriad localized cross-border and riparian political geographies of the physical-human landscape through partial enclosures, up-downstream reorderings and b/orderings of hydrosocial relations. To explain these transformations, we posit that it is necessary to pay attention to the politics of human and nonhuman (such as water, sediment, and fish) mobilities that are shaped by hydropower dams and the new forms of mobilities engendered as a result. We examine how hydropower development renders water, fish, and sediment immobile, or alters their routes and rhythms in ways that optimize the generation of hydropower but which create new concerns around these changing nonhuman mobilities for riparian communities in Cambodia. There is a tension that exists between technical representations and community experiences of these nonhuman mobilities, which raise implications for the exacerbation of vulnerabilities among Cambodian Mekong communities. In this paper, we focus our analysis on selected sites in Cambodia: 1) Stung Treng Province, downstream of Laos' Don Sahong Dam and the Cambodia-Lao border riverscape, and 2) the Tonle Sap Lake (water-based and floodplain areas), to highlight these changing mobilities and the critical processes of b/ordering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the dark of a July night in 2018, a 5-billion-cubic-metre torrent of muddy water crashed through rooftops and ripped through the downstream villages of southeast Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). An auxiliary "saddle" dam had collapsed in the US$1.02 billion Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy (XPXN) Hydropower Project that was still under construction and had just reached financial contractual close five years prior, in 2013. In the aftermath of the collapse, official state narratives pointed to extreme weather conditions and "unforeseen" construction and engineering miscalculations, viewing soil conditions as the primary culprit. This paper examines the financial dimensions of dam failure and introduces the term "fast finance": financier-driven timelines that have drastically expedited and shortened the legal, social, and pre-construction processes involved in hydropower dam projects to the detriment of dam safety, due diligence, and local participatory input. Extreme weather and anthropogenic climate change are not sole explanatory factors in the XPXN dam disaster. This paper highlights the also significant role of financial and political interests as contributing factors in dam safety and failure alongside extreme weather. The paper challenges conventional "natural disaster" framing of dam collapse by bringing into focus ex-ante political decision-making, financial engineering, and construction planning prior to dam construction to highlight the ways in which the XPXN catastrophe also had anthropogenic and "unnatural" contributing factors. Fast finance encompasses the role of temporality and the responsibility of state-business actors in ex-ante financial and infrastructure decisions that conclude with catastrophic outcomes. The article examines the re-engineering of contemporary dam finance through a case study of Lao PDR and argues that issues of financial engineering should be examined alongside other forms of civil, mechanical, structural, and hydrological engineering in the analysis of dam disasters. The temporal logics of financial actors-particularly the financialized logic of fast finance-has displaced the public-good-producing logic of patient capital. Financial logics shape and condition other forms of engineering and construction and are central to considerations of dam safety and accountability. Naturalizing discourses around extreme weather and aging dams deflect from the financial decisions and policy action, or inaction, of state-business actors to prevent dam collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely noted that China maintains a "special relationship" with North Korea, which is best epitomized by the Sino-DPRK Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance that the two countries signed in July 1961. However, in the post-Cold War era, the raison d'être of this alliance treaty has been challenged. Against this backdrop, this paper traces China's evolving interpretations of the Sino-DPRK friendship treaty. By investigating the process behind the signing of the treaty, it argues that Beijing signed an "alliance treaty" with Pyongyang to win over the latter in the context of the Sino-Soviet split. However, as China sought to improve its relations with Western powers, the Sino-DPRK friendship treaty became increasingly burdensome to Beijing. Thus, Beijing began to dilute the alliance nature of the treaty by no longer publicly affirming its security obligation toward Pyongyang. After Deng Xiaoping came to power in China, the treaty was found to be incompatible with Beijing's newly promulgated foreign policy principle of non-alignment. To address this problem, Beijing ultimately reformulated the nature of Sino-DPRK relations and reinterpreted the Sino-DPRK friendship treaty--that is, China is not an ally of North Korea, and the Sino-DPRK friendship treaty carries only symbolic meaning without casus foederis. Based on these analyses, this paper claims that the security obligation of the Sino-DPRK friendship treaty is no longer functional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from extant studies that largely focus on gender roles, norm diffusion, or ethnonationalism, this paper highlights policy siting as one understudied factor in determining why and when states manage cultural diversity. Using the case of South Korea's family-centred multicultural policy, the paper contributes to the growing body of literature on comparative policymaking, multiculturalism, and multi-level citizenship by foregrounding the processes by which governing elites target specific meso-level social institutions as privileged sites of diversity governance. The paper draws on immersive field research conducted between 2017 and 2023 to introduce and analyze the concept of familial multiculturalism to explain how the state locates diversity governance mainly within the family and between family and broader society. Siting diversity governance in powerful meso-level institutions like the nuclear family in shaping state multiculturalism is not unique to Korea. Rather, the paper contends that these institutions play a significant role in cultural management endeavours worldwide. While the content of a multicultural site depends on history and national context, states worldwide seek to mitigate social friction and political backlash by targeting certain intercultural relations and negating or delegitimizing others. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contemporary political ramifications of Korea's multiculturalism and prospects for future broadening and deepening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on the expansion of Chinese multinational corporations (CMCs) in Papua New Guinea (PNG) by comparing the operation of a Chinese mine to that of the German New Guinea Company. I start by looking at the two economic positions (helper and merchant) performed by early Chinese immigrants to New Guinea during the colonial era and the host hostility they encountered.1 Then, a case study of a Chinese mining company in postcolonial PNG illustrates how local employees learned to negotiate with Chinese management through unionization instead of striking. In the meantime, Chinese personnel became subject to PNG industrial regulations based on Australian standards rather than operating as a modernizing agent to educate local workers.2 These findings suggest that, despite specific new Chinese communities becoming investors, they must dedicate resources towards comprehending local customs and legislation, given the enhanced agency of local actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Don Sahong Hydropower Project (DSHPP), located in the Khone Falls area of Khong District, Champasak Province, southern Laos, near the border with Cambodia, has been amongst the most controversial hydropower dams in the Mekong River Basin. Despite considerable regional and international opposition, the dam was finally constructed, becoming commercially operational in 2020. In 2011, I expressed serious concerns about the project's potential impacts on long-distance migratory fish and associated fisheries, especially fish that migrate from Cambodia and Vietnam up the Mekong River to Laos and Thailand. However, my concerns have somewhat changed along with the circumstances, although they continue to focus on