ABSTRACT The Shanghai Co‐operation Organisation (SCO) has emerged as a viable intergovernmental organisation with a vibrant security portfolio. With its recent expansion it now boasts ten members, including rising great powers Russia, China, and India, as well as nuclear‐armed Pakistan, and regional power Iran. However, the organisation is beset with internal inconsistencies and regional rivalries (Pakistan‐India, India‐China in particular) that may preclude its viability. Despite this, the SCO, led by China and Russia, has set itself up as a major counterweight to NATO and other security organisations in Eurasia. This article examines the feasibility of the SCO in forming its own concert of powers in Eurasia in the new multipolar system, with three powers—China, India, and Russia balancing in Eurasia. The research will feature a multi‐methods design, based on the aggregate capabilities model, and using statistical analysis of arms trading and defence budgets amongst the SCO powers, that will enhance the specific case studies. This includes examining what system‐ and unit‐level factors are pushing the member states towards a regional concert, including internal and external, and what unit‐level factors may, or will, prevent a concert from forming.
In-person networks based on imperial legacies, immigrants, and general trading companies that share a common language and culture can help expand trade in differentiated goods. However, little is known regarding how such networks can facilitate deals for differentiated goods. To investigate the role played by general trading companies in this context, we study how major trading companies navigated a sensitive transaction—the procurement of distillation facilities for oil shale in Manchuria—in imperial Japan during the first age of globalization. Our archival research revealed that trading companies logistically supported Japanese buyer engineers when they met in person with engineers associated with Western suppliers, and visited plants in the West with the aim of acquiring tacit knowledge beyond the scope of written specifications. The role played by Japanese trading companies in this context involved promoting knowledge spillover from the West by providing logistic support for such in-person meetings.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Social Sciences
Over the past five years humanitarian ties between Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries have shown a rapid forced “cooling” due to numerous local and global restrictions during the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020–2021, and a gradual recovery in the post-COVID era. Against the backdrop of the recovery of countries after the pandemic, other constraints have emerged, primarily of a military and political nature, which “freeze” the further development of humanitarian ties. Since February 24, 2022, such a constraint in Russian-Japanese relations has been Russia's special military operation, which led to a global split between supporters and opponents of Ukraine. Nevertheless, Japan strives to establish and develop relations with the Asia-Pacific countries, which resulted, in particular, in a new record of foreign tourists visiting Japan in 2024. The situation in Russian-Japanese relations has seriously worsened, due to the actual development of sanctions and information war between the two countries. However, humanitarian ties between Russia and Japan have not ceased yet.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
This paper investigates the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in fostering economic growth within the ASEAN region, which is a dynamic area known for its fast-paced economic development in recent decades. The study's objective is to analyze the FDI situation in ASEAN and how it is distributed among key sectors such as manufacturing, finance, and trade, as well as to assess the challenges and opportunities that the region faces in attracting foreign capital. The study explores how ASEAN's policies, such as trade liberalization, agreements, the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and other initiatives, have successfully positioned the region as a prime destination for FDI. The findings indicate that FDI has significantly contributed to economic growth, job creation, and technological advancement, though benefits remain unevenly distributed among the member states. The paper also highlights the growing importance of sustainable and high-tech investments, emphasizing that future economic progress will require addressing infrastructure gaps, enhancing human capital, and strengthening regulatory frameworks. The findings suggest that, while FDI remains a crucial driver of growth, ASEAN must focus on promoting inclusivity and sustainability in its investment strategies to maintain its competitive edge in the global market.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Sai Raj Kishore Perla, Aditya Vora, Sauradip Nag
et al.
