Search

The subject of economic security has always been bandied about in academic discourse since the emergence of an interconnected world economy. With ASEAN states getting increasingly enmeshed in free trade agreements, and common market like arrangements, it is imperative to explore what economic security means for national governments today. The shocks of the 2017-20 Donald Trump presidency of the USA and the COVID-19 pandemic impart timely momentum for inquiring after economic security. If the USA currently embodies the idea of zero-sum economic logics as the way forward into the twenty first century, it becomes even more urgent that Asians re-examine the degrees of openness needed to sustain growth and prosperity. Contributors to this Special Section will not only examine government-to-government trade interactions, the prospects of Islamic Finance and gender inequalities will also be analysed in terms of how they can make or break conventional notions of economic security.

Malta and Singapore attained full independence nearly a year apart: 21 September 1964 and 9 August 1965 respectively. Yet today, despite being self-classified as small states, Singapore has been treated as a developed economy by the OECD and is widely acknowledged to be a ‘behind the scenes’ helmsman of the regional security architecture in the Asia-Pacific. Malta, in contrast, appears to be a relative diplomatic bystander enunciating its own principles of sovereign difference, calling for EU and Mediterranean regional forums to address non- traditional security issues, and focussing heavily on growing a service economy in finance, tourism, electronics and freight transhipment. Singapore’s growth trajectory takes on these areas as well, but also experiments with designs to establish itself as a transportation and communications hub for Asia. This preliminary comparison of Malta and Singapore as small states will proceed through three categories of examination: stabilising the geopolitical environment for growth; experiments in integration into a global economy; and the idea of a globally branded small state., peer-reviewed

The intent of this dessertation is to focus primarily on the phase 1 implementation of the E-Commerce Infrastructure to support the NAtional Library Board Digital Library initiative. Master of Science (Information Studies)

As globalization progresses, the system of states derived from the Treaty of Westphalia and the institutions developed to govern these actors face the pressure of obsolescence. The world is becoming increasingly interconnected economically, yet this interconnectivity does not translate well into global norms with respect to social behavior. International anarchy still exists as institutions struggle to develop a global governance system and pave the way for a global society. However, as long as the system of states remain the de facto model of international society, a successful global governance model will not emerge as heterogeneity increases the cost of government at both the state and global level. Classical political theory ignores any possibility of having actors smaller than the size of the state and therein lies the gap which we can explore possibilities. There is a need to examine the normative changes due to globalization in order to conceive a new model to replace the system of states with smaller units as the cost of government will be lower, and states would be further forced into greater interdependence. This increasing interdependence coupled with the smaller sized actors would allow a new global governance model to include not just the smaller sized actors, but also the non-state actors of which some are virtually the size of small states. If the world could conceive and accept a multiplicity of smaller sized actors, it would be possible to have enough actors to cover all the differences in ideology instead of forcing them into the system of states. When these smaller sized actors no longer have to deal with differences in practices and ideology from within and to enforce it on those around them, it would then be feasible to consider a model of global governance for the future. Master of Science (International Relations)

Social media, the main organising platform of social movements since 2008, have presented various dilemmas to the states throughout the world. This thesis attempts to unpack these dilemmas and examine the impact of social media on Westphalian conceptions such as sovereignty and identity of sovereign-state and citizen. This paper also examines how nation-states react to the implications. The paper traces six social movements that span ten years in time and five continents geographically to showcase how each event inherits lessons from the former one. They disrupt the established hierarchical order, and render national borders and sovereignty obsolete. In the process, they present citizen and sovereign-state the opportunities of rearticulating the their identities, relations between them and between citizens of different nationalities. The emergence of print-capitalism had contributed to the budding of national consciousness, the paper therefore foresees a brewing slate of new imagined communities that will change the status quo of sovereign-states and transnational relations, on the one hand; and partitions people along the line of common beliefs, shared values or simply informational ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, on the other hand. Master of Science (International Relations)