dam impacts on migratory fish. I am now particularly concerned about the indirect impacts of the DSHPP on the fishing livelihoods in the Khone Falls area, and the impacts of the dam on fish larvae and fish passing through the dam's turbines when migrating downstream. Using a political ecology approach, this paper considers how infrastructure, in this case a large hydropower dam located on the Mekong River, has altered the spatialities associated with the project in particular ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a "state-in society" approach to understanding the evolution of Pakistan's COVID-19 response, which was laid claim to and contested by multiple agencies within and adjacent to the state, and by multiple levels of government. The capacity of the health system of Pakistan was already overstretched by the needs of its population but in recent years it has been hamstrung by ongoing protests by the medical community concerning the privatization of public-sector hospitals, to which were added protests over the lack of personal protective equipment in the public sector. These protests resulted in frequent closures of outpatient departments at major hospitals. When the government announced a relief package to mitigate the effects of COVID-19, traders and big businesses lobbied the government to obtain the lion's share in the form of concessions such as loan deferments and tax refunds. The government touted the unconditional cash grants program but the cash for the poor could not be disbursed effectively due to the absence of local governments at the grassroots level. As an appropriate response to the pandemic, especially in relation to the lockdown policies, was contested and negotiated among multiple actors in the Pakistani state and society, the Pakistani military emerged as a dominant force in this "field of power."1 In this paper, I present an account of Pakistan's response to COVID-19 as it evolved in 2020 and discuss the implications for democratic culture in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's systematic strategy of autocratization backfired. This paper is based on a model of three pillars of authoritarian regimes. It traces the di'erent strategies and measures employed to weaken the opposition and shows that major survival strategies were prone to frequent shifts. At the beginning of his tenure, Najib depicted himself as a reformer, and refined some forms of repression. The regime scrapped central coercive tools such as the Internal Security Act, but later replaced them with kindred, yet ine'ective measures. Co-optation was more centralized and "money politics" expanded. The widespread and unprecedented usage of patronage resulted in corruption, which fundamentally destabilized the regime. Legitimation was modified since 2013 to a more Malay-centric and Islamist discourse. Because of this shift, legitimation eroded among ethnic and religious minorities. The prime minister's legitimacy shrank due to corruption scandals. This paper helps gauge the lacking complementarity of the pillars and the failures of an authoritarian regime in crisis, which is important also with a view to political developments in Malaysia since 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains and corroborates the mechanisms by which civic and political spaces opposed to Hindu nationalism have been attacked, especially after the arrival of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2014. Three mechanisms are discerned for replacing pluralistic values with Hindu majoritarian ones. Sometimes institutions are just allowed to drift by interpreting old rules in new ways. For example, no formal rules for media control have changed but the government's control over media has increased substantially. At other times, incremental legal and policy changes are executed to make the change explicit, often building on a new moral purpose. To give another example, the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) was amended and weaponized against NGOs in a layered way in 2020. Finally, when political opposition is weak, institutions that have provided guarantees for protecting diversity have simply been displaced by new and radically different ones. This was the case with abrogating Article 370, which converted the special status of the subnational state of Jammu and Kashmir to the status of two federally administered union territories--Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. These mechanisms place India in a competitive authoritarian frame, where those in power deploy electoral majorities to systematically attack the political opposition, making it more di(cult for it to rise. Despite these propensities, opposition parties have won elections in some of India's subnational states. The challenges facing the world's most populous democracy are significant, even though competitive elements co-exist. These elements in a competitive authoritarian regime, however, are under severe stress. India's democratic credentials can be revived only if the competitive elements of India's democracy stand united against ethno-nationalist Hindu majoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An election held under semi-authoritarian conditions in Fiji in December 2022 saw a narrow defeat for coup leader Frank Bainimarama’s incumbent Fiji First Party. This paper looks at the political parties, the campaign issues, and the results. It argues that fear of yet another coup, as occurred in 1987, 2000, and 2006, was a critical factor determining election outcomes in 2014 and 2018, but a credible rejection of that option by the Republic of Fiji Military Forces in 2022 and an opposition campaign that could no longer be depicted as ethno-nationalist paved the way for regime change in Fiji. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite election violence being a commonly agreed upon phenomena in the Philippines, there has been a dearth in academic research on the topic in recent years, largely due to a lack of reliable information. To address this, our article adapts recognized methods from studies such as Lindsay Shorr Newman's 2013 paper, together with Stephen McGrath and Paul Gill's 2014 research on terrorism and elections. To expose the timing of election violence, we tracked incidents relative to election dates for the period from 2004 to 2017, with the results indicating that violence increased closer to an election date, and frequency substantially increased during the 14-year period. This is the first academic journal article since John Linantud in 1998 to focus on the issue of election violence in the Philippines but through adaptive methodologies goes further, enabling national analysis. Furthermore, our findings reveal statistically significant differences regarding the types of terrorist attacks and targets when comparing election and non-election periods. We highlight complicating factors such as the majority of attacks being attributed to "unknown" actors and the complex situation during elections. The results also demonstrate that election violence in the Philippines is dominated by the New People's Army and the use of assassination. The paper makes the case for further research and the creation of a dedicated database of election violence in the Philippines and elsewhere, and evaluates the measures implemented by the government that have failed to stem election violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global arms industry has experienced a major transformation in the post-Cold War era, with production becoming increasingly transnational and larger in scale. While many scholars and policymakers predicted the widespread adoption of market-enhancing reforms aimed at increasing domestic competition and attracting FDI, globalization of arms production has not led to a convergence of national defense industries into a liberal-market model. Drawing on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature, recent scholarship has demonstrated how an interdependent web of economic institutions has shaped each country’s response in varied ways. This paper builds on the VoC literature and argues that the hierarchical market economy (HME) as a distinct variety serves as a better model for understanding the trajectory of defense industries in many second-tier producers that do not fit the existing categories of VoC. We conduct an in-depth case study of South Korea’s defense-industry reform initiated in 2008 and the subsequent threefold increase in its arms exports. We show that the trajectory of South Korea’s defense-industry reform can be seen as the result of an HME’s attempt to adapt to the