Abstract South Korea’s unrealized proposals in the 1960s remind us that the tension between bilateral dominance and fragile regionalism remains one of the central dilemmas of Asia’s order today. Yet scholarship has largely overlooked South Korea’s Cold War multilateral initiatives. This article investigates Seoul’s efforts to reshape regional economic and security arrangements amid escalating Cold War tensions, focusing on proposals for the Asian Common Market, the Asian and Pacific Council, and the Asia–Pacific Treaty Organization. Using archival documents, presidential speeches, and declassified U.S. records, and interpreted through a constructivist and a historical context lens, the analysis shows how South Korea sought to reframe its identity from a peripheral Cold War state to a regional leader by advocating economic integration and multilateral security. These proposals encountered significant resistance, especially from the United States and Japan, underscoring the limits of middle-power diplomacy in Cold War Asia. The article demonstrates that these unrealized initiatives not only highlight the constraints of U.S.-led bilateralism but also illuminate enduring tensions that continue to shape Asia’s regional order in the Indo-Pacific today.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Economic growth, development, planning
Since the launch of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in 2015, Beijing and Islamabad have developed a joint strategic narrative in favour of China and its investments in Pakistan. As state-funded think tanks play a pivotal role in crafting and spreading these narratives, this study examines two major Islamabad-based think tanks during 2015 and 2023. It argues that these state-funded think tanks play a key role in legitimising policy decisions on CPEC by disseminating state-endorsed narratives. They emphasise CPEC's economic and strategic benefits, reinforcing the official discourse through research, publications, and advocacy.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Social sciences and state - Asia (Asian studies only)
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz
et al.
Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.
Investing in Asian markets through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provides investors with access to rapidly expanding economies and valuable diversification opportunities. This study examines the advantages and challenges of investing in Asian ETFs by conducting comprehensive risk assessments, portfolio analyses, and performance comparisons. The dataset comprises 29 ETFs offering exposure across a wide spectrum of Asian markets, including broad regional funds, country-specific ETFs, as well as sector-focused funds, dividend-oriented ETFs, small-cap portfolios, and emerging market bond ETFs. To evaluate risk and return dynamics, the study employs Markowitz's efficient frontier to identify optimal portfolios for given levels of risk, and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) to capture potential extreme losses for a more comprehensive risk assessment. Multiple portfolio configurations are analyzed under long-only and long-short investment strategies to assess adaptability across varying market conditions. Furthermore, key performance risk measures, including the Sharpe ratio, Rachev ratio, and stable tail-adjusted return ratio (STARR), are calculated to provide an in-depth evaluation of reward-to-risk efficiency, with particular emphasis on the role of tail behavior in portfolio performance. This research aims to deliver deeper insights into the risk-return trade-offs, tail-risk behavior, and efficiency of Asian ETFs, offering investors a practical foundation for constructing robust and well-diversified portfolios across both emerging and developed Asian markets.
AbstractThis paper examines how local institutions in U.S. municipalities can affect budget allocations for socially disadvantaged groups, specifically focusing on eight key institutions related to electoral rules, power dynamics, and bureaucratic authority. Additionally, we develop a composite index to assess the overall level of (de)politicization within the local institutional framework. Theoretically, local institutions can shape public officials’ political accountability and administrative discretion during policy processes, thereby influencing their decision‐making on budget allocations. Empirical analyses primarily use data from ICMA's multiround national surveys and employ the historical background of municipalities as an instrumental variable (IV) to address potential endogeneity problems associated with local institutions. We find that local institutions that strengthen politicians’ political accountability to citizens lead to greater budget allocations for redistributive social welfare, thereby fostering social equity in public budgeting. Conversely, the institutions that enhance the authority of senior bureaucrats negatively affect budget allocations for redistributive social welfare.
The Middle East is important to China as a major source of energy, a key node in its Belt and Road Initiative and an emerging venue for US-China rivalry. China’s deepening involvement in the Middle East can be divided into three dimensions: economic, strategic and cultural. China is careful not to become mired in Middle Eastern politics and regional countries generally welcome China’s growing engagement. China’s expanding footprint in the region may intensify US-China rivalry.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only), Political science (General)
Global Social Movements (GSMs) have become integral to the study of Sociology and International Politics, reflecting the interconnectedness of global communities on diverse issues. Orchestrated by NGOs and INGOs, GSMs encompass environmental, women’s, human rights, racial, fair trade, and refugee movements, among others, reflecting the breadth of global concerns. However, challenges arise from political affiliations between civil society members and state authorities, as well as pressures from donor countries and ruling elites in economically disadvantaged nations. This study, employing content analysis methodology, aims to delineate the causes of GSMs, investigate the roles of INGOs and civil society, and explore the interplay between GSMs and global governance. Through critical analysis, it provides insights and recommendations to enhance the effectiveness and inclusivity of GSMs in addressing global challenges, thus contributing to the advancement of global democracy and governance structures.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
The surging demand for AI has led to a rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, impacting the environment through escalating carbon emissions and water consumption. While significant attention has been paid to data centers' growing environmental footprint, the public health burden, a hidden toll of data centers, has been largely overlooked. Specifically, data centers' lifecycle, from chip manufacturing to operation, can significantly degrade air quality through emissions of criteria air pollutants such as fine particulate matter, substantially impacting public health. This paper introduces a principled methodology to model lifecycle pollutant emissions for data centers and computing tasks, quantifying the public health impacts. Our findings reveal that training a large AI model comparable to the Llama-3.1 scale can produce air pollutants equivalent to more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City. The growing demand for AI is projected to push the total annual public health burden of U.S. data centers up to more than $20 billion in 2028, rivaling that of on-road emissions of California. Further, the public health costs are more felt in disadvantaged communities, where the per-household health burden could be 200x more than that in less-impacted communities. Finally, we propose a health-informed computing framework that explicitly incorporates public health risk as a key metric for scheduling data center workloads across space and time, which can effectively mitigate adverse health impacts while advancing environmental sustainability. More broadly, we also recommend adopting a standard reporting protocol for the public health impacts of data centers and paying attention to all impacted communities.
As new technologies rapidly reshape patterns of political communication, platforms like Twitch are transforming how people consume political information. This entertainment-oriented live streaming platform allows us to observe the impact of technologies such as ``live-streaming'' and ``streaming-chat'' on political communication. Despite its entertainment focus, Twitch hosts a variety of political actors, including politicians and pundits. This study explores Twitch politics by addressing three main questions: 1) Who are the political Twitch streamers? 2) What content is covered in political streams? 3) How do audiences of political streams interact with each other? To identify political streamers, I leveraged the Twitch API and supervised machine-learning techniques, identifying 574 political streamers. I used topic modeling to analyze the content of political streams, revealing seven broad categories of political topics and a unique pattern of communication involving context-specific ``emotes.'' Additionally, I created user-reference networks to examine interaction patterns, finding that a small number of users dominate the communication network. This research contributes to our understanding of how new social media technologies influence political communication, particularly among younger audiences.
Efforts that must be made by the regional government in tackling or breaking the chain of the Covid-19 pandemic are issuing regulations governing community activities and actions that need to be taken by the regional government. This effort has been made by the City Government of South Tangerang by issuing Mayor Regulation no. 13 of 2020 concerning Implementation of Large-Scale Social Restrictions in the Context of Handling Corona Virus Disease 2019. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the Regulation of Mayor using a qualitative descriptive method with a normative legal study approach using Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA). The results of the study concluded that it was necessary to revise the Regulation of Mayor, especially on the points: social organization activities, the obligation of workplace leaders to ensure that employees do not have co-morbidities, the obligation to provide temperature test kits, regulation of worship activities, explanations about public facilities, the obligation to use masks, community rights, provision of incentives and vaccines, and criteria for administrative sanctions.
Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
The DNS root server system uses Anycast technology to provide resolution through widely distributed root nodes. In recent years, the F-root node has seen astonishing growth and now boasts the largest number of nodes among the 13 root servers. Based on Ripe Atlas measurement data, we examined the availability and query latency of the F-root within the Southeast Asian region historically. The collected data illustrates how latency varies with changes in the number of root nodes, how the geographic distribution of responding root nodes changes in different periods, and examines the most recent differences between countries in terms of latency distribution. This study sheds light on the evolving landscape of DNS infrastructure in Southeast Asia.
Uwe M. Borghoff, Nicol Matzner-Vogel, Siegfried Rapp
Digitalization is conquering and stressing out the federal administration. Using selected large-scale ICT projects, we show how complex and interdisciplinary the tasks are. The federal administration's IT strategy requires well-trained specialists for all defined fields of action. This scarce resource is increasingly being trained academically in separate, tailor-made degree courses that are developed specifically for the needs of the German ministries and authorities. We use the example of administrative informatics courses to explain their necessity and success story. Using a Bachelor's/Master's program developed by the authors for the ITZBund and the Federal Ministry of Finance, we look at a concrete implementation and justify two of our design decisions in the development of the course, namely transdisciplinarity and design thinking. We adopt a German perspective throughout the paper. However, the conclusions also apply to other countries.
We present a study of the short maturity asymptotics for Asian options in a jump-diffusion model with a local volatility component, where the jumps are modeled as a compound Poisson process. The analysis for out-of-the-money Asian options is extended to models with Lévy jumps, including the exponential Lévy model as a special case. Both fixed and floating strike Asian options are considered. Explicit results are obtained for the first-order asymptotics of the Asian options prices for a few popular models in the literature: the Merton jump-diffusion model, the double-exponential jump model, and the Variance Gamma model. We propose an analytical approximation for Asian option prices which satisfies the constraints from the short-maturity asymptotics, and test it against Monte Carlo simulations. The asymptotic results are in good agreement with numerical simulations for sufficiently small maturity.