We introduce ASIA (Adaptive 3D Segmentation using few Image Annotations), a novel framework that enables segmentation of possibly non-semantic and non-text-describable "parts" in 3D. Our segmentation is controllable through a few user-annotated in-the-wild images, which are easier to collect than multi-view images, less demanding to annotate than 3D models, and more precise than potentially ambiguous text descriptions. Our method leverages the rich priors of text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion (SD), to transfer segmentations from image space to 3D, even when the annotated and target objects differ significantly in geometry or structure. During training, we optimize a text token for each segment and fine-tune our model with a novel cross-view part correspondence loss. At inference, we segment multi-view renderings of the 3D mesh, fuse the labels in UV-space via voting, refine them with our novel Noise Optimization technique, and finally map the UV-labels back onto the mesh. ASIA provides a practical and generalizable solution for both semantic and non-semantic 3D segmentation tasks, outperforming existing methods by a noticeable margin in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
We present TyDi QA-WANA, a question-answering dataset consisting of 28K examples divided among 10 language varieties of western Asia and northern Africa. The data collection process was designed to elicit information-seeking questions, where the asker is genuinely curious to know the answer. Each question in paired with an entire article that may or may not contain the answer; the relatively large size of the articles results in a task suitable for evaluating models' abilities to utilize large text contexts in answering questions. Furthermore, the data was collected directly in each language variety, without the use of translation, in order to avoid issues of cultural relevance. We present performance of two baseline models, and release our code and data to facilitate further improvement by the research community.
Climate policy scenario generation and evaluation have traditionally relied on integrated assessment models (IAMs) and expert-driven qualitative analysis. These methods enable stakeholders, such as policymakers and researchers, to anticipate impacts, plan governance strategies, and develop mitigation measures. However, traditional methods are often time-intensive, reliant on simple extrapolations of past trends, and limited in capturing the complex and interconnected nature of energy and climate issues. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI models trained on vast datasets, these limitations can be addressed, ensuring robustness even under limited data conditions. In this work, we explore the novel method that employs generative AI, specifically large language models (LLMs), to simulate climate policy scenarios for Sub-Saharan Africa. These scenarios focus on energy transition themes derived from the historical United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) documents. By leveraging generative models, the project aims to create plausible and diverse policy scenarios that align with regional climate goals and energy challenges. Given limited access to human evaluators, automated techniques were employed for scenario evaluation. We generated policy scenarios using the llama3.2-3B model. Of the 34 generated responses, 30 (88%) passed expert validation, accurately reflecting the intended impacts provided in the corresponding prompts. We compared these validated responses against assessments from a human climate expert and two additional LLMs (gemma2-2B and mistral-7B). Our structured, embedding-based evaluation framework shows that generative AI effectively generate scenarios that are coherent, relevant, plausible, and diverse. This approach offers a transformative tool for climate policy planning in data-constrained regions.
In recent years, the drug situation in China has generally stabilized, and according to official Chinese statistics, the number of drug addicts is reducing. However, China remains one of the key sources of synthetic drugs and precursors to other countries.
The spread of narcotic drugs (synthetic opioids, cannabinoids, methamphetamine and others) threatens all countries. An important factor is that the Chinese government is able to control the large number of
pharmaceutical manufacturers in the country , thus making it difficult for new types and modifications of drugs and psychoactive substances to appear on the market.
In recent years, the PRC leadership has taken a number of effective steps to combat the uncontrolled production and distribution of illegal drugs, in particular, the state tightens control and regulation of the production of synthetic psychoactive drugs. China has strict laws against drug trafficking, which also serve as an effective deterrent against the distribution and consumption of illicit substances. Due to these measures, the international drug business is forced to move laboratories for the production of synthetic drugs from China to other nearby countries such as Myanmar and India.
The situation with the international drug trade in the modern world requires concerted action at the interstate level. The interaction between law enforcement agencies of the SCO (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) member states is a good example of cooperation in this area. One of the priorities of this organization is the fight against drug crime.
At this stage, it is necessary to further deepen cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of the SCO countries to identify established drug trafficking channels, fight against drug trafficking in the dark web and prevent the emergence of analogues to various psychotropic substances prohibited by law.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The major powers are becoming more interested in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) due to its strategic location. They believe that increasing their presence in the area helps to achieve a number of national goals, particularly enhancing their influence in the Asia-Pacific region as a whole as well as in the countries of mainland Southeast Asia. The article examines the US and China’s approaches to the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) in light of their rivalry. This analysis additionally demonstrates that every power has a unique way for creating integration mechanisms in order to draw the GMS nations under its influence. The paper also focuses on the evaluation of Russia's capabilities. The author points out that given China's and the United States' long-standing presence in the area, Russia, which has a number of interests there, must take the proper measures to establish its place and role in the region.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The bank is a company with highly regulated conditions of creation and operation. Its creation is a legal process at two levels, including the creation of a commercial company first, and then the transformation of the company into a bank. The legislator of the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa (OHADA) brings an innovation in terms of companies with the possibility of the creation of a single-member company, this one has the advantage of facilitating the creation of businesses by individuals by reducing the informal circuit which characterizes the business world in Africa. To preserve its stability, only the legal entity in general, and the public limited company in particular, is authorized to transform itself into a bank. However, shareholding conditions may limit the company's access to the banking profession; such is the case of the single-member company. Prudential standards are strict regarding the form and conditions for establishing a bank. The bank plays a very important role in the economy of a country, that it cannot be left to anyone. Prudential standards relate to the stability of the banking sector through shareholding, which plays an important role in the operation of the bank. The one-person company does not offer the necessary guarantees of stability to set up as a bank, since it is subject to the will of a single individual representing the general meeting of the company.
Asia and Eurasia, Africa, Pacific Area, and Antarctica
In this chapter, we investigate the spectrum measurement results in Asia-Pacific region. Then the spectrum sharing policy in the Asia-Pacific region is reviewed in details, where the national projects and strategies on spectrum refarming and spectrum sharing in China, Japan, Singapore, India, Korea and Australia are investigated. Then we introduce the spectrum sharing test-bed that is developed in China, which is a cognitive radio enabled TD-LTE test-bed utilizing TVWS. This chapter provides a brief introduction of the spectrum sharing mechanism and policy of Asia-Pacific region.
Work on bias in pretrained language models (PLMs) focuses on bias evaluation and mitigation and fails to tackle the question of bias attribution and explainability. We propose a novel metric, the $\textit{bias attribution score}$, which draws from information theory to measure token-level contributions to biased behavior in PLMs. We then demonstrate the utility of this metric by applying it on multilingual PLMs, including models from Southeast Asia which have not yet been thoroughly examined in bias evaluation literature. Our results confirm the presence of sexist and homophobic bias in Southeast Asian PLMs. Interpretability and semantic analyses also reveal that PLM bias is strongly induced by words relating to crime, intimate relationships, and helping among other discursive categories, suggesting that these are topics where PLMs strongly reproduce bias from pretraining data and where PLMs should be used with more caution.
Abhijeet Parida, Daniel Capellán-Martín, Zhifan Jiang
et al.
Gliomas, a kind of brain tumor characterized by high mortality, present substantial diagnostic challenges in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper introduces a novel approach to glioma segmentation using transfer learning to address challenges in resource-limited regions with minimal and low-quality MRI data. We leverage pre-trained deep learning models, nnU-Net and MedNeXt, and apply a stratified fine-tuning strategy using the BraTS2023-Adult-Glioma and BraTS-Africa datasets. Our method exploits radiomic analysis to create stratified training folds, model training on a large brain tumor dataset, and transfer learning to the Sub-Saharan context. A weighted model ensembling strategy and adaptive post-processing are employed to enhance segmentation accuracy. The evaluation of our proposed method on unseen validation cases on the BraTS-Africa 2024 task resulted in lesion-wise mean Dice scores of 0.870, 0.865, and 0.926, for enhancing tumor, tumor core, and whole tumor regions and was ranked first for the challenge. Our approach highlights the ability of integrated machine-learning techniques to bridge the gap between the medical imaging capabilities of resource-limited countries and established developed regions. By tailoring our methods to a target population's specific needs and constraints, we aim to enhance diagnostic capabilities in isolated environments. Our findings underscore the importance of approaches like local data integration and stratification refinement to address healthcare disparities, ensure practical applicability, and enhance impact. A dockerized version of the BraTS-Africa 2024 winning algorithm is available at https://hub.docker.com/r/aparida12/brats-ssa-2024 .
Abstract As the scholarly border between China and Southeast Asia has dissipated, so the vast region from the Yangtze River to Malaysia has been integrated into a whole. There was an inexorable expansion of copper-base expertise southward, reaching Lingnan and Yunnan by 1400-1200 bc, and Southeast Asia one or two centuries later, with ultimate origins in the Asian steppes via the Chinese Central Plains and Sichuan. As prospectors identified and exploited the Southeast Asian copper mines, a limited range of copper-base artefacts moved along established exchange routes, including socketed axes, bangles and spears. At first rare and used to advertise status in communities advantaged by a strategic location, with increased production and in situ casting within consumer settlements, bronzes were no longer associated with social elites. Only with different regional stimuli during the Iron Age, were bronzes again employed by societies characterized by social inequality.