globalization of arms production in ways that preserve its distinct comparative advantage. As the HME model has broad applicability for many countries in Asia and Latin America, our findings have important implications for future developments in the global arms industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papua New Guinea's first deep-sea mining project, once touted as the first of its kind in the world, now appears to be "dead in the water." The mining company behind it has been liquidated, the mining equipment has been rendered obsolete, and the host government has been made to look foolish for supporting the enterprise. This paper examines the application of two concepts--that of the "resource frontier" and that of the "actornetwork"--to reach an understanding of the history of this apparent failure. By elaborating on the additional concept of a "network junction," it seeks to show how arguments about the feasibility or fallibility of this particular project, and deep-sea mining proposals more broadly, have been related to arguments about a range of other issues in which scientific and technological uncertainties are associated with environmental and social impacts or environmental and political risks. Instead of seeking to explain the failure of this project by reference to the attributes of a specific type of maritime resource frontier, the paper shows how the articulation of different policy networks creates the appearance of a frontier in which human and nonhuman actors have combined to produce a variety of unpredictable and open-ended outcomes. From this point of view, the history of this project's failure cannot simply be read as the outcome of a contest between two groups of human actors with clearly defined interests or ideologies, nor does it necessarily spell the end of the policy network in which this project has been embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interprets the disrupted establishment of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, a 620,000 square kilometre marine protection area, as a crucial moment in Pacific frontier making. The development of large-scale protected marine areas is a politically charged frontier tool, in which states garner international recognition and environmental renown by setting aside large swathes of their exclusive economic zones. In the Kermadec Sanctuary, this enclosure hit against an assemblage of Indigenous histories, ecologies, repatriated fishing rights, and privatized fishing quota challenging the of tmarginalized agency of Indigenous people in frontier narratives. This paper argues that three factors are fundamental to untangling this conflict: first, the historical trajectory of terraqueous territorialization in the Kermadec region, second, the post-Treaty of Waitangi settlement dynamics of Māori marine environments, and third, the common ecosystem services model underlying conservation and extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May of 2022, Bongbong Marcos won a commanding 59 percent of the vote to become president of the Philippines. His victory was, on some level, shocking to scholars and analysts of Philippine politics. As a result, a plethora of di'erent theories have been proposed, in an attempt to explain why Marcos won. In this paper, we use nationally representative survey data to explore which factors predict (and do not predict) voting intention for Marcos. We find that, a) support for former President Rodrigo Duterte, b) positive perceptions of the late President Ferdinand Marcos and martial law, and c) ethnic (linguistic) identity are strong predictors of voting for Bongbong Marcos. On the other hand, age, education, and income are not. Consequently, theories based on continuity, coalition, history, and identity provide the most leverage on the question of why Bongbong Marcos won the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations (UN) introduced multiparty elections to Cambodia in 1993 in the hope of bringing about democracy in that country. Ironically, the two-and-a-half decades of uninterrupted elections have led to an ever-more authoritarian government under Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian People's Party (CPP). Authoritarianism under the singledominant party system began in 1997, but has intensified since 2017 with the ban on the leading opposition party. While concurring that repetitive elections have consolidated authoritarianism, this paper argues that elections are not merely tools that authoritarian leaders deploy to hold on to power. Elections are arguably mechanisms that have compelled the CPP to offer several extraordinary economic concessions since 2013; this is the first argument of the paper. The developments have created a win-win scenario for the rulers and the ruled--the authoritarian leaders prolong their rule, and the masses have more disposable income, among various benefits. The second argument is that such policy concessions are made only when the ruling party senses critical challenges from the opposition and voters. This paper contributes to the literature arguing that multiparty elections in electoral authoritarian regimes extract economic policy concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to capture the complex process through which former socialist North Koreans are remade as South Koreans. I argue that the process by which border crossers from North Korea are remade into postsocialist subjects is complex and multi-dimensional. I address the interlocked nature of institutions and subjectivities in citizen-making processes. On the one hand, it involves the institutionalizations of border crossers with the purpose of screening out "dangerous socialist subjects" for security reasons, followed by "post-socialist" education at Hanawon. On the other hand, it also entails the cultural dynamics of the citizen-making processes. Border crossers are taught not only about political democracy and the economic market, but the cultural learning of resilience to cope with hardship and uncertainty in South Korea. This paper finds two distinctive responses to the cultural learning of resilience--fear and rejection. In this sense, the institutionalizations and the cultural teaching of resilience have unintended consequences. These citizen-making processes raise the question of what characterizes normal subjectivity in a modern, marketized economy. Rather than accepting these normal assumptions as given and natural, this paper tries to uncover hidden assumptions and to problematize the arbitrariness of these normative assumptions. What appears normal, rational, free, and democratic can be actually accidental, temporary, absurd, and socially constructed. This paper attempts to challenge and demystify the meaning of rational, free, democratic, resilient, and normative citizenships that tend to be taken for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on precarity in Asia by examining the way in which state law interacts with social, political, and ideological factors in shaping experiences of precarity. Different from studies of precarity that see law as a set of state regulations underpinning the precarious economic and political status of individual workers, this paper adopts a socially grounded view of law that incorporates workers' understandings of and engagements with state law in commonplace settings. It also adopts a view of precarity as a complex dynamic of social, legal, and political processes shaping and reproducing workers' experiences of insecurity and vulnerability at work, rather than a broad, identity-based category of non-standard and informal types of employment. Through an ethnographic study of former state workers' working experiences in Vietnam, this paper sheds light on different aspects of workers' collective and individual struggles against precarity and workplace injustice, and the role that law plays in these struggles. It argues that law contributes to reinforcing workers' precarious experiences, which are underpinned by the tension between their expectations grounded in the socialist era and the realities of workplace injustice and insecurity in a market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While international and Pacific scholarship suggests that communities can play a significant role in improving access to schooling as well as school funding, infrastructure, and resources, there is little research on how school-community relations shape the implementation of fee-free education policies. This is particularly the case in the Pacific region. In Papua New Guinea, communities play a significant role in determining school