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The purpose of this short paper is to describe briefly the peculiar pattern of Thailand's economic growth during the last 15 years. The paper will be divided into three parts. The first part will briefly describe the pattern of Thailand's economic development from 1956 to 1970. The second part will show the impact of this particular pattern of development on Thailand's balance of payments. The third part will suggest some other possible effects of this development pattern.

The propose of this paper is to generate a research agenda on exploring the possible prospects of cultural exchanges in the context of trade routes along the Belt and Road Initiative by using cha chaan teng (茶餐厅), or Hong Kong style cafe, which has been a “by-product” of inter-cultural experiences in the 1950s in Hong Kong. Thus, the theoretical framework used for researching cha chaan teng, and constructing the research agenda are informed with the concepts of food, culture, and mobilities. Ethnographic in-depth interviews, systematic participant observation of cafes, content analysis of selected cha chaan teng websites were used to gain understanding of this cultural practice. Drawn on the past development of cha cha cheng, this paper suggests that Belt and Road Initiative can be seen as one of the many trade initiatives at the current time, and food consumption, adaptation, and invention along the routes are businesses which go along well with the movements of people and projects. It is reasonable to expect intriguing business opportunities and products through cultural exchanges, something similar to the development of cha chaan teng started in the past in Hong Kong. The research agenda advocate inter- and multidisciplinary theoretical approach and mixed methodologies to explore what new developments will be brought along the routes either something that will emerge as new, or something that will continue to synergize from the past practices. Hopefully, empirical findings will direct toward a culturally sensitive interaction, in which understanding, compassion, tolerance, and respect can be nurtured and developed.

Quality-of-life research leans toward measuring placed-based attributes of a locale while less attention has been given to understanding what people mean by quality of life. This paper reiterates that quality-of-life research is intrinsically about juxtaposing life conditions and life evaluation, thereby unveiling critical issues immanent in a society (Castells, 1983). This paper draws on interviews conducted in public housing neighbourhoods in Singapore to examine the colloquial meanings of quality of life and the normative connotations that people attach to it. It unveils the efforts to reconcile fast and slow and discusses the different temporalities underpinning life domains and how spatial planning could engage with the issue of time to improve quality of life. The Singapore case is insightful to contemplate the challenges of reconciling the increasing needs of going slower amid an accelerated pace of life, which is a contradictory yet pervasive characteristic of life in contemporary capitalist societies.

This paper explores the social adaptation of 157 former Khmer Rouge (KR) cadres. The cadres lived in relative isolation in the former KR stronghold, the semi-autonomous Anlong Veng, under the leadership of their commander, Chhit Chhoeun (alias Ta Mok). With the help of survey analysis, the paper presents findings regarding the cadres’ traumatisation, their views on assigning responsibility for actions during the genocide (1975–1979), as well as the cadres’ feelings of shame and lack of trust. The cadres demonstrated avoidance and a lack of self-confrontation and, similarly, manifested limited reflection about their individual and collective participation in the genocidal regime of the KR. The paper concludes with the long-lasting impact of thought reform and obedience to authority. Community re-building in post-genocide societies requires efforts at collective rehabilitation of collaborators of genocidal regimes and survivors alike.

At present, a great deal of the scholarly research on Indonesia focuses on the processes of Islamisation. This paper will discuss a phenomenon that seems to point in a different direction, namely the contemporary reconfiguration of dukun/spiritual experts called paranormal. These mystics indicate a peculiar form of pluralism. They are an assemblage of tradition and modernity, locality and translocality, religion and mysticism, spirituality and business, and global esotericism and popular psychology. Most of them belong to the urban middle class, are highly professional, and make extensive use of modern mass media to advertise their supernatural skills. Yet, how do they position themselves in Indonesian and global cultural contexts? This paper identifies the ongoing ambivalence between cosmopolitan ideas and their rupture in polarising, orientalist, and occidentalist imaginaries. Finally, a new understanding of cosmopolitanism is suggested that expands the reference beyond the world of humans by also including a plurality of supernatural powers.

Migrant children are an unintended consequence of the widened rural-urban gap in China. In Dengfeng, a county-level city in central China, many of the 70,000 full-time martial arts students were rural-to-urban migrant children ‘floating’ with their parents from one place to another. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores why these migrant children ‘migrated’ to martial arts schools for educational purposes and how they and their parents seek to establish a new value system within which different forms of capital can be accumulated, disseminated, and transformed as society expects. This paper argues that the (imaginary) transition between and flow of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital construct a path to an aspirational future used by both these martial arts students and their parents.

