Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Politics and International Relations
  4. South-East Asian government, politics and policy
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

101 results in South-East Asian government, politics and policy

Page 1 of 6

States against Nations
  • Meritocracy, Patronage, and the Challenges of Bureaucratic Selection
  • Nicholas Kuipers
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • In States Against Nations, Nicholas Kuipers questions the virtues of meritocratic recruitment as the ideal method of bureaucratic selection. Kuipers argues that while civil service reform is often seen as an admirable act of state-building, it can actually undermine nation-building. Throughout the book, he shows that in countries with high levels of group-based inequality, privileged groups tend to outperform marginalized groups on entrance exams, leading to disproportionate representation in government positions. This dynamic exacerbates intergroup tensions and undermines efforts towards nation-building. Drawing on large-scale surveys, experiments, and archival documents, States Against Nations provides a thought-provoking perspective on the challenges of bureaucratic recruitment and unearths an overlooked tension between state- and nation-building.

Statelessness in Asia
  • Edited by Michelle Foster, Jaclyn Neo, Christoph Sperfeldt
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • This interdisciplinary collection, edited by leading scholars, provides the first book-length treatment of statelessness in the region in which most stateless persons reside. This book fills a critical gap in understanding statelessness in Asia, offering a unique interdisciplinary and comprehensive set of perspectives. This book brings case studies and expertise together to explore statelessness in Asia, itself a diverse region, and offers new insights as to what it means to be, de facto and de jure, stateless. In identifying key points of similarities and divergences across the region, as well as critical nodes for comparisons, this book aims to provide fresh frameworks for comparative research in this area.

Contested Civil Society in Myanmar
  • Local Change and Global Recognition
  • Maaike Matelski
  • Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023
  • This book illustrates the ways in which contestations in Myanmar society are reflected in civil society. It provides an up-to-date overview of the main identities and contestations in Myanmar society as a whole.

Law and Precarity
  • Legal Consciousness and Daily Survival in Vietnam
  • Tu Phuong Nguyen
  • Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • Why do some people invoke the law (or resist it) as a way to solve their problems and achieve more stability in life, only to end up in another challenging and uncertain situation? This book offers an original understanding of the important, but understudied, paradoxical effects of law on the survival strategies of Vietnamese people who are caught to live and work in precarious circumstances. It demonstrates how precarity influences the way people perceive, engage with, or resist the law; yet law, at the same time, creates and reinforces such a condition. Understanding the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and precarity sheds a new light on the way law enables individuals to better their condition but ultimately makes matters worse rather than better. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of law and society, political economy, anthropology, and Asian studies.

Competition Law in South Asia
  • Policy Diffusion and Transfer
  • Amber Darr
  • Published online:
    16 February 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • In the last twenty years, South Asian countries have increasingly engaged with modern competition legislation. Yet, apart from India and Pakistan, the countries in this region have had little success enforcing these laws. Competition Law in South Asia analyses the mechanisms and institutions through which Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Maldives Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan have engaged with modern competition legislation. The book argues that the success (or failure) of competition reform in these countries is inextricably linked to the unique interplay of mechanisms and legal and political institutions through which these countries have engaged with competition legislation. The book provides an in-depth comparative analysis of the adoption and implementation continuum in India and Pakistan, the compatibility and legitimacy generated by the adoption process, and its impact on implementation. Taking a far-reaching, comparative approach, the book draws lessons not only for countries in South Asia but also for emerging economies across the globe.

Investing the ASEAN Way
  • Theories and Practices of Economic Integration in Southeast Asia
  • Sungjoon Cho, Jürgen Kurtz
  • Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022
  • In recent decades, South East Asia has become one of the world's most popular destinations for foreign investment. The member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have employed varying modalities to pursue first security and then economic cooperation. This book explores regional law and governance in ASEAN through the lens of its regulation of foreign investment. It adopts a new framework to identify the unique ontological autonomy of the ASEAN Investment Regime beyond a simple aggregation of its individual member states. It deploys a sociology-led approach (especially constructivism) and emphasizes ideational factors (such as culture and norms) that guide state actions from within. The book explores the manner in which ASEAN's history and culture have fundamentally shaped its foreign investment policies, leading to outcomes that often depart fundamentally from the external structure and script of Global Investment Law.

Unity through Division
  • Political Islam, Representation and Democracy in Indonesia
  • Diego Fossati
  • Published online:
    15 September 2022
    Print publication:
    22 September 2022
  • Indonesia, like many other countries around the world, is currently experiencing the process of democratic backsliding, marked by a toxic mix of religious sectarianism, polarization, and executive overreach. Despite this trend, Indonesians have become more, rather than less, satisfied with their country's democratic practice. What accounts for this puzzle? Unity Through Division examines an overlooked aspect of democracy in Indonesia: political representation. In this country, an ideological cleavage between pluralism and Islamism has long characterized political competition. This cleavage, while divisive, has been a strength of Indonesia's democracy, giving meaning to political participation and allowing a degree of representation not often observed in young democracies. While the recent resurgence of radical Islam and political polarization in Indonesian politics may have contributed to democratic erosion, these factors have simultaneously clarified political alternatives and improved perceptions of representation, in turn bolstering democratic participation and satisfaction. This compelling book effectively challenges the wisdom of the role of Islam in Indonesian political life and provides a fresh analysis for debates on democratic backsliding in Indonesia and beyond.