funding, infrastructure, and access, but their role in implementing the country’s fee-free education policy (introduced in 2012) is poorly understood. Drawing on data from two provinces with very different capacities for service delivery, this paper shows that school-community relations vary significantly, and are crucial for managing challenges associated with the country’s tuition fee-free (TFF) policy, particularly in regards to access to schooling and improving school funding, infrastructure, and resources. While communities have helped advance the TFF policy’s goals, conflict over land, the charging of fees, and the board of management (BOM)—a key local governance body—has, in some cases, undermined national efforts to increase enrollments and make up for the loss of school income from tuition fees. This paper argues that academics and policy makers need to pay greater attention to the sustainability of fee-free education policies, geographical variation, and the improvement of school-community relations. Doing so will require overcoming the tendency to focus on national-level indicators of success associated with fee-free education policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments in the field of social robotics have increasingly played with the boundaries between human and machine, using remote or tele-presence technological innovations as a way to mediate or revolutionize humanmachine interactions. This paper explores one such development, namely the roboticization of care labour in the realm of education, and the ways in which it brokers relationships between human and non-human interaction. Drawing on fieldwork in the Philippines and South Korea and using the telepresence robotic innovation of Engkey as a case study, this paper describes practices that represent the convergence of technology, politics, and intimacies that shape the complexities of contemporary forms of labour migration, articulations of gendered and racialized "skill," and changing relationships between human and non-human. The paper argues that these relationships are intentionally produced mediations of care: gendered and racialized hierarchies that produce new forms of affective labour and sociality that are governed by modes of simultaneous disembodiment and embodiment, immobility and mobility, and marketized statecraft through vocabularies of innovation and exploitation. These technologically produced mediations of care have implications for how we understand the connections between human and machine and how labour and sociality are ultimately brokered in the context of a neoliberal and capitalist world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of the field of hotel and restaurant management, a program popular among Filipino youth hoping to find work overseas, this paper argues that an integral, yet invisible, aspect of educating future migrant workers is "cooling out" working-class students for a hospitality industry that runs on low-wage, contractual labour. This practice of cooling out involves reorienting students' ambitions towards blue-collar jobs that do not require college degrees, encouraging them to start from the bottom in pursuing their migration dreams. Based on qualitative interviews with 36 college educators and 25 students, this paper discusses how the coolingout function serves as a form of migration brokerage, funnelling aspiring migrants into lower segments of the global labour market even before they leave their countries of origin. Yet, students do not question such practices, constructing a notion of working-class values that allows them to take pride in performing work that others might consider undesirable. This paper emphasizes the need for migration scholars to look beyond schooling as a stepping stone towards social mobility and unpack the role of higher education as part of a migration infrastructure that conditions aspiring migrants' mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a pragmatist theory of international relations, combined with parables of alliance formation from local proverbs and literary classics, best explains the art of Thai diplomacy from a historical perspective. Notably avoiding Western colonization, the Thais have enjoyed relative sovereignty and independence throughout their history. Rather than balancing, bandwagoning, or hedging, our study finds that Thailand has deliberately leveraged asymmetrical partnerships between often-opposed great powers and more symmetrical partnerships with less powerful states and multilateral organizations in order to maintain its physical and identitybased ontological security. We draw our empirical evidence from four historical periods: the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, World War II, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War modern era. Our findings can be applied to other Southeast Asian states and their own parables of alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the exclusionary politics of casino urbanism in Singapore, especially in terms of how this particular brand of urbanism reproduces disciplinary regimes through the uneven consumption of fun and leisure. Singapore's vision of becoming a world-class "state of fun" is accompanied by increasingly sophisticated measures of boundary making between global leisure citizens and the excluded others, often comprised of the working class and those deemed to be at risk or lacking self-control and responsibility. The evolving biopolitical borders coincide with the multiple borders set up around Singapore's casino spaces, ensuring the exclusive consumption of Singapore's casino urbanism by the wealthy few. The fun regimes help to normalize social exclusion, moralize disciplinary control, and give legitimacy to the new class of global consumers under the operations of the state-capital apparatus. This paper argues that exclusive casino urbanism has broader social and political implications on issues of equality, accessibility, and urban participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many Indigenous peoples, ancestral lands are a source of nourishment, strength, and sovereignty that counteracts colonial legacies of violence and hegemony. However, the feelings associated with place and the land can also be complicated by embodied fear and ambivalence. What happens when the remnants of colonialism feed feelings of ambivalence, shame, or fear of the land? How do these lasting emotional scars on Indigenous minds and bodies impact Native place-making, today? This paper problematizes the role of ancestral lands and affective place-making in shaping Indigenous identity, sovereignty, resource management, and sustainability. In the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, ancestral places are felt as much as seen, and the spirits that dwell there can be dangerous. The active concealment of these Marquesan reactions and relationships to place illustrates the blending of colonial and Indigenous histories and values in ambivalent, affective experiences on the land. Thus, even as islanders work to revitalize their traditional culture and build a sustainable future based on ancestral places, reticence complicates local relationships to the land and the vital hopes they represent. As global sustainability efforts emphasize the conservation of lands inhabited by Indigenous communities, recognizing the conflicted, emplaced emotions and experiences of local peoples will be a key part of understanding such areas and how to preserve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on multi-site research in China and South Korea, this paper examines the motivations for rural-origin Chinese students to study abroad in South Korea and how their overseas experiences are mediated by both internal and international educational hierarchies. Existing literature on transnational student mobility from Asia mainly focuses on students from urban middle-class backgrounds, while little attention has been paid to students from less advantaged backgrounds. Scholars have noted that China's seemingly meritocratic gaokao (national college entrance exam) policy in reality functions to perpetuate the structural marginalization of rural students in its educational system. This research moves beyond the internal migration paradigm by examining how social inequalities associated with the rural/urban divide are reproduced and re-articulated by the intersection of class, gender, place of origin, and time management at the transnational scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries are becoming interested in developing their film industries as a way of promoting their national culture and increasing their soft power. With the continued global dominance of Hollywood films, policy makers are increasingly considering government subsidies as an essential tool in promoting their national film industries. However, the actual effectiveness of subsidies in promoting a film industry remains debatable. In order to better address this issue, this paper evaluates and compares the experiences of France and Korea. Both countries have adopted exactly the same sequence of instruments-import quotas, screen quotas, and then subsidies-yet have applied almost the opposite subsidy policies. Since the 1950s, France has intensively used subsidies while Korea has not. After more than a half century, these different subsidy policies have led to very different outcomes. This paper shows that a film industry without significant government subsidies can prosper better in the long term than a heavily subsidized one. This is an important lesson for countries that want to develop their film industry and to promote their culture by designing effective film policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in promoting Chinese outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) in the presence of rising economic policy uncertainty in China's partner countries. We postulate that the signing of BITs should help stimulate COFDI because the treaties send a credible signal to foreign investors about the host country's intent to protect Chinese investment, and make it more difficult for the host country to violate its treaty obligations. BITs that contain rigorous investment protection and liberalization provisions, in particular, should be more likely to encourage COFDI as they directly influence Chinese investors' expectations about the stability, predictability, and security of the host market. However, while BITs generally promote COFDI, host country economic policy uncertainty may also limit their effectiveness. This is because uncertainty tends to undermine investor confidence, trigger capital flows from high- to low-risk countries, and dampen commercial activities. Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation models of the determinants of COFDI to 188 countries between 2003 and 2017 lend substantial support to our conjectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Singapore, the percentage of elected female politicians rose from 3.8 percent in 1984 to 22.5 percent after the 2015 general election. After years of exclusion, why were gender reforms adopted and how did they lead to more women in political office? Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, this paper shows that in Singapore party pragmatism rather than international diffusion of gender equality norms, feminist lobbying, or rival party pressures drove gender reforms. It is argued that the ruling People's Action Party's (PAP) strategic and electoral calculations to maintain hegemonic rule drove its policy u-turn to nominate an average of about 17.6 percent female candidates in the last three elections. Similar to the PAP's bid to capture women voters in the 1959 elections, it had to alter its patriarchal, conservative image to appeal to the younger, progressive electorate in the 2000s. Additionally, Singapore's electoral system that includes multi-member constituencies based on plurality party bloc vote rule also makes it easier to include women and diversify the party slate. But despite the strategic and electoral incentives, a gender gap remains. Drawing from a range of public opinion data, this paper explains why traditional gender stereotypes, biased social norms, and unequal family responsibilities may hold women back from full political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most prominent trends in Latin America in the 2000s has been the proliferation of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) across the Pacific basin. Beginning with the path-breaking Chile-Korea FTA in 2004 up to the Costa Rica-Singapore FTA in 2013, the past decade has seen the negotiation of twenty-two cross-Pacific accords. China, too, has jumped on to the cross-Pacific FTA bandwagon, including its negotiation of separate bilateral FTAs with Chile (2006), Peru (2009), and Costa Rica (2011). This paper analyzes the origins, content, and preliminary outcomes of these three China-Latin America FTAs. The findings are threefold: 1) in contrast with other cross-Pacific FTAs, which include at least one developed country, the three FTAs analyzed in this paper constitute "south-south" FTAs; yet' in contrast with other south-south FTAs, these three China-Latin America accords approximate WTO+ standards vis-a-vis the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its new trade agenda (services, investment, and intellectual property rights); 2) although the motives for negotiating these developingdeveloping country accords varied, on the part of China and the countries themselves, this did not disrupt the march toward WTO+ status; and 3) while all three of these FTAs elude standard theoretical explanations for the negotiation of bilateral FTAs, the three Latin American countries do share similar reform trajectories and institutional affinities, which sheds light on the decision and capacity of each to negotiate a bilateral FTA with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how democratization has affected the dynamics of candidate selection in South Korea. After democratization in the late 1980s, it was expected that intra-party democracy would follow. In response to increasing public demand, the major parties adopted primary systems in the early 2000s. Nonetheless, most candidates for the legislature are still nominated by a small number of central party elites without additional ballots in the local branches. To explain the persistence of such exclusive, centralized features of candidate selection, I highlight the limited impact democratization has had on the political environment in which the parties operate. More specifically, since the 1987 democratization process resulted in a compromise agreement established by a small number of party leaders, South Korea retained much of the political legacy from authoritarian times, such as an electoral system advantageous to the major parties and legal provisions restricting electoral campaigns, party activities, and political participation. The continuation of these political institutions makes radical candidate selection reform highly unlikely as the party elites have no incentive to expand and decentralize the selection process. Without significant changes to the political institutions at the national level, the dominance of the central party elite over the final outcome of candidate selection looks likely to continue for the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal sector actors played a key role in Mumbai's resilience to disastrous floods in 2005. Members of small-scale retail and service-sector businesses, the city's underclass, its waste workers and scrap dealers, and sundry individual tradespersons such as electricians, plumbers, masons, and sanitary workers were at the heart of recovery and rehabilitation in the weeks following the floods of July 2005. These floods not only affected significant parts of the city's new Central Business District (CBD) and business sectors but also its poor and marginalized communities that lived in environmentally fragile and marginal locations. Ironically, these actors have also been at the receiving end of distorted urban planning initiatives, real estate growth, bourgeois environmentalism-inspired middle-class activism, and ethnic chauvinist political forces, which have pushed them to the city's social, economic, and spatial margins. Hence, the aforementioned reasons have made the lives and livelihoods of these actors quite precarious and insecure. Going with recent sociological attempts to bridge the expanding field of disaster studies and classical sociological theorization by linking development theories to the study of disasters and their social implications, this paper argues for more imaginative disaster mitigation and management strategies that recognize the role of informal sector workers in post-disaster resilience. It is argued that this recognition should be accompanied by formal state-sponsored institutional inclusion and integration of informal sector workers and actors in disaster governance. In Mumbai, informal economic actors were characterized by resourcefulness, access to key networks in enabling recovery, flexibility and innovativeness in design and planning, and the ability to offer low-cost options which could be