During the colonial period, the Straits Settlements government formalised through law the declaration of public holidays marking religious festivals for the different communities. This practice was continued by the post-colonial state, apportioning public holidays “equally” amongst its citizenry. Adopting a historical perspective, this paper theorises the Singapore state’s allocation of public holidays for its citizens with a specific focus on the Singaporean Hindu community. The paper traces the journey of Tai Pucam as a declared public holiday in colonial Singapore to the 1950s when the Hindu community had two gazetted public holidays to 1968 when Tai Pucam was removed from the list of public holidays, a situation which persists into the present. The “making and unmaking of Tai Pucam as a public holiday” remains a controversial issue for Singaporean Hindus who express unhappiness over the fact that their religious community is granted only one religious holiday, when the norm in Singapore is such that each ethnic community has two holidays. This inequality is cited by Hindus and Indians in Singapore as a discriminatory practice. In 2015, a recent case, Vijaya Kumar s/o Rajendran and Others v. Attorney General, the controversial ban on musical instruments during a Tai Pucam celebration triggered yet again the sensitive issue of Tai Pucam as a “non holiday”.

The last three decades have witnessed campaigns in India by the women’s health movement against provider-controlled contraceptives, i.e., long-acting contraceptives, non-surgical sterilisation and anti-fertility vaccines. These campaigns are examined to understand and analyse the engagement of women’s groups with contraceptive technology in opposing the entry of these contraceptives into the Family Planning Programme (FPP) of the country. The rise of social movements challenging scientific knowledge and scientific institutions is attributed to the “scientisation” of politics; however, we argue that the politicisation of contraceptive technology and its research was the result of women’s collective action in India. The paper explores collective action strategies and intersecting frames of overpopulation, development and technology used by women’s groups to consistently oppose the provider-controlled contraceptives from entering the FPP of the country. The paper uses the internal documents of women’s organisations, media reports and personal interviews to explore the engagement of women’s collective action with contraceptive technologies.

This paper examines how institutional dynamics among regulatory institutions affect the governance of the recruitment of Indonesian low-skilled migrant workers. Two institutional reforms have been made to create better governance for Indonesian migrant workers in the post-authoritarian era. One was the establishment of the National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers (BNP2TKI) while the other was the granting of greater responsibility to sub-national governments to supervise migrant worker recruitment. In spite of these institutional reforms, little progress has been made in the protection of Indonesian migrant workers. The paper reveals that the restrictive regulatory framework for the recruitment of migrant workers, which curbs private recruitment agencies, does not create better migrant worker governance. This regulatory framework does not take into consideration the horizontal relationship between the old and new institutions, and the vertical relationship between the central and sub-national governments. Horizontally, the institutional design of the proposed new regulatory framework has created institutional rivalry between the newly established regulatory actor and the old one. Vertically, the reluctance of central government to decentralise authority to sub-national governments has curtailed the ability of sub-national governments to perform a supervisory role in the recruitment process. These two inter-related factors have hindered the efforts to create a better recruitment process for Indonesian migrant workers.

Qualitative data is now increasingly used within public health research, and domestic violence widely is recognized as a serious public health problem. India is one of the most socio-economically diverse nations in the world, where language, culture and customs differ from place to place within the country. In order to carry out research on domestic violence in a multi-centre cross-cultural environment, it is imperative to pay attention to methodological issues. This paper aims to understand how domestic violence is addressed in research and identifies lessons from the methodological gaps in understanding health research. These gaps are analyzed at four levels; conceptualization, setting, ethics and cross-cultural adaptation of research instruments. The research was a multicentre study covering 18 states of India. A wide range of methods were used to narrow the methodological gaps. Despite the inherent difficulties in defining domestic violence in a cross cultural set up, the paper reflects the cumulative efforts of investigators to recognize and systematically deal with the methodological gap in addressing multi-centre research.

Identity of Banaras was once again back in the limelight with the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) Prime Ministerial candidate Mr. Narendra Modi choosing to represent the city. Known also as Kashi and Varanasi, Banaras indeed played a strategic role in representing the politics the incumbent party believed in. With the overwhelming majority to Modi, the city of Banaras is further idealized as an archetypal city of the Brahminical Hinduism with the spectacular images of temples and ghats that remain teeming with Pandas and devotees. This particular Hindu identity of the city has been constructed through the selective images over time from the colonial period onwards in the 19th century. Identity formation, whether of a community or a city, social or symbolic is spatially situated process and spatial centrality is important in understanding the identity of a city in general and Banaras in particular. We in this paper argue that how in case of Banaras some spaces were mobilized and centralized to create this hindutva identity. In this representational mobilization of identity, the city of Banaras represents a spectacular space removed from its own spatiality. Proclaimed space of Banaras seems not to be a product of social practices rather it is symbolic spaces generated through the trajectories of ideologies of certain groups. This process of formation of identity is not a radical departure, rather it as a culmination of re-emerging Hindu nationalist movement during 19th and 20th century. In this paper, we bring forth the celebration of Ravidas Jyanti as the performance of possibilities and we try to identity the spaces of hope amidst the overarching outcry. Thinking through the categories of space and performance and their interpolations in Banaras, this article attempts to reconfigure the identity of this city beyond the Hindu right-wing rhetoric and pretension.