Mobilizing for Elections
  • Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia
  • Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, Allen Hicken, Paul D. Hutchcroft
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • Politicians in Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters, but the ways in which they do this vary tremendously, both across and within countries. Mobilizing for Elections presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is distributed. The book draws on an extensive, multi-country, multi-year research effort involving interactions with hundreds of politicians and vote brokers, as well as surveys of voters and political campaigners across the region. Chapters explore how local machines in the Philippines, ad hoc election teams in Indonesia, and political parties in Malaysia pursue distinctive clusters of strategies of patronage distribution – what the authors term electoral mobilization regimes. In doing so, the book shows how and why patronage politics varies, and how it works on the ground.

Taiwan's Exceptionalism
  • Edited by Anna  Rudakowska, Ewa Trojnar, Agata W. Zietek
  • Ewa Kowal
  • Published by:
    Jagiellonian University Press
    Published online:
    16 July 2022
    Print publication:
    21 August 2022
  • Take a look at the political map of the world and you will see that almost every piece of land belongs to a state. This division - in contrast, for example, to the split created by a valley between two mountains - is man-made, imaginary, and arbitrary, and therefore can be easily questioned. Indeed, in addition to the multiple disputed borders that permeate the world map, some countries are not recognized or partially recognized. Other states decide whether a certain political unit can be recognized as sovereign. Again, even though their decision concerns imaginary divisions created by borders, accepting or rejecting them has far-reaching consequences in real life. The unrecognized country stays outside of a club of sovereign states, which makes cooperation with its members very difficult or even impossible. It has no choice but to invent novel ways to conduct external relations. Moreover, this specific international situation has a major impact on its politics, people’s lifestyles, culture, etc.

    This book is about just such an exceptional entity in the international community of states - Taiwan. It explains how the island’s specific international situation influences the developments in its external and internal affairs.

    Taiwan’s Exceptionalism shines the spotlight on two areas that are heavily influenced by Taipei’s unique status - its external and internal affairs. Additionally, each chapter of the book addresses the active role of Taiwanese society in shaping their international fate. First, it introduces the reader to Taiwan’s international legal status; next, it turns to the consequences of the island’s specific situation for international relations in the South China Sea, as well as in the US-China-Taiwan triangle. Having set the historical and political background for the following chapters, the volume draws attention to important phenomena in Taiwan’s internal affairs that are closely related to the status of the island. They examine Taiwan’s democratic development and challenges, civil society activism, indigenous tourism clusters, eco-tourism and the image of the island in Polish dailies. The authors believe that all of these facets are exceptional in the sense that they all bear the imprint of the island’s distinct international situation.

A History of Thailand
  • 4th edition
  • Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit
  • Published online:
    13 April 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • Since it was first published in 2005, A History of Thailand has been hailed as an authoritative, lively and readable account of Thailand's political, economic, social and cultural history. From the early settlements in the Chao Phraya basin to today, Baker and Phongpaichit trace how a world of mandarin nobles and unfree peasants was transformed by colonialism, the expansion of the rice frontier and the immigration of traders and labourers from southern China. This book examines how the monarchy managed the foundation of a new nation‐state at the end of the nineteenth century, and how urban nationalists, ambitious generals, communist rebels and business politicians competed to take control through the twentieth century. It tracks Thailand's economic changes, globalisation and the evolution of mass society, and draws on popular culture to dramatize social trends.This edition contains a new chapter on Thailand's turbulent politics since 2006 and incorporates new sources and research throughout.

Rioting for Representation
  • Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries
  • Risa J. Toha
  • Published online:
    28 October 2021
    Print publication:
    04 November 2021
  • Ethnic riots are a costly and all too common occurrence during political transitions in multi-ethnic settings.  Why do ethnic riots occur in certain parts of a country and not others? How does violence eventually decline? Drawing on rich case studies and quantitative evidence from Indonesia between 1990 and 2012, this book argues that patterns of ethnic rioting are not inevitably driven by inter-group animosity, weakness of state capacity, or local demographic composition.  Rather, local ethnic elites strategically use violence to leverage their demands for political inclusion during political transition and that violence eventually declines as these demands are accommodated. Toha breaks new ground in showing that particular political reforms—increased political competition, direct local elections, and local administrative units partitioning—in ethnically diverse contexts can ameliorate political exclusion and reduce overall levels of violence between groups.

Systems Thinking Analyses for Health Policy and Systems Development
  • A Malaysian Case Study
  • Edited by Jo. M. Martins, Indra Pathmanathan, David T. Tan, Shiang Cheng Lim, Pascale Allotey
  • Published online:
    04 September 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021
  • Health systems are fluid and their components are interdependent in complex ways. Policymakers, academics and students continually endeavour to understand how to manage health systems to improve the health of populations. However, previous scholarship has often failed to engage with the intersections and interactions of health with a multitude of other systems and determinants. This book ambitiously takes on the challenge of presenting health systems as a coherent whole, by applying a systems-thinking lens. It focuses on Malaysia as a case study to demonstrate the evolution of a health system from a low-income developing status to one of the most resilient health systems today. A rich collaboration of multidisciplinary academics working with policymakers who were at the coalface of decision-making and practitioners with decades of experience, provides a candid analysis of what worked and what did not. The result is an engaging, informative and thought-provoking intervention in the debate. This title is Open Access.

Narrating Democracy in Myanmar
  • The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers
  • Tamas Wells
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 June 2021
    Print publication:
    14 May 2021
  • This book analyses what Myanmar's struggle for democracy has signified to Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and to their international allies. In doing so, it explores how understanding contested meanings of democracy helps make sense of the country's tortuous path since Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won historic elections in 2015. Using Burmese and English language sources, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar reveals how the country's ongoing struggles for democracy exist not only in opposition to Burmese military elites, but also within networks of local activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers.

Democracy and Nationalism in Southeast Asia
  • From Secessionist Mobilization to Conflict Resolution
  • Jacques Bertrand
  • Published online:
    04 May 2021
    Print publication:
    29 April 2021
  • Jacques Bertrand offers a comparative-historical analysis of five nationalist conflicts over several decades in Southeast Asia. Using a theoretical framework to explain variance over time and across cases, he challenges and refines existing debates on democracy's impact and shows that, while democratization significantly reduces violent insurgency over time, it often introduces pernicious effects that fail to resolve conflict and contribute to maintaining deep nationalist grievances. Drawing on years of detailed fieldwork, Bertrand analyses the paths that led from secessionist mobilization to a range of outcomes. These include persistent state repression for Malay Muslims in Thailand, low level violence under a top-down 'special autonomy' for Papuans, reframing of mobilizing from nationalist to indigenous peoples in the Cordillera, a long and broken path to an untested broad autonomy for the Moros and relatively successful broad autonomy for Acehnese.

Rule of Law Intermediaries
  • Brokering Influence in Myanmar
  • Kristina Simion
  • Published online:
    17 April 2021
    Print publication:
    06 May 2021
  • Scholars puzzle over the conditions that make rule of law development in authoritarian settings successful. In this significant contribution, focusing on the decade of Myanmar's political transformation, Kristina Simion explores rule of law assistance through the practice and experience of intermediaries, their capital, strategies and challenges. How do intermediaries influence the field, and the ways in which the rule of law is brokered transnationally? And why do they matter? Simion relates her research to law and sociology to bring to light these neglected players, focusing on who they are, the influence they have, their double agency and their crucial importance in establishing trust and translating rule of law. Relying on rich empirical data collected in Myanmar, the book shares the voices of the individuals that help to steer societal change within authoritarian confines. This socio-legal work offers some insights into why rule of law change in authoritarian settings often does not go expected ways, one of the development field's long unresolved issues.

Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective
  • Edited by Jonathan Digby Rigg, Jamie Gillen, Eric Thompson
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    21 November 2020
    Print publication:
    09 October 2019
  • Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective provides the first multicountry, inter-disciplinary analysis of the single most important social and economic formation in the Asian countryside: the smallholder. Based on ten core country chapters, the volume describes and explains the persistence, transformations, functioning and future of the smallholder and smallholdings across East and Southeast Asia. As well as providing a source book for scholars working on agrarian change in the region, it also engages with a number of key current areas of debate, including: the nature and direction of the agrarian transition in Asia, and its distinctiveness vis à vis transitions in the global North; the persistence of the smallholder notwithstanding deep and rapid structural change; and the question of the efficiency and productivity of smallholder-based farming set against concerns over global and national food security.

Stateness and Democracy in East Asia
  • Edited by Aurel Croissant, Olli Hellmann
  • Published online:
    13 May 2020
    Print publication:
    21 May 2020
  • Democratization and state building are fundamental political processes, yet scholars cannot agree on which process should be prioritized in order to put countries on a positive path of institutional development. Where much of the existing literature on the state-democracy nexus focuses on quantitative cross-national data, this volume offers a theoretically grounded regional analysis built around in-depth qualitative case studies. The chapters examine cases of successful democratic consolidation (South Korea, Taiwan), defective democracy (Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor), and autocratic reversal (Cambodia, Thailand). The book's evidence challenges the dominant 'state first, democracy later' argument, demonstrating instead that stateness is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for democratic consolidation. The authors not only show that democratization can become trapped in path-dependent processes, but also that the system-level organization of informal networks plays a key role in shaping the outcome of democratic transitions.

Labor and Politics in Indonesia
  • Teri L. Caraway, Michele Ford
  • Published online:
    02 March 2020
    Print publication:
    05 March 2020
  • Two decades after Indonesia's transition to democracy, its labor movement has emerged as a vibrant and influential political actor. Labor and Politics in Indonesia provides the first in-depth analysis of this development, investigating how a structurally weak labor movement carved out a strategic foothold in a country with no recent history of union engagement in politics. Caraway and Ford show how Indