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Since the 1990s, Singapore has developed a steady reputation as a high technology and communications hub. Being 100 percent urbanized seems to have been an asset in the city-state's top-down [...]

Democracy as interpreted in the East emphasizes dignity and responsibility. Democracy, according to them should be guided to include, the welfare of the individual, opposing injustice, providing equality and an access to education, for all.

The study of small state perceptions of international order has been much neglected. Small state leaders are intellectual heavyweights in a disproportionate relationship to their respective sovereign territorial domains. To navigate the treacherous currents of international order, they rely on their own synthesised views of manoeuvrable spaces amongst great powers. Simultaneously, they are also reflective of the limits of global institutional governance. Moreover, small state leaders frequently weigh international order in moral terms. The intellectual propaganda of charismatic and authoritative foreign policy leaders from then-Czechoslovakia, Ghana and Singapore will be read to illustrate these insights. The conclusion will suggest that small state theorising can enrich mainstream IR theory as a result of these perspectives from small state actorness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While local Marxist and neo-Marxist parties attempted to synchronize their revolutionary struggles with the centers of world communism during the period 1945–1991, political currents on the ground in Malaysia and Singapore were pushing for the establishment of postcolonial authority, social peace, and economic prosperity. The Cold War struggle between 'communism' and 'democratic capitalism' was highly refracted, even distorted, on the ground in these two Southeast Asian countries. This refraction was largely manifested in the struggles by nationalists of all ideological stripes to achieve a multiracial society through interethnic decolonization under the banner of waging 'class warfare' against colonial authority. For many anti-colonial political parties, siding with or joining leftist movements was a façade for revolutionary agendas that were not necessarily Marxist-Leninist in orientation. Secondly, the biographies and civil society narratives of contending political figures of the time suggest that they were less inclined to define their thinking about development along Cold War ideological orthodoxy than to defy the latter to make things work for prosperity. Finally, the successor elites who took the place of the colonial rulers were consistently obsessed with burnishing sovereignty in spite of the international Cold War. This can be seen in their slippery practice of nonalignment in foreign policy. The Malaysian and Singaporean cases strongly present the thesis of indigenization of the Cold War for local purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of law in South East Asia frustrates many scholars due to its subliminal character. I call this subliminal form of law 'legalism'. This article adopts the method of historical sociology to trace three evolutionary phases in South East Asia's international history of legalism to illuminate the cumulative mixture of informality beneath formality in the practice of legalism via 'social morality'. In pre-colonial times, divinely-guided moral censure and the ethical reputation of particular rulers passed for proto-intersocietal law. In colonial times, international law was foisted by Western powers onto the informal social morality of the region, resulting in power politics operating behind legal manoeuvres. The advent of ASEAN saw a reversion to a preference for even greater informality and soft law. Finally, the post-colonial era witnessed experimentation with Westphalian international law. This has resulted nowadays in a cumulative halfway house of soft legalism operated through diplomatic social morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a qualitative analysis of three air disasters from Asia in recent years—MH370, MH17 and QZ8501—this article investigates the puzzle of how aviation disasters open up a sovereign state's domestic governance and foreign policy to international questioning within an anarchic international system. This enquiry thereby highlights the gaps in the global governance of aviation, particularly in the areas of safety and recovery in the wake of aviation disasters. Three linked literatures demonstrate this dynamic. First, aligned with the 'emotional turn' in international relations, we show that the portrayal of air disasters and grieving next of kin in global media highlights the politics of grief and trauma. Second, aviation disasters surface the politics of disaster diplomacy in the guise of 'security competition by proxy' in the recovery process. Third, we emphasize that these shortfalls in domestic governance and international cooperation demonstrated by the attention-grabbing spectacle of aviation disasters consequently underscore important knowledge, norms and compliance gaps in global aviation governance. Aviation disasters and their aftermath thus shine an international spotlight on the state's domestic governance and foreign policies in these three manners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System is to be both praised and critiqued for opening spaces for discussing civilisational standards in the era of a globalising world. It offers a healthy provocation for inquiry into how non-Western states ought to comprehend the legacies of Western political evolution colouring existing ‘IR’ as a discipline. Linklater’s book inspires three thematic reactions: globalisation does bring harm; the notion of a universal civilisation remains open to debate; and the possibilities of civilising patterns in premodern Southeast Asia serving as supplementary mirrors and extensions of the relationship between violence and civilisation. It is suggested that Linklater’s sequel must consider the trajectory of non-Western sociologies of IR. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the tension between sovereignty and intervention through the philosophical lenses of three classical realists -- Machiavelli, Hobbes and Bodin. A close reading of their studies of sovereignty reveals that they have been animated by a common philosophical search for order and preservation by state authorities amidst the arbitrariness inherent in politics. Their quest for these goals was premised upon the construction of sovereignty in tandem with intervention. Explaining the realist premises of intervention also requires the co-constitution of a third idea: the logic of expedience intrinsic to sovereignty itself. This holds implications for the way one views sovereignty in contemporary international relations discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1992 and 2000, the international order witnessed a clash of discourses not seen since the height of the Cold War when both superpowers engaged in propaganda offensives to assert the superiority of their respective governing ideologies. However, unlike the Cold War, the Asian Values Debate did not involve a supporting cast of armed occupations, insurgencies and the preaching of revolution. It involved instead statements of difference couched in intellectual and material terms, and also relied heavily on persuasion by words and symbolic deeds. This article seeks to evaluate Singaporean foreign policy in the Asian Values Debate by using the concept of soft power as described by Joseph Nye. However, soft power, as the ability to obtain foreign policy ends through attraction or convincing rather than through coercion, is itself vulnerable to instances where the ideas propounded diverge from the practices they purport to inspire. Singapore's role in the Debate will be examined through three events at its zenith between 1992 and 2000: the clash between Asia and the West at the 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna, the Michael Fay Caning Affair which directly pitted Singapore against the US in 1994, and the fate of the Asian exceptionalist argument in the face of the 1997-99 Asian Financial Crisis. The conclusion suggests that Singaporean foreign policy's experiment in soft power has had its successes, but it remains qualified in its applicability to other Asian foreign policies by certain limits inherent in the Singaporean discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To scholars researching the connections between international relations and globalisation, such as those in the five books reviewed here, 'foreign policy' is becoming functionally and descriptively rivalled in a globalising context. Foreign policy, once the theoretically exclusive prerogative of the nation-state, is Violated daily by new developments in non-state actorness arising from transnational technical and welfare issues such as trade, finance, labour standards and environmentalism. These books under review introduce the displacement lexicon of transnational politics, global civil society, non-state resistance and complexity into policymaking consciousness; in short, the post-international era. The conclusion proposes to tease out the preliminary outlines of the post-international challenge to foreign policy on the basis of 'plus non-state' actor-interest considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]