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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]

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens in the early hours of 8 March 2014, initial reactions suggesting that it was just another airliner disaster proved only partially correct. This article offers the interpretation that the multinational search effort for the missing Malaysian Boeing 777-200 airliner was revelatory of an abridged form of security competition among the mostly Pacific Rim states participating in both the post mortem and the search and rescue (SAR) operations. Although the Asia Pacific peace has been largely unbroken since the end of the Cold War, security competition among great powers, middle powers and weak states is still ongoing. In fact, this security competition is taking on proxy forms given the relative robustness of the overlapping architecture of Pacific Rim security regionalism in tamping down pressures for overt armed conflict to advance national security interests. MH370, following in the wake of the destruction wrought by natural disasters since the early 2000s, has provoked a competition in technological prowess in SAR operations, and more broadly, in quasi-civilian humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) capabilities amongst Pacific Rim states that have overlapping claims on the South China Sea and with interests in revising existing patterns of diplomatic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While information warfare (IW) has been treated by its foremost western proponents as a strategic revolution, the reasons for such a claim are actually rather weak if one considers how non-western approaches to the informational components of warfare have put forth their positions within a multidimensional context of strategy. This article ventures an Asian perspective that can potentially offer a more nuanced contribution to the study of IW. This article will pan out by first critically analyzing the predominantly American interpretation of IW as a set of five characteristics that can be contrasted to an Asian rival. Subsequently, we will elaborate a list of features likely to characterize a generic Asian IW approach, which I will argue, is more appropriately termed information operations (IO). These Asian IO features will be teased out through a reading of Sun Tzu, Mao Zedong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. An Asian IO approach will not distinguish wartime and peacetime applications, and neither will it place a premium on liberal democratic ideology as a basis for information superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Democracy as political doctrine has its fair share of controversies over the adjudication of rights and the prioritization of the individual over the community. These debates have largely derived from its western genesis. The current stage of global development has however supplied many non-western perspectives on democracy which suggest that any consensus over an identifiable body of democratic thought is likely to witness more sub-diversity than ever before. This article argues that contemporary Asian thinkers on the philosophy of government have a valuable contribution to make to democratic discourse notwithstanding the clichés of the Asian Values debate of the 1990s. By performing a sampled reading of José Rizal, Sukarno and Lee Kuan Yew on their diverse interpretations of guided democracy in a nationalistic context, it will be shown that these three modern Southeast Asian political thinkers would offer some tentative Asian insights on the democracy of dignity and of responsibility. [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]