This paper proposes a computational model for policy administration. As an organization evolves, new users and resources are gradually placed under the mediation of the access control model. Each time such new entities are added, the policy administrator must deliberate on how the access control policy shall be revised to reflect the new reality. A well-designed access control model must anticipate such changes so that the administration cost does not become prohibitive when the organization scales up. Unfortunately, past Access Control research does not offer a formal way to quantify the cost of policy administration. In this work, we propose to model ongoing policy administration in an active learning framework. Administration cost can be quantified in terms of query complexity. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by applying it to the evolution of protection domains. We also modelled different policy administration strategies in our framework. This allowed us to formally demonstrate that domain-based policies have a cost advantage over access control matrices because of the use of heuristic reasoning when the policy evolves. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to employ an active learning framework to study the cost of policy deliberation and demonstrate the cost advantage of heuristic policy administration.
Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Rodrigo Agerri
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political leaning of social media users, this has been typically simplified as a binary classification problem (e.g. left vs right) and has been limited to a single location, leading to a dearth of investigation into more complex, multiclass classification and its generalizability to different locations, particularly those with multi-party systems. Our work performs the first such effort by studying political leaning inference in three of the UK's nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), each of which has a different political landscape composed of multiple parties. To do so, we collect and release a dataset comprising users labelled by their political leaning as well as interactions with one another. We investigate the ability to predict the political leaning of users by leveraging these interactions in challenging scenarios such as few-shot learning, where training data is scarce, as well as assessing the applicability to users with different levels of political engagement. We show that interactions in the form of retweets between users can be a very powerful feature to enable political leaning inference, leading to consistent and robust results across different regions with multi-party systems. However, we also see that there is room for improvement in predicting the political leaning of users who are less engaged in politics.
Introduction. The article provides data on the territory of Kalmyk Steppe and its uluses in relation to the uyezd system of Astrakhan Governorate, outlines features of the former’s administrative structure in relation to the territorial component of public management, and examines historiography of the research issue. Materials. The paper investigates statistical digests, geographical reference books on the territorial composition of Astrakhan Governorate, including Kalmyk Steppe, its area, and ulus structure. Special attention is paid to certain legislative provisions of the Russian Empire concerning the governance of Astrakhan Kalmyks and the ulus administrative system. The work also introduces scholars’ opinions on the status of Kalmyk Steppe as part of Astrakhan Governorate, evolution of administrative governance in the 19th to early 20th centuries. Results. The question of how Kalmyk Steppe used to be classified in statistical and reference publications of the Russian Empire requires further investigation. In some cases, Kalmyk Steppe is designated as part of Astrakhan Governorate to be accompanied by a note that it is incorporated into uyezds of the province, and an indication of its total area. In other cases, there is no mention of the territory at all. This may have resulted from the administrative reforms in Kalmyk Steppe and, in general, changed approaches to Astrakhan Kalmyk people’s governance during the identified period. Nikolay Palmov’s viewpoint that the early 19th-century decrees had allotted the lands to the Kalmyk people to be fully owned by and thus constitute legitimate property of the latter is worth noticing in terms of scholarly research. The official position reflected in government documents and expressed in writings of Russian officials of the examined period states that the lands had been allotted for use and distributed by each ulus individually, i.e. never formed a single whole. So, even if one takes into account that the Kalmyks were governed by a special administrative department which was under the jurisdiction of the country’s ministerial system, there is practically no mention of the uyezd level in administrative/territorial structure of the Governorate, nor there are any essential prescriptions regarding correlation between the latter and the ulus system. This also remains understudied in Russian historiography.
History of Asia, Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
The psychological costs of the attention economy are often considered through the binary of harmful design and healthy use, with digital well-being chiefly characterised as a matter of personal responsibility. This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the empirical, ideological, and political limits of embedding this individualised perspective in computational discourses and designs of digital well-being measurement. We will reveal well-being to be a culturally specific and environmentally conditioned concept and will problematize user engagement as a universal proxy for well-being. Instead, the contributing factors of user well-being will be located in environing social, cultural, and political conditions far beyond the control of individual users alone. In doing so, we hope to reinvigorate the issue of digital well-being measurement as a nexus point of political concern, through which multiple disciplines can study experiences of digital ill as symptomatic of wider social inequalities and (capitalist) relations of power.
Social media platforms have been trying to be more transparent about the political ads they run on their platforms, because the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that political campaigns are using social media on a large scale. One such transparency effort is the Facebook Ad Library, a public repository of all political ads run on Facebook and Instagram. This library provides journalist and researchers with data to get a better understanding of political advertising and microtargeting on Facebook's platforms. Unfortunately, the Facebook Ad Library only provides estimates and basic information. This paper analyses political ads in more depth, by examining the themes that ads are about. We provide a method to match themes to political Facebook ads and we apply this method to analyse Facebook ad campaigns ran by Dutch political parties during the 2021 Dutch general election.
Abstract When considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.