The article provides a general evaluation of the Russian direction of Japan’s foreign policy as of late 2023 and analyzes the factors that determine its contents. It considers the speeches of the Prime Minister of Japan, the sections of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s publications which focus on Russia-Japan relations, analyzes the state of economic ties given the sanctions imposed by Japan on Russia, and studies the place of Russia in Japan’s National Security Strategy, adopted in late 2022. The author comes to the conclusion that, despite the obvious influence of the U.S. on the Japanese position regarding Russia, one can hardly speak of Washington bluntly imposing its views on Tokyo. Rather, we find an already established consensus regarding this issue between Japan and the U.S. Meanwhile, the “foreign pressure” is not limited to interaction with the United States, as cooperation with multilateral formats of the “collective West” starts to play an increasingly important role for Japan. From the point of view of domestic politics, the situation also facilitates the continuation of Tokyo’s anti -Russian course, as, within the country, those expressing alternative points of view are de-facto subject to ostracism and “cancelling.” But, even given all these negative factors, one can still glimpse some signs of pragmatism in the Russian direction of Japan’s foreign policy. This lets one hope that, should the Ukrainian crisis be resolved, the Japanese leadership will not put obstacles in the way of normalization of Russia-Japan relations.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The article is devoted to the analysis of the perception of difficult historical experience in bilateral relations by China and Japan, which dates back to the middle of the 19th century when both countries faced strong pressure from the Western world. The chronological framework of the study thus covers the period starting from the “Opium Wars” in China and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, makes a focus on the war of 1937–1945, which is viewed as the culmination of the crisis in bilateral relations, and ends with the current situation, when both countries are still trying to comprehend this difficult period of their history. The purpose of the study is to identify the role of the Western component in the mutual perception of recent historical experience by China and Japan, examining this perception through the prism of the West-East opposition. The first part of the article describes the process of Japan and China, searching for their national identities after facing with the growing pressure from the West in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century. The second part sheds light on the role of the Western component in the formation of historical memory in Japan and China, related to the recent war between them. The study demonstrates significance of the Western factor for understanding the origins of the crisis in Sino-Japanese relations and the assessment of its consequences for each country. It should be definitely taken into consideration for better understanding the current state of Sino-Japanese relations as well as the interpretation of historical past in both countries.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The article examines the topic of development and implementation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in Vietnam, one of the rapidly developing countries in East Asia. The Vietnamese government, stimulated by its economic success, is paying more and more attention to the development and financing of the AI industry every year. The government's national strategy aims to transform Vietnam into one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence in the region and even in the whole world. The work on creation and application of AI is gradually becoming a national concern in Vietnam. As an example, the author considers Vietnam Artificial Intelligence Day on the topic “Artificial Intelligence: The Power of Life” – a major event to promote AI technologies, which was held in September 2023 in Ho Chi Minh City, the main economic center of the country. The activities of the Joint Russian-Vietnamese Tropical Research and Technology Center are also outlined in the context of its contribution to solving the AI problem.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president of Thai Women Network in Europe (TWNE), was originally conducted in English over email by Sirijit Sunanta and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot in July 2022. It was supplemented by an online interview (via WebEx) in Thai by Sirijit Sunanta in November 2022. Mrs. Grimsmann served as the President of TWNE from 2019 to 2022. TWNE is well-established and one of the most active organizations of Thai migrant women with individual and organizational members in 16 European countries, the US, and Thailand. TWNE seeks to collaborate with governmental and non-governmental organizations, both in Thailand and the destination countries, to improve the welfare of Thai migrant women. They organize annual general meetings to discuss topics relevant to Thai migrant women’s lives in destination countries and publish an annual newsletter Sarn Satree (สารสตรี) to circulate information. Mrs. Grimsmann has extensive experience of providing community service as a social volunteer and working with international organizations, particularly in the area of women and children’s welfare. She is now based in France and Thailand.