rapidly deployed. These tend to contrast with the slowness and cumbersome procedures and responses that typify formal state and private responses to disasters. Given the feeble response mechanisms of state institutions in disaster management and mitigation in much of the developing world, and the established fact of citizen action being the first to respond to disaster situations, this paper suggests that paying attention to and involving informal sector actors in disaster governance can both augment the quality of disaster management and enhance the possibility of greater integration of the city's marginalized and excluded groups into its mainstream social fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their appearance in the mid-1990s, Chinese labour NGOs have mostly focused on disseminating labour law and guiding labour disputes through official channels. In so doing, they have assisted the Chinese Communist Party in achieving its paramount goal of maintaining social stability. In line with this approach, activists in these organizations have traditionally framed their work in terms of "public interest" or "legality," both of which resonate with the hegemonic discourses of the Party-state. However, earlier this decade a minority of Chinese labour activists began to employ some new counterhegemonic narratives centred on the experience of the labour movement and the practice of collective bargaining that attempted to recode the proletarian experience outside of its official representation. In this paper we analyze this discursive shift through the voices of the activists involved, and argue that the rise of these new counterhegemonic voices was one of the reasons that led to the Party-state cracking down on labour NGOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southeast Asian studies faces multiple challenges, such as misgivings among its scholars regarding the field's geopolitical lineage, skepticism about the relevance of area studies in an era of globalization, and the rise of competing discipline-based approaches. But these challenges also provide the impetus for rethinking and broadening, especially through a closer engagement with disciplinary approaches and comparative studies. To this end, this paper highlights two possibilities: "transnational area studies" and "disciplinary regional studies." Together, they attest to the "promise of comparisons." Using examples such as the discourse on "Mediterranean analogy" in Southeast Asian historiography and the study of Southeast Asian regionalism by international relations scholars, this paper argues that comparisons need to go beyond analogies that do little more than serve as a self-vindicating "comfort zone" for the scholar. Also, comparisons can be enhanced by studying the processes and consequences of diffusion, not in the sense of establishing the universal validity of certain ideas and institutions, but of exploring their localization and contribution to diversity. Comparisons should not privilege an ideal type on the basis of which "others" are studied and judged. Citing the danger of Eurocentrism in comparing Southeast Asia with the Mediterranean, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the European Union, the paper argues that comparisons should recognize the significance of each case in terms of its own context. Such comparisons do not invoke a "spectre," but offer the promise of broadening Southeast Asian studies to overcome the lingering doubts about the future of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the changing role of the nation-state in the context of the broader social structure of society amid net-liberal globalization, with a focus on the politics of the Korean Wave. It analyzes the ways in which the Korean government has developed its unique cultural policy and how it has contributed to the growth in Korean cultural production and export. The paper argues that net-liberal ideologies have not completely altered the role of the nation-state in the Korean Wave in spite of the dominance of net-liberal ideology in Korea's economic conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As articulated by Joseph Nye, soft power is the ability to achieve goals through attraction rather than by threat or conflict. Although frequently associated with the state and foreign policy, non-state actors can also develop and possess soft power independent of the state. In particular, educational institutions have long held significant amounts of soft power that transcend national boundaries. Through knowledge sharing, educational institutions can leverage soft power to influence a society through educating its social and political elites, and future leaders. Knowledge sharing that focuses on human resource development is one of the most successful areas of cooperation between North Korea and the international community. Knowledge-sharing activities not only give North Korean participants access to knowledge but this access contains an important potential for socialization effects: the spreading of ideas, customs and values. Despite this, however, the current body of literature on knowledge sharing is quite limited. Based on the ongoing knowledge-sharing experiences with North Korea at the University of British Columbia, this paper explores the nature and the development of knowledge sharing with Pyongyang, demonstrating that North Korea can be a "willing interpreter and receiver" of soft power. Using the concept of university soft power, the paper proposes that educational institutions are inherently effective in using their influence and expertise to initiate successful, long-term knowledge sharing with North Korea. It will also examine strategies for successful knowledge sharing with Pyongyang and the impacts of such knowledge sharing with relation to engagement efforts with North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how decentralization has created a "local political arena" and has been transforming governance in the environmental management sector in South Korea. Korea has been known as a developmental state where the strong central government and businesses have conspicuously dominated during most of its industrialization period. Yet, the deepened democracy, global competitiveness and fiscal austerity have pressured central political stakeholders to devolve highly centralized functions and authority to local bodies since the mid-1990s. The building of democratic institutions at the local level, including directly elected mayors and city councils, has created room for local politics and diminished central political leverage over local affairs. The national economic crisis has highlighted the inefficiency of the centralized system and encouraged further administrative and fiscal decentralization under the democratic governments. In this context, while the central government and big businesses continue to have a significant say in policy making, local executives, with their expanded decisional authority and resources, are trying to improve the images of their cities and to take responsibility for promoting urban economies and improving quality of life in the age of trans-border links and competition. This paper analyzes the case of Ulsan, where Hyundai and several other conglomerates are located and which has been a symbol of state-led industrialization during most of the development period. Despite the large role played by the centre in the development of Ulsan, the empowered mayor of the city has successfully turned citizens' attention to post-industrial aspects of governance for ensuring the future competitiveness of the city in global markets by orchestrating collaborative implementation of environmental policies. The paper explores how this governance shift in Ulsan has led successful collaborative environmental change by mobilizing local businesses, civic organizations and general citizens who might not have been interested in the making of an "environment-friendly city." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2011 marked the tenth anniversary of the implementation of Indonesia's regional autonomy laws. This paper considers implications of more than a decade of decentralized governance for urban development in Indonesia. After a brief historical overview and consideration of the rationale for political and administrative decentralization in that national context, we examine a range of critical perspectives on policy outcomes. Both media coverage and academic analyses have overwhelmingly cast decentralized governance as it has been implemented in Indonesia in a negative light. As a corrective to this, we have sought to identify positive outcomes and possibilities associated with Indonesia's large-scale decentralization project. In particular, we detail the cases of two cities which have been cast in a variety of rankings and media representations as success stories of urban development through decentralized governance: Solo (or Surakartaas the city is also formally named) and Surabaya. In the final section of the paper, we critically evaluate these two cases and discuss their wider implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000 in New Delhi, urban decentralization has mainly come in the form of the highly visible Bhagidari or partnership scheme, inviting city residents to participate in a "process of dialogue and the discovery of jointsolutions."1 This paper critically examines this program between 2000 and 2012, through the experiences of primarily middle-class neighbourhood organizations called Resident Welfare Associations, or RWAs that were included in the scheme. The paper argues that rather than constitutional decentralization, Bhagidari as an initiative must be read in terms of a larger shift to entrepreneurial governance. Bhagidari's success has been in delegating management to RWAs, at little cost to city government, while seemingly opening up a "participatory" space for middle-class urban residents in civic affairs. However, for RWAs the article argues that Bhagidari's impact has come to represent an attempt at harnessing and managing the new middle-class aspiration to engage with urban government for administrative and political ends. In this context, Bhagidari has also been seen as an important means of cultivating middle-class consent and a constituency through courting RWAs for an ambitious chief executive. Over time, this has become a common strategy for building political and civic visibility for a range of actors, one reason why the number of RWAs has proliferated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers what a Foucauldian-informed analysis of decentralization and urban transformation offers to current debates. It analyzes decentralization as a new regime of governing, in contrast to many studies that treat it as a policy process, objective or outcome aimed at alleviating some problem of centralized authority. Rather than understanding decentralization as less state governance, this paper asks how practices such as local autonomy are in fact technologies of governing the urban. Decentralization is analyzed then not simply as an absence of some central state power, either in the political or fiscal realm, but rather, as new mechanisms of governing the urban, which are linked with the regulation and constitution of subjects. The paper focuses on an aspect of decentralization that typically is under-examined: the decentralization of welfare provisioning in urban China. Under high socialism of the Maoist era, social services for urban residents were distributed by the state, through the work unit (danwei) as part of the planned economy. In recent years, however, major reforms have been put into place to diversify the ways in which social services are delivered, under a general rubric of decentralizing the distribution away from the state. Based on anthropological research in Dalian, a major port city in northeast China, this paper examines a new social practice and subject form that has emerged with new ways of caring for those in need in the city: volunteerism. By focusing on this resulting social form, the paper argues that we may better understand how decentralization is not a singular process with multiple outcomes, but rather, a complex assemblage of elements that includes technical questiofis about how to govern as well as normative practices of subject formation. An analytical disaggregation of these elements also allows us to avoid the assumption that decentralization necessarily contains certain characteristics, or that it will lead to particular kinds of political and social forms [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2004, India has introduced a series of progressive national bills that enact a right to new civic entitlements, ranging from information, work and education to forest conservation, food and basic public services. What explains the emergence of these laws? How are the rights conceived by these acts conceptualized, operationalized and pursued? What are the promises, challenges and risks—legal, political and economic—of enshrining socioeconomic entitlements as formal statutory rights? This paper engages these questions. In part 1, I argue that three slow-burning processes since the 1980s, distinct yet related, catalyzed India's new rights agenda: high socio-legal activism, rapid uneven development and the expanding popular foundations of its federal parliamentary democracy. Significantly, all three processes exposed the growing nexus between political corruption and socioeconomic inequality. Equally, however, each raised popular expectations for greater socialjustice that were only partly met. Part 2 of the paper evaluates India's new rights agenda. ]he promise of these new laws is threefold: they breach the traditional division of civil, politica' and socioeconomic rights, devise innovative governance mechanisms that enable citizens to see the state and provide fresh incentives for new political coalitions to emerge across state and fociety. Several risks exist, however. Official political resistance from above and below, the limited capacities of judicial actors, state bureaucracies and social forces and the relatively narrow base of many of these new movements endanger the potential of these reforms. The paper concludes by considering several imperatives that India's evolving rights movement must confront to realize its ambition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1991, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) commenced the first Chinese national oil company equity oil investment overseas when it invested in a UN-sponsored oil sands project in Canada. Since then, the CNPC and the other Chinese national oil companies (Sinopec and the CNOOC) have steadily increased their equity oil investments in developing nations, sometimes with the assistance of various Chinese party and government organs. Viewed in the context of China's burgeoning oil consumption and plateauing oil production, these investments have led to accusations by Western analysts and policy makers that China is engaging in "mercantilism" by "locking up" oil supplies from vulnerable developing nations to assuage their mounting energy-security woes. Through examining Chinese oil engagement in Kazakhstan, this paper will analyze whether accusations of "mercantilism" can adequately capture the complexities and dynamics that drive Chinese oil company investment in developing nations. This will be achieved by first surveying contemporary debates regarding Chinese oil engagement abroad and then linking these debates to historical and contemporary conceptualizations of mercantilism. This will allow for a new multi-faceted definition of "oil mercantilist" behaviour, which will shift the label from a statement of ethical value to a statement of empirical fact that can be tested. This definition will then be used to examine the institutional contexts in China that support and counter contemporary accusations of oil mercantilism, and then to explore Chinese oil engagement in Kazakhstan from 1996 to the present day. This paper will contribute to emerging literature that suggests Chinese oil investment and diplomacy cannot be simply understood through mercantilist perspectives. Analyses of Chinese oil engagement need to recognize the important influence that China's institutional reforms have had on Chinese national oil companies' increasingly commercial approach to foreign investment, in addition to the unique host-country contexts China encounters through its oil investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the perspectives and narratives developed by three different sets of Chinese investors in Papua New Guinea (PNG): investors in the retail, mining and construction sectors. It is estimated that 90 percent of new Chinese private investors in the PNG retail sector hail from Fuqing, a coastal community in Fujian Province with a long history of transnational migration. Larger state-owned mining ventures and construction companies draw on a more disparate workforce, even though they are headquartered in Beijing. All three sets of investors face different degrees of stigmatization from their competitors, the media and different Chinese and local actors. Based on interviews with Chinese investors