This paper examines the wari as a discursive terrain produced by the interface of folk and Hinduised cultures. We focus on socio-religious interactions and divergences as crucial sites for the production of a discourse on the economy of worship, devotion and social equality. Popularly understood as a procession to Pandharpur, wari is understood here as a social force mediating the transmission of ideas and practices through the interface of various publics. We interpret wari as a process generated through the reflexivity of productive castes interacting with Brahminical Hinduism, and the articulation of social ethics reflecting specific realities and aspirations of allied communities with an emphasis on worldly relationships. The wari’s grammar of devotion subverts abstract notions of the spiritual by embedding them in the local and everyday. Its emergence from regional counter-hegemonic agitations reflects the existential crises and agency of Maharashtra’s productive castes, and the instrumentality of local parlance in demystifying Brahminical representations of society. The term discursive comprises a vocabulary of devotion addressing cultural material alienation, social disparity, agency and the formation of intentional publics in constituting sites for social reform. This paper relies on field data and existing literature to consolidate its argument.

Despite the well-publicised risks, millions of Indonesian women labour abroad as domestic workers, where they face significant risks. By offering community education and current information on migration, Indonesian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attempt to mitigate these risks. Yet, interviews with migrant workers and NGOs reveal that rather than seeking out migration information from government or NGO sources, women instead rely on fate and the information they receive from the middlemen who are paid to recruit women for work abroad. This paper, which is based on ten months of fieldwork in Java, focuses on the centrality of fate in women’s migration narratives. This paper examines how women’s belief in fate helps them explain their position in the migration industry and their ability to control the outcomes of their migration decisions. In addition, this paper analyses why migration authorities take up the language of fate and the challenges this presents to education and activist projects.

This paper considers the transition to adulthood in East Asia by exploring the experiences of single women between the ages of 25 and 45 years in the cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. The paper argues that single women encounter difficulties negotiating marriage in the three cities due to problems in marriage markets, expectations of fertility upon marriage, and conflicts between educational and employment opportunities and marital roles. It also finds that in the three cities, women articulated two models of marriage, namely, a gender duty model based on expectations of gendered role fulfilment and a companionate model. The paper suggests that the specific configuration of marriage models differs in the three cities due to differences in the historical and social backgrounds of the cities and the larger national and regional contexts.

Drawing on research on landslide risk reduction in Nepal and the impacts of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 in southern Thailand, this paper considers how risk, in the context of natural hazards, is produced by processes of social and economic transformation; understood and experienced by vulnerable groups; and framed by governments and experts. In so doing, we propose an agenda for more effective disaster risk management. We open the discussion by exploring the spatiality of risk, vulnerability and opportunity in the two research contexts, in particular, why people live in hazardous places and the processes that explain the intersection of human settlement and livelihoods on the one hand, and risk on the other. The paper then turns to consider the way that “risk”—and the framing and prioritisation of risk(s) by governments, experts and by vulnerable groups themselves—plays a role in setting the disaster risk management agenda. Underpinning this is the hidden question of what evidence is used—and valued—in the identification and delineation of risk. In order to understand disaster vulnerability, we argue that it is necessary to look beyond the immediate “hazardscape” to understand the wider risk context both spatially and structurally. Effective disaster risk management requires not only an appreciation of the different framings and understandings of risk, but a true integration of knowledge and expertise.

Philanthropic organisations are engaged in diverse welfare and development works including community development in India. A substantial number of these organisations are faith-based organisations (FBOs). While religion impacts people in many ways, religious tenets and practices have shaped, and in many cases strengthened, much of philanthropic activity. This paper focuses on the socio-economic change impacted by a philanthropic organisation called Bettiah Parish Society, successively managed by two FBOs since 1745, for the development of a Christian community, located at Bettiah, West Champaran District, in the State of Bihar, eastern India. The two FBOs were the Capuchin Mission Society (1745–1921), and the Patna Jesuit Society (1921–2000). The paper explores the influence and impact of these two external, goal-oriented FBOs on the 265-year-old Bettiah Christian community in Bihar. Aside a brief discussion on the missionary agents and their religion-induced ideologies, vision and motivations that seem to have goaded them engage in philanthropic works, the main discussion will be on the second aspect, namely the impact of their philanthropic action on the recipient community. The overall impact was (1) the construction of a Christian community (the Bettiah Christians) from among disparate convert groups, formerly belonging to different Hindu castes, and (2) changes in the socio-economic structures of the community through development aid and education. I have used an inter-disciplinary method for this study, relying much on historical, sociological and anthropological data, collected during a field study in 1998, and again in 2010.

The aim of this paper is to the study of the role of women Buddhists in the delivery of Buddhist compassion and the micro-politics of volunteerism from a feminist perspective. It sets out to ask a simple question: What attracts and motivates the Chinese women Buddhists to become actively engaged in religious volunteerism and commit their time, energies and resources into doing philanthropic works for the greater needs of their local and transnational communities. Ethnographically, I want to explore how through their understanding of the Buddhist teachings, these women Buddhists interpret and integrate their status, role and actions within their local socially-engaged Buddhist community. At the same time, to understand how, in today’s globalised world, these women focus and frame themselves as performers of emotive compassion in the local and global societies. Through this study, this paper argues that using a feminist perspective will shed light on the micro-politics of women’s involvement in Buddhist volunteerism in three areas: empowerment, social visibility and emotive philanthropy.

This Introduction pulls together the main themes of the papers in this special issue, which covers major regions in Asia from Japan, Korea and China to Indonesia, India and Iran. The papers are all critical of the implications of imposing Eurocentric and metropolitan frameworks on the diverse assemblages of practices of producing, distributing and engaging with Asian media and film. Bringing a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to bear, the contributors question existing approaches and concepts, reconsider what should count as objects of study and propose new theoretical approaches appropriate to the study of such large and rapidly changing industries. What emerges, however, is the extent to which issues of knowledge and power permeate not just the debates, but also the critiques. Drawing upon the papers, the Introduction concludes by suggesting the possibilities of a more rigorous and sustained analysis in terms of practice.

This paper offers an ethnographic account of the self-formation experiences of Mainland Chinese undergraduate students as “foreign talents” in a Singaporean university. While extant scholarship often points out that international educational sojourn has transformative effects on the student-sojourners, detailed empirical examination of how such transformations take place is still lacking; this paper furnishes a microscopic case study in this vein. By looking at Chinese international students in the (Southeast) Asian city-state Singapore, the paper is also an effort to offer a relatively rare glimpse into the subjective dimension of intra-Asia student mobility. Furthermore, with regard to the Singapore local context, this account seeks to throw some new light on the hotly-debated “foreign talent” issue from the perspective of the scholarship-receiving students (“scholars”). With the title being a playful riff on G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical canon, this paper uses Hegelian notions such as self-consciousness, the “other”, desire, and negation to narrate and analyse those aspects of the Mainland Chinese scholars’ self-(trans)formative experiences revolving around the idiom of “very China”-ness.

Despite the emphasis placed on response capacity building to strengthen health security in this region, no comparative data exists to look into the determinants that drive the capacity. For public and private managers, the ignorance of capacity development and failure to assess it, by and large, points to highly ambiguous and flawed methodological approaches. This paper therefore reports on a qualitative interview study into capacity building around health security and explains the emergence of response capacity against the fight of influenza A H1N1 pandemics in Singapore and Taiwan in 2009. This paper further provides empirically grounded evidence to identify prerequisites for capacity development towards health security in response to (the same type of) public health crises in Asia.

Scholarship on Christianity in Malaysia has been dominated by denominational church history, as well as the study of urban, middle-class and English-speaking church congregations in the post-Independence period. In focusing on the vernacular Chinese Protestant church in Malaysia, and one of its most prominent para-church organisations, called The Bridge, this paper draws attention to the variegated histories of Christian conversion and dissemination in Malaysia, and the various modes and meanings of Christian identity as incorporated into different local communities and cultures. The history of the Chinese Protestant church suggested in the first part of the paper takes as its point of departure the distinction between mission and migrant churches, the latter being the origin of the vernacular Chinese churches in Malaysia. The second part of the paper traces the emergence of a Chinese para-church lay organisation called The Bridge, and the Chinese Christian intellectuals behind it, in their mission to engage the larger Chinese and national public through literary publications and other media outreach activities. In so doing, these Chinese Christian intellectuals also drew on the resources of an East Asian and overseas Chinese Christian network, while searching for their destiny as Chinese Christians in the national context of Malaysia. By pointing to the importance of regional, Chinese-language Christian networks, and the complexity of vernacular Christian subjectivity, the paper hopes to fill a gap in the existing literature on Christianity in Malaysia, as well as make a contribution to on-going debates on issues of localisation, globalisation and authenticity in global Christianity.

Psychoanalysis is gaining popularity as a tool for interrogating political problems. This paper applies the three fundamental diagnostic categories of neurosis, psychosis and perversion to Malaysian socio-political discourse. This endeavour is urgent given the political upheavals in the country since the 2008 general elections where the ruling National Alliance regime lost its two-third majority in parliament, a result repeated again five years later at the thirteenth general elections. Nevertheless, democratic abuses and religious extremism remain strife (and has arguably grown worse) in the country. Political action is thus rendered even more urgent and thus, arguably, the need for fresh lenses with which to view the present (and even past) injustices perpetuated by the reigning administration. As such, this paper will analyse issues and events like the ‘Allah’ controversy, Mahathirism, Ops Lalang and cronyism in Malaysian politics, and seeks to do so using conceptual tools of a Lacanian-Žižekian nature. If the nature of the problem can be reviewed and rethought, perhaps a new way of thinking about the solutions may also arise, leading even to a reimagining of the very idea of the political.

Although religious diversity is legally supported in Indonesia, incidents of attacks on religious minorities and anxiety towards the practice of religious pluralism have continued to plague the country. This paper will analyse factors limiting the practice of religious diversity in post-Suharto Indonesia with a focus on two types of important grass-roots religious institutions. The first type is religious philanthropic organizations, which provide social services for natural disaster victims and the poor. The second type of religious institution is traditional Islamic schools known as pesantren salaf, one of most the important educational institutions for Islamic scholars. This paper will show that increased religiosity has contributed to the growth of socially-engaged religious organizations being used to address social problems, but these religious institutions are naturally developing their operational links within their own religious affiliations and communication beyond their religion is restricted because of mutual anxiety. This paper will also examine the challenge presented by traditional Islamic educational institutions. In order to protect Islam from secularism, these institutions are promoting theologically conservative Islamic teachings that curtail the practice of religious diversity at the grassroots level. Our case studies show that religious education has unintentionally limited the development of religious diversity in Indonesia.

