Hasil untuk "Unlocalized maps (Asian studies only)"

Mehmet Özgün Özkul

Marco Zappa

This special issue examines the complex and evolving relations between Japan and Southeast Asia. Historically rich in resources, Southeast Asia attracted imperial powers, including Japan, significantly transforming the region. Post-war ecosystems were influenced by Japanese occupation during WWII, shaping leaders and industrial development. Japanese investments and Official Development Assistance (ODA) since the 1960s have facilitated regional growth. Despite Japan's cautious diplomacy due to its US alliance, it diversified support in the 1990s, including infrastructure, legal, and political aid to transitional economies like Vietnam. Japan remains a significant investor, expanding aid to address climate change and maintaining trust in ASEAN countries. Recent geopolitical shifts, including China’s rise and US-China competition, have pushed Southeast Asia to strengthen ties with both powers, positioning Japan’s evolving role as crucial for regional security and development. The issue includes analyses of Japan’s strategic empowerment of Southeast Asia, capacity building, nostalgia in foreign policy, and smart technologies in urban planning, illustrating broader trends and reducing historical asymmetries.

Fabricio Rodríguez

Toygar Sinan Baykan

This article reflects upon the author’s long fieldwork experience on party politics in the hybrid political regime of Turkey. It illustrates the ethical and practical challenges that the political context poses for research and elaborates on two interrelated issues. Firstly, the observations and findings that researchers may obtain and present in such a polarised and semi-authoritarian setting can be remarkably different from the expectations of the research participants. This poses a challenge to the principles of not doing harm and of informed consent, and requires researchers to negotiate these principles in order to convey meaningful research outcomes while being uncompromising with respect to the principle of anonymity/confidentiality. The other dilemma is that, in settings where politics imposes itself on bureaucratic and legal institutions as well as on the economy, researchers may find themselves in extremely vulnerable positions before powerful research participants. To what extent should the researcher tolerate being treated badly and how should the researcher deal with such contexts? In this article, the author proposes that Max Weber’s recommendation in his article “Science as Vocation” – to avoid extremely politicised positions – still remains relevant in ethical and practical respects.

Deepsikha Chatterjee

Dongping Wang

Linda Westman, Ping Huang

This paper engages with China’s currently most prominent environmental policy concept: ecological civilisation. As this concept is becoming a cornerstone of China’s strategy of socialist modernisation, we examine whether and how the term can enable ecological protection in China and beyond. We argue that ecological civilisation, while a recently emerged discourse, builds on established environmental governance practices in China that shape its manifestation in political action. To illustrate this argument, we explain how two philosophical principles central to ecological civilisation discourse, “holism” and “harmony”, have been expressed in environmental political practice in Communist China. Building on this analysis, we suggest that ecological civilisation discourse may have a profound impact in certain policy domains (e.g., resource conservation and ecologi­cal conservation redlines), but limited transformative capacity in others (e.g., environmental litigation and resource extraction).

Mina Roces

During the past decades, Asian Studies scholars have made outstanding contributions on the topic of how political elites have promoted changes in clothing in their projects of modernising their citizens or creating new nationalist identities (such as by inventing national dress). But the visual power of the politics of appearances allows also marginal and oppressed groups to send powerful messages. This special issue proposes to shift the analytical lens from the way sartorial changes have come from above – i.e., from political elites in power – to examining instead how resistance movements, including women’s movements, social movements, minorities and marginalised groups, utilise the semiotics of dress to advance their agendas from below. Thus, this issue underscores the importance of dress, bodily deportment, fashion and etiquette, analysing how these have been intrinsic to the performance of social, political, cultural, religious and gendered identities, and in challenging the status quo. The focus here is on how dress and fashion are marshalled for the performance of collective action, socio-political dissent, alternative politics and identity politics.

Tom Narins

Moin Ahmad Nizami

David Tyfield, Fabricio Rodríguez

Since the call for papers for this Special Issue less than two years ago, the world has faced a stream of existential challenges, with the background drumbeat of environmental catastrophe(s) and geopolitical tensions growing ever louder. At this moment of unprecedented global challenges, it is increasingly apparent that the sphere of international politics and government, to which citizens would turn for action, is itself also displaying a deep crisis of structural dysfunction. The growing influence of China appears to be both a contributing cause and partial effect of the perceived international vacuum of the multilateral action needed to prevent and respond to such a serious moment of planetary crises. The burning question of the age arguably concerns how China will use, expand or lose its remarkable sources of economic, political and technological influence in this system crisis scenario while attempting to stabilise (or at least not upend) its own economic and socio-political conditions in the process. How will China actually go beyond China? And what world – what world order, what planet and nature, what globe-spanning sociotechnical systems – will this singularly important but not yet well-understood phenomenon create? This Special Issue opens up this agenda, presenting a series of insightful papers across a range of empirical sites that illuminate not only that profound change is underway with the (uncertain) rise of China and the global reach of its infra­structural projects amidst planetary phase shift, but also how that is currently unfolding.

Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert

Nina Mirnig

Patrick Heinrich, Francesca Tarocco, Daniele Brombal

I-Yi Hsieh

The Red House neighbourhood in the Ximen shopping district, located on the south side of Taipei, has been the centre of the city’s vibrant culture of sexual inclusivity and gay activism since the early 2000s. Next to the shining billboards at Ximen Square, the Red House presents itself as a reminder of the neighbourhood’s historical transformation from a marketplace during the Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan (1895–1945) to a major pornography theatre in the 1970s–1990s, while emerging as a new urban centre for youth culture, entertainment and outdoor gay bars in the 2000s. Addressing issues of urban exclusion and inclusion, this paper focuses on an HIV testing booth located in the Red House area. Based on interviews with social workers and drawing analyses from archival research, this paper reflects on the politics of a place of caring. Providing 15-minute HIV testing sessions free for anyone in the gay community, the testing booth is an outpost of the Taiwan AIDS Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation that receives public funds. Despite the fact that HIV tests are now widely available for purchase – even accessible from vending machines – the testing booth’s cosy, discretionary and friendly manner renders it a place of caring, where one can be attended by social workers as well as receiving a consultation.

Aksana Ismailbekova

Based on fieldwork in southern Kyrgyzstan in October and November 2017, this article explores at a micro-level the security practices undertaken by Uzbek people in Osh. It closely examines the experiences of Uzbek taxi-drivers, traders and businesspeople and thereby seeks to understand how and why local actors have managed to find creative ways to secure their economic activities. The business sector is the sector in which the Uzbek community is dominant, whereas the Kyrgyz community dominates the state structures. Historically, the two ethnic groups have lived side by side and have been in constant contact with each other through this state/business symbiosis. However, the conflict of 2010 drastically changed and destroyed this symbiosis, and with it threatened the Uzbek business sector. The examination of the security- making practices of the Uzbek businesspeople was guided through the prism of the theoretical framework of “securityscapes”.

Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam

Elke Grawert

Forced migration studies and research related to the “new wars” paradigm have drawn attention to the modes of operation of war economies and the coercive labour relations involved. Field research findings by the author and an Afghan team in 2015–2017 on employment by local construction companies revealed that remnants of the war economy have persisted in Afghanistan’s fragile and violence-affected settings and continue to shape labour relations. To avoid acts of sabotage and fulfil construction contracts, relationships with local powerholders – politicians holding offices in government or Taliban leaders – are crucial for mobile Afghan companies operating on construction sites for limited periods. The research findings indicate that these relationships provide a field of interaction and negotiations about conflict-sensitive employment between company managers and local elders representing community interests – and through them, local powerholders. The involvement of elders affects the labour relations between company managers and local workers, both mobile and immobile.

Baburam Saikia

Majuli is an island situated mid-stream in the river Brahmaputra, in India’s northeastern state of Assam. The island is bounded by the river Subansiri – a tributary of the river Brahmaputra – on the northwest, the Kherkatiasuti – a spill channel of the river Brahmaputra – in the northeast and the main Brahmaputra river to the south and southwest. The river usually brings floods every year. Inhabitants sužffer badly as a consequence of widespread severe bank erosion, which causes serious damage to residential blocks, paddy fields, grazing land and open areas. More than half of the island has eroded over the last 100 years. The government’s role in terms of protection measures does not seem to be ežffective in controlling floods and stopping erosion. With land disappearing, there is a progressive loss of the traditional means of livelihood of the island’s people, leading to their displacement. During times of erosion, inhabitants offžer their prayers to the river Brahmaputra to stop rapid destruction and protect them from catastrophe. A section of the population has set up a congregational worship of the river Brahmaputra, which is performed on the riverbank every year before the monsoon begins. The islanders’ relationship with the river is affžectionate but also filled with hatred, depending on the activity of the river. This paper analyses the beliefs and narratives of the inhabitants of Majuli associated with the river Brahmaputra.

Stefano Beggiora, Lidia Guzy, Uwe Skoda