in PNG and China, and drawing on Chinese scholarly studies, this paper will explore the interaction of these three groups of investors with Chinese state and non-state actors, and evaluate how this shapes the process of "localization." The paper will examine how relations with state and non-state actors in PNG are evolving over time, as both groups find ways to "get things done" in a country where mainland Chinese investors have a short history of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a broad context for assessing China's increased interest in the Pacific Islands, and examines some of the major implications for regional security, regional politics, Western influence and self-determination in the region. It argues that Beijing's policy towards the Pacific is not driven by strategic competition with the United States, as some have maintained. Nor is it reducible to a specific set of interests centred on natural resources and, especially, competition with Taiwan. Although these factors are important, China's activities in the region are best understood as part of a much larger outreach to the developing world that is likely to endure and intensify. The paper suggests that China's rise is generally welcomed by island leaders, and makes the case that it offers island states economic and political opportunities not available under established structures of power and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's increasing role as a provider of overseas aid is the subject of considerable debate both within and outside of China. However, despite research activity examining how Chinese aid is materialized, very little is actually known about why Chinese aid projects are developed or implemented the way they are. Although recent indications suggest the Chinese government is increasingly willing to be more open about overseas aid, for example, the release of the first White Paper on Foreign Aid in 2011, external observers remain largely unaware of the values, goals and motivations behind Chinese aid projects. Alongside this lack of information, non-Chinese analyses tend to be founded on a Realist approach to understanding international relations in which a "rising power" such as China automatically constitutes a threat to existing power relations. As a result, many scholars conclude that China's aid is part of a strategic quest to further its own geopolitical ends. This paper provides insights into the contentious topic of the drivers behind Chinese overseas development assistance. It finds that Chinese elites in the international development sphere do not share the views prevalent in Western international relations discourse about the international system and China's role within it. This article argues that exploring Chinese development actors' and commentators' conceptions of what development means, along with their views on China's role and obligations within the international system, allows a better understanding of the motivations behind Chinese aid, and a reexamination of some of the misconceptions around Chinese aid as a tool of Chinese geopolitical strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the coverage in seven major Japanese and Taiwanese daily newspapers of a selection of events involving both societies in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this paper investigates the phenomenon of rhetorical instrumentalization of the past for present ideological purposes. The concerns of this study are the processes of dehistorization in Japanese and Taiwanese news and public debate, and through a critical thematic reading of the sources I argue that a motif of Taiwanese repetition and imitation of Japan runs through all the studied cases as a basic narrative formula. Analyzed cases include news presentations of Taiwanese politicians visiting Japan, controversial statements on Taiwan by a Japanese cabinet minister, infrastructure developments in present-day Taiwan and the controversy surrounding a Japanese guidebook to Taiwanese prostitution. Throughout the material, Taiwan is pictured as ideally progressing along a trajectory marked out by Japan and the two are cast in fixed roles that recall their relative positions in the half-century of Japanese colonization of Taiwan: Japan teaches Taiwan order, unity and modern development and Taiwan studies Japan's past to overcome the challenges of its own present. Or Taiwan spontaneously imitates Japanese precedence as a consequence of its own development. This paper fundamentally challenges the rationale underlying strategic instrumentalization of the past and draws critical attention to the paradoxical fact that the use of the repetition formula positions the covered news events in a thematic field of time-lag and retrospection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes SMSGupShup, a mobile-centric social networking platform in India. It focuses on a set of dominant users (young, male) who are redefining the nature of micro-blogging and the creation of mobile networking communities. Like many social networking sites, assembling, maintaining and growing social networks are primary behaviours on GupShup. Unlike many others, where maintaining a personalized profile and conversing with a networked community take prominence, users of GupShup show markedly different messaging or broadcasting practices. While captivated by the idea of connecting with people all over India for the first time through the GupShup platform, the primary motivation of users is not conversation, forging a "second life" or building interest groups, but optimizing the networking service to expand one's own group membership. From a qualitative study of user profiles, the paper demonstrates how GupShup can inform thinking about facets of mobile communities in developing countries: specifically, changing ideas about the networking platform as a "second social life" to one of a pecuniary "resource." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosive growth in India's mobile telephony during the last decade coincided with a robust growth in its trade with China. A variety of imported equipment from China played a critical role in augmenting the use of mobile phones and expansion of networks in India. This paper studies the trends of these imports and examines the reasons for their penetrating deep into the Indian market. It argues that Chinese imports bridged a serious supply-side deficiency in India's telecom sector: the absence of a modern indigenous equipment manufacturing industry. Pointing out that development of the latter has been stunted due to low R&D, limited innovations, lack of access to finance, and liberal access to imports, the paper argues that Chinese imports are likely to continue until these conditions prevail, notwithstanding security concerns over such imports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to explore the interrelations between safeguarding migration flows between Laos and Thailand and dual models of migrant brokers' subjectivity. Within the anti-trafficking community in the Mekong region there is a tacit dual imagery of"insider" and "outsider" categories, where external brokers are associated with "risk," whereas friends and personal networks within village communities constitute possible avenues for "safe migration." The Thai and Lao governments have over the past years attempted to legalize migration flows. An important rationale for this--which is advocated by international organizations in the Mekong region and elsewhere--is the claim that legalization will "dry out" a market for dubious brokers, making labour migration safer. This paper suggests that what sustains this "legalization model" is an implicit utilitarian view of migration which projects ideal- type depictions of traffickers and brokers. In light of ethnographic data from the commercial sex industry along the Thai-Lao border, this paper suggests that migration networks do not replace brokers, as brokering services are embedded within these very same networks where legality is appropriated as a resource with mixed results. Yet, although legality is being manufactured through the migration process, both consensual and deceptive recruitment (i.e., "trafficking") of young Lao women, is taking place within a context where sex workers themselves play a central role as dilettante-brokers within wider informal social networks. In other words, legality does not alter brokering services, but rather the reverse holds true. "Trafficking," then, is taking place in the very same contexts that are deemed "safe" by anti-trafficking programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]