Search

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]

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]