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Recent escalations in the severity of extreme weather events in Europe and Asia have set the stage for a rethink of international relations as a policy pathway towards dealing with climate change. A rethink of state obligations in international relations requires a refocus towards the social contract undergirding sovereignty and an acceptance that we are into the era of supra-sovereign consequences. Global warming attests to this expansive spatialisation of consequences. This article argues that the State can take two practical steps to cope with climate change: the spatialisation of obligations to citizens to protect them against extreme weather; and the need for officials and citizenry to accept that the sovereign state owes moral obligations to complex chains of culpability across geographical borders that transcend sovereignty itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore's politics post-2011 is increasingly exhibiting symptoms of a bifurcation into two broad 'paradigms'. Assuming that the result of the 2011 General Elections, when the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) [...]

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]

The work of Gentile Bellini that depicts a young Turkish man seated on the floor, has a rich and complex history and has inspired views as an artist from several different cultures which has raised questions about relationships between East and West and between the Islamic and Christian worlds. The seated scribe by Bellini became an important example of European art in Persia, where the compilation was intended to survey the history of Persian paintings.

Peter Schatborn. Drawn to Warmth: Seventeenth Century Dutch Artists in Italy. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, Inc., 2003. 224 pp. illus. bibl. $80. ISBN: 90-400-9535-3. Peter Schatborn's valedictory exhibition for the Amsterdam [...]

The Singaporean polity has created the ‘militarized civilian’. This policy phenomenon beckons the question: How is this cross-fertilization carried out in Singapore's civil–military relations? Militarization is in the first sense meant to inculcate a calibrated dual personality within the civilian whereby being an effective soldier requires indulging in simulated military suffering as a badge of pride; at the same time, the citizen soldier has to believe that military and civilian values are perfectly interchangeable and contribute equally to the maintenance of peace. In a second sense, militarization is equally about permanently ritualizing sacrifices for a communitarian defence. We argue that while mostly successful, militarization also produces the tension arising from the need to appear pugnaciously vigilant while avoiding the casualties that must logically arise from heightened simulated combat. This tension is explained through two dimensions of ongoing crises: the parameters of a politically dramatized National Service ritual; and the constant propaganda of geopolitical dangers threatening the Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asian diplomatic practices consistently frustrate western policymakers. This, I argue, is due in large part to cultural factors and the differences in interpreting political modernization. I will identify the features that contribute to a 'diplomacy of encounter' by, firstly, performing a historical reading of early indigenous annals that treat diplomacy in Asia, as well as of Jesuit and Portuguese encounters with Asia in the 1500s and 1600s; secondly, by reading a sample of nationalist tracts from Asia between the late 1800s and1960s; and, thirdly, by reading the practices of ASEAN andwider Asia- Pacific regionalism between the 1990s and2000s. It is only through discourse analysis of the Foucaultian variety that one can tease out the cultural and modernization-related road bumps in so-called 'modern Asian diplomacy'. This study hopes to contribute to enhancing appreciation of the ongoing procedural and substantive tensions between Asian states and their western, and mostly developed, dialogue partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to engage in a preliminary twinned study of the foreign policy styles of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew within the framework of ‘modernizing Southeast Asian foreign policies’. Modernization is a process of immense multidimensional displacement in economy, society, political system, attitudes towards politicians, identities, work, and consumption. As such the onus falls upon their leaders to either mitigate change or productively awaken their followers to embrace a new mode of thought. Both Lee and Mahathir have however chosen to engage in the foreign policy of intellectual iconoclasm featuring the narrative of ‘productive shock’, manufactured nationalist logics, elitist policy-making and elaborate self-propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Early museum pioneers Émile Gavet and his American contemporaries like Alva Vanderbilt, Isabella Gardner, and George Barnard were not interested in re-creating specific periods with academic rigour. Gardner and Barnard bought objects they liked, arranged them sympathetically, and created atmospheric and inviting total environments. They perhaps realized that historical precision was impossible or simply preferred to stamp their own personality on their museums. It was their successors, American museum professionals of the 1920s and after, that chose to chase the elusive and shifting goal of historical accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart power is comprised of two elements: the quest for building society among states and between states and non-state actors; as well as the desire for cleaner forms of power projection. This special issue explores how states continue to fumble over achieving the optimum mix of hard and soft power across several country cases and themed articles. This set of contributions suggests that smart power is not unlike a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ analogy: multifunctional and challenging to choose the right combination of ideational and material tools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two recently discovered ivory objects carved in Sri Lanka-a pipe case and a sculpture of the Virgin and Child-testify to the sophistication of Sinhalese artistic responses to European trading networks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This essay seeks to contextualize these objects and to highlight the connections between the Portuguese and Dutch empires, normally conceived of as separate entities in perennial conflict. Even as scholars turn increasingly to the relationships between the Netherlands and Asia, the limitations of national categories as a means of understanding world trade become evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the Holy See has formal diplomatic relations with almost all states around the globe as well as with the United Nations (UN), where it holds the curious position of a Permanent Observer. Representing a universal sacred mission, the Holy See views the UN as one of the most important avenues in international relations for pursuing its aims. Vatican diplomats have thus been at the forefront of lobbying for human dignity at the UN in various conferences and popes have even directly addressed the UN's General Assembly. In examining relations between the Holy See and the UN, at least two issues are obvious and of primary importance. First, both institutions share a universal approach – the latter to represent all states of the world and the Holy See to represent all Catholics. Furthermore, both preach to their constituencies that they represent a universal idealist mission – to pursue peace and work towards the universalization of human rights. Second, the Holy See enjoys a Permanent Observer status within the UN and also a seemingly privileged status among all other religious communities. By adopting short studies of the Holy See's interventions in three dimensions of human rights advocacy at the UN, along with its supplement of the UN's mission in correcting capitalist development, the article concludes that the Catholic religion has returned in a role that reaffirms the possibilities of enhancing society on a globalist scale rather than merely reinforcing an international society of sovereign states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of soft power, or symbolic power, offers unexplored potential for analysing small state power. This article argues that it is a means of virtual enlargement of small states' foreign policy reach and presence. If one examines the bases of soft power, it becomes evident that small states can utilize their political economy potential, models of good governance and diplomatic mediation as forms of power that defy their territorial limitations. Case studies of the Vatican City State and Singapore illustrate 'small state soft power'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]