According to Granovetter, weak ties link individuals to other social circles that place them in strategic positions to gain access to job information and opportunities otherwise not available in their innate networks. This paper affirms that weak ties, as a form of social capital, matter and that they assist in explaining variations in status attainment between ethnic groups in Singapore. I show that access to weak ties affects status attainment differently across ethnic groups and that the Malay’s weaker performance in the labour market is partly due to their lower access to weak ties. This paper would be of interest to scholars concerned with the intertwining of social stratification with social capital and ethnicity.

This paper examines the dynamic boundaries of Chinese identities and the role of family narratives in their formation. It examines the interplay between history and memory, focusing on traditions regarding ancestors of the Fujian Guo lineage of Muslim descent in China, Taiwan and the Philippines, over six centuries. Existing scholarship approaches these traditions in ethnic terms, corresponding to the ethnic discourse prevalent in the P.R.C., focusing solely on mainland groups, but overlooking other variations found overseas. Hence, scholars portray the changing narratives as reflecting a linear process: from past sinicisation, to today’s more “historically authentic” Hui identity. The present analysis offers a broader socio-cultural overview, showing how the pan-Asian Guo lineage re-imagines familial history across time and space by highlighting the forced assimilation narrative in which their early Ming ancestors falsely adopted Guo Ziyi, a Han-Chinese national hero, as their ancestor. The paper follows the narrative’s continuous transformations, analysing different interpretations of assuming Chinese identity among Muslims’ descendants within different contexts of contemporary Asia.

Creating and guarding boundaries is one of the pervasive features of modern states. Many boundaries have been contested in the Southeast Asian region between states, and boundaries are always locations of great insecurity for states, and for the people who live on them. The case to be explored in this paper is about boundaries that are not international, but local boundaries between districts within the nation state of Indonesia, in the eastern region of western Flores. The years of political change in Indonesia have created considerable attention to the creation of new boundaries, with the “pemekaran”, or “flowering” of new districts. This has caused the revival of concern over the actual boundaries of western Flores districts, resulting in various extreme instances of boundary contestation and protection. One contestation revived a much older dispute of the eastern boundary of the western Flores district of Manggarai, which dates from the time of the beginning of the Indonesian modern state. In this paper it will be queried what makes internal, domestic boundaries important, including how they are complicated by issues of ethnicity, foreign investment in natural resources, and religion, all of which can create considerable insecurity for the local communities who live near and on these contested borders.

Abstract This paper examines US-China trade disputes under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and argues that Chinese leaders are increasingly resorting to the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism to target issues of most critical concern to domestic constituencies. The following overview of the WTO disputes initiated by China suggests that China’s WTO disputes tend to be dominated by cases involving anti-dumping duties (ADs) and countervailing duties (CVDs). The disproportionate share of such trade remedy cases in China’s WTO cases needs to be viewed in light of the fact that China has become the leading target of such cases worldwide in the past decades. The above pattern of China’s WTO initiation is explicable within the leader cost-benefit analysis, which would lead us to expect Chinese leaders to use the WTO DSM either to open foreign markets for Chinese businesses or to shield domestic firms from perceived unfair foreign trade practices. This paper further argues that the significant expansion of bilateral trade relations in the past decades has provided opportunities for Chinese leaders to identify or threaten retaliation against anti-protectionist groups in the other country in order to mobilise them against the disputed measure.

Abstract The Korean wave, which is the popularity of Korean entertainment outside Korea, is a fairly new phenomenon. Encompassing Korean dramas, films, and songs, it has been highlighted by international media outlets and scholars. Several prestigious newspapers and scholars attempted to explain the competitiveness of the Korean wave, but they have remained biased by missing, overemphasizing, or overlapping important success factors. To provide a more comprehensive and accurate analysis, this paper conducts a rigorous study on the competitiveness of Korean entertainment industry focused on Korean dramas and films with a comprehensive analytical tool, the generalized double diamond model. The results of this study provide evidences that the Korean wave is not a temporary phenomenon but a sustainable industry segment. For further enhancement of this important industry, this paper suggests useful implications, including international cooperation with other countries.

Abstract Nearly four decades after the Khmer Rouge genocide, the Cambodian people have found some solace to a tragic past that forever has defined their personal and collective identities. The first of five defendants on trial in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the ECCC), Kaing Guek Eav (alias Duch, Chief Warden of S-21) was found guilty of crimes against humanity and Grave Breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 3 February 2012. Aside from his criminal reputation as the head executioner of S-21, what other legacy does Duch leave behind? In particular, what psycho-emotional legacy does he leave his children? This paper focuses on the social and political legacy passed on to Duch’s eldest son as it affects the possibilities for his contributing to reconciliation, forgiveness, and ‘healing justice’ in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. The paper also warns against casting perpetrators’ children as bystanders to their own history or as being guilty of their parents’ crimes, and provides an alternative Khmer Rouge narrative: that of the children of perpetrators and how their identities fit within the larger Cambodian national identity and search for justice.

Based on a close reading of Malay textual sources, this paper looks at the nature of the trading system in place in the Western Malay World towards the end of the 18th century and in particular the role Francis Light played within this system. Touching on Braudel’s broad concept of world theatre and world economy and on Van Leur’s seminal work on the periodization of Southeast Asian history post-Melaka, the paper intends to challenge established notions of the exercise of power and the nature of economic relations in the Malay World during the late 18th century.

Abstract The increase of migrant workers into the Kingdom of Thailand began in the mid-1980s and early 1990s when Thailand was in transition from a low-end labour-intensive economy, to a capital-intensive one. The role of migrant workers became even more evident when Thailand encountered the economic crisis of the mid-1990s. Current statistics indicate that Thailand receives more than a million migrant workers from neighbouring countries, including Myanmar, Lao PDR and Cambodia. This paper traces the five stages of the Royal Thai Government’s (RTG) policies to managing cross-border migration and migrant worker issues in Thailand. It argues that despite the introduction of policies of management of the issue, migrant workers are vulnerable to human trafficking. Furthermore, as more often than not migrant workers are irregular migrants, they are treated as a risk to national security. As such they are vulnerable to labour exploitation. This paper analyses the problems in policy and legal enforcement between countries of origin and the RTG, suggesting ways in which these problems can be overcome to ensure compliance with international norms, and thus the responsibility of the RTG to its ‘foreign workers’.

Applying Bourdieu’s theoretical framework on the correspondence between mental structures and social structures, this paper examines the persistence of educational underachievement among working class Malay youths in Singapore. Accordingly, my first objective is to document the social structure, namely a largely working class neighbourhood where these Malay youths have grown up. My second aim is to analyse how everyday cultural practices and interactions among peers in the neighbourhood significantly reinforced these youths’ levelled aspirations. I maintain that by believing in ‘taking the gravel road’, which is symbolically rough, uneven and uncertain, these youths justified the irrelevance of doing well in school. Succinctly, this essay demonstrates the close correspondence between the perceptions of the odds of success and the educational underperformance of the Malay youths. Hence, this paper would be of interest to scholars in the Malay Peninsula, as well as experts concerned with the intertwining of education with class and ethnicity.

Malay merchants and traders played an essential and significant role in the early modern history of trade and commerce in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless records on the history of their entrepreneurship has been hardly written and researched upon. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to trace back the dynamic of Malay trading communities in the late 18th and towards the early decades of the 19th century. The paper would also highlight the importance of Malay traders in early Penang and the survival of Melaka as an important port in the late 18th century. A focal analysis of this study is on the 18th and 19th centuries Malay merchant communities and how their active presence in the Malay waters had given a great impact to the intra-Asian trade in Southeast Asia prior to the period of European colonialism and imperialism.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of recent transformations in East Asian welfare regimes, applying a ‘real-typical’ perspective, based on the ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ thesis of Ian Holliday (2000). Unlike Western welfare-state regimes in which the politics of austerity has dominated, the politics of welfare expansion has been noticeable in East Asian welfare regimes. This paper will analyse whether these changes have fundamentally dismantled the productivist feature where social policy is subordinate to economic objectives. While the trajectories are different depending on different political institutional contexts, this study shows that there are two strong signs that these states are moving out of their productivist nature and also that they are in the process of establishing their own welfare states. Japan seems to still be a productivist welfare-state regime struggling to accommodate rapid socio-economic changes, whereas Korea is a welfare state regime with strong liberal characteristics via modern welfare politics. Since the needs for social policy expansion in China correspond to economic and political needs, the productivist feature has been significantly weakened. However, this study argues that these transitory welfare regimes are in critical stages of formulating their new welfare regimes and that welfare politics based on contingent events could affect the future trajectories of these regimes.

Abstract In response to difficulties faced by families in caring for the aged, the government of Taiwan launched a foreign live-in caregiver programme in 1992. This paper draws upon literature on family, domestic work and motives for caregiving to examine how the long-term co-residence of migrant live-in elder care-workers reconfigures Taiwanese families. Our analysis, based on in-depth interviews conducted in the summer of 2009 with 20 Vietnamese migrant live-in care-workers, uses the concept of ‘social family’ to document the close emotional and quasi-familial relationships between foreign care-workers and members of Taiwanese families. Narratives shed light on the dynamics of these relationships and show the limitations of the concept. The inherent asymmetrical employer-employee power relationship remains, while workers constantly negotiate contradictory feelings and positions in the intimate sphere of the employers’ private homes. This paper emphasizes the mutual dependency that migrants experience as both workers and members of a new family. Rather than being seen as cheap, disposable labour, migrants become indispensable to the families. It is this dependency and intimacy that make them part of the family, but also continues to make them vulnerable to abuse.

This paper describes the contemporary context of Zikir Maulud, a popular, religiously-inspired musical practice that has a long history in Sambas, a regency in West Kalimantan. The formation of a Zikir Maulud association several years ago resulted in the establishment of a monthly, inter-village circuit, one in which women figure prominently as performers and the representatives of their village. Despite this initiative, there is little evidence that Zikir Maulud is attracting new performers. The paper outlines three broad approaches to the study of Malay cultural forms, before arguing that people’s interest in Zikir Maulud is best understood in relation to changes associated with urbanisation, social mobility and new media. These social forces not only erode the forms of sociality that support Zikir Maulud as a village-based cultural performance, but result in new cultural sensibilities and modes of textuality, which shape people’s level of interest and participation in cultural forms. Here Zikir Maulud and its association with older, village-based forms of entertainment cannot compete with vernacular forms of digitalised and audiovisual entertainment that situate people in broader, translocal contexts.

One of the outcomes of the radical decentralisation policies accompanying political reform and democratisation in Indonesia is a sustained administrative programme known by the term pemekaran, or a ‘blossoming’ of new administrative and budgetary units that extend to the farthest corners of the nation. This paper explores aspects and impacts of the pemekaran process as it unfolds in two remote corners of Indonesia, namely the sub-district of Routa in Konawe Regency of Southeast Sulawesi and the newly-established district of Bintuni in the swamp lands of Bintuni Gulf, West Papua. In both regions the strategic possibilities that accompany pemekaran have fostered a vibrant local politic based around appeals to established patterns of landed authority. But the logic of pemekaran can lead to fragmentation and confusion over jurisdictional authority. Critics argue that the process dilutes capacity and political authority. Supporters acknowledge the limits but applaud the extension of development funding into areas which otherwise would remain isolated and impoverished. The paper explores some of the dimensions of this debate and the role of pemekaran in shaping local experience on the margins of the state.

Abstract In the last decade, housing has become one of the most prominent and best funded sectors in large-scale post-disaster reconstruction efforts. This has especially been the case in Asian developing countries where both official and private aid helped finance a significant amount of the housing reconstruction. Despite the emphasis upon community involvement, inclusive and participatory processes for housing reconstruction by international non-governmental organizations, recent experiences show that such ideas often do not readily translate in practice on the ground. This paper analyses the necessary conditions for successful involvement by local beneficiaries in rebuilding their homes following natural disasters. The analysis is situated within the context of community recovery, and the trade-off between centralized donor planning, and community driven initiatives, using primary and secondary data collected from post-tsunami Aceh, Indonesia. The paper also discusses how various stakeholders (including recipient government and donors) evaluate and make use of the practical capacities of affected persons and communities to be involved in planning, building and monitoring processes in the housing sector. Our research focused on the level and types of roles played by the aid beneficiaries in the housing reconstruction process in Aceh. In spite of considerable rhetoric about participation and inclusive reconstruction accompanying the post-tsunami reconstruction by various donors, a number of systemic barriers created considerable distance between beneficiaries and NGOs in Aceh in the housing sector. The drive for efficiency and need to produce tangible results quickly, mixed with the sheer number of stakeholders and resources involved, created a largely top-down environment in which decisions were centralized, and arbitrary standards imposed. This was exacerbated by an extensive chain of sub-contractors, a large supply of lower-cost imported labor, and highlighted the importance of local political affiliations, leading to weak accountability and reduced aid effectiveness.

Abstract This paper examines private businesses’ access to land and capital in Vietnam. It finds that the allocation of these resources to private firms is still excessively state-driven and personalised, and examines the links that business people of different ethnical and regional backgrounds have with the state and how this facilitates or hinders their access to land and capital. Lacking relationships with the state may have profound consequences for unconnected private enterprises, which are accordingly subject to uneven competition from connected ones. The paper suggests that private businesses’ uneven opportunities are basically a consequence of the general history of the country and the role that individual business people have played in it, in such respects as having had former state-sector employment, party membership, the “side” they were on before and during the Vietnam War etc. In this, factors such as ethnicity, origin and present location in either northern or southern Vietnam play an important part.

Globalisation and social inequalities are the central research interests of a number of scholars in the world today. This Special Issue, Social Stratification Studies in East Asia, offers selected papers presented at the Tohoku University — National University of Singapore Joint Forum of Sociology and Stratification Studies held in Singapore in February 2009. This journal issue introduces five enthusiastic research projects presented at the forum on a variety of social stratification issues. These papers highlight the studies of sociologists who delve into inequalities and disparities in globalised Asia today.

Hybridisation refers to the fusion of diverse cultural elements which generates new cultural forms that are distinct yet interconnected with one another. Previous studies affirmed that hybridisation has become part of an ongoing trend in transnational culture, emerging from a Third Space where diverse cultural elements enmesh. This study aims to explore how Mulan's cultural identity is hybridised when the folklore flows from China to America, becoming entangled within a conflict of Chinese-Western transcultural clashes. Using Jameson's cultural identity model, the paper analyses Mulan's cultural identity in three texts which are the original The Ballad of Mulan, Disney's animated movie Mulan (1998) and its subsequent life-action installment Mulan (2020). Components measuring the protagonist's cultural identity comprising vocation, class, geography, philosophy, language, biological traits with cultural aspects are compared. The findings show that the movies have particularly hybridise the protagonist's cultural identity from the aspects of geography, philosophy, and language. This results in a hybrid cultural identity with transnational markers in Mulan. The significance of the research thus lies in its contribution towards highlighting how Chinese figures are increasingly hybridised by Western influences as the Chinese culture continues to transcend transnational borders.

This paper applies the concept of relative deprivation to the study of Palestinian suicide bombings. While earlier work by Krueger and Maleckova (2003) indicates that the absolute well-being of those who support terrorism is higher than the general population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it is not clear if changes in the relative well-being of Palestinians could have influenced suicide bombings. This paper uses three reference groups, namely earlier generations of youth, as well as Israelis and Palestinians residing in different areas, to understand whether relative deprivation helps explain the phenomenon of suicide bombings. This paper finds some support for relative deprivation influencing the rate and timing of suicide bombings.

[, The Middle Kingdom, as a relatively unknown advanced civilisation, held a unique position in Enlightenment thought, as Europeans tried to understand a widening world and their own place in it. European views of China in the early modern period have been widely studied. While the predominant paradigm has been to analyse a shift from sinophilia to sinophobia, disagreements over the extent, nature and timing of this shift suggest that the rigid juxtaposition may not always be useful. In order to highlight the importance of the particular topic to the constructions of China in eighteenth-century European thought, this paper examines the way primary sources and scholars viewed one particular aspect of China: Its system of government. This paper will consider views of China related to Adam Smith’s main duties of government (the art and science of war, the administration of justice and public institutions) and how these duties were to be paid for (the public revenue). Discussions of China’s government married interest in the advanced civilisation of China with that characteristic Enlightenment project to define, explain and reflect on the meaning of civilisation and progress. A surprising degree of consensus is found, calling into question the conventional juxtaposition of sinophilia and sinophobia. Moreover, eighteenth-century European observers did not approach China with assumptions of superiority; on the contrary, there was a degree of civilisational relativism in their outlook, and at times China was seen as offering useful lessons. This approach also allows us to consider those questions with which Enlightenment thinkers did not turn towards China for answers, and ask the reasons for such omissions. China was dismissed as a useful model because it was deemed in many ways to be a unique case that could not be worked into the universal models that characterised the European Enlightenment.]

Since the issue of human trafficking is subject to judicial, moral and political constraints, this research chose to study Vietnamese sex workers in Phnom Penh as a common migration phenomenon in order to see when, how and why some women ended up in situations of bondage. On the basis of four months of research in the Mekong delta, the paper explores the journeys leading Vietnamese women to Phnom Penh. It concurs with the recent literature that debt-bonded sex work is not always an unending situation and that it could be an effective means to cope with socio-cultural pressures. We argue that, in addition to labour arrangements, some women find in sex work a way to deal with their (in)dependency with regards to their families, achieving greater control over their resources and experimenting different meanings of womanhood. Far from denying human trafficking, the paper tries to explore the grey area that lies between this extreme and voluntary migration. While the results of this research are not representative of the whole phenomenon, we argue that these few elements help explain why women keep taking the risks of migration for sex work and expose themselves to situations of bonded labour.

This paper complicates the notion of the suicide bomber as represented in mental health literature. Most authors apply Western psychiatric concepts to understand suicide bombers without accounting for value differences around life and death or terrorism and martyrdom. Accordingly, these researchers replicate arguments to explain individual behaviour from a particular epistemological perspective. In contrast, critical approaches to this literature can expose the worldviews of the analysers and the analysed to devise sounder interpretations. This paper scrutinises mental health discourse on suicide bombing to ask: (1) What do we learn about the authors of suicide bombers in these articles? (2) How do their analyses demonstrate the relationship between knowledge and power? These conclusions can enable researchers to reduce biases and devise behavioural models that more accurately reflect the realities of their subjects.

Much has been written about Indonesia's decentralisation since the fall of Soeharto. Scholars have developed different perspectives and provided useful analyses on 'right governance', but they seem to have largely neglected the organisational problems of civic organisations engaged in governance reform. By employing the concepts of legitimacy, organisational field and networks familiar in the sociology of organisation, this paper explores ways in which they develop and transform their organisations and networks, creating political issues and, mobilising the public. Three cities — Padang, Bandung, and Yogyakarta — were chosen as the study locations for the conspicuous and even prominent engagement of civic organisations in the struggle for reform of public governance. A qualitative method was used to collect data from various actors who are directly and indirectly engaged in contesting and cooperating with organisational actors in this area. This paper shows that the principles of independency and freedom within civic organisations have developed rapidly at the expense of organisational accountability. Such development has hampered the transformation of civic organisations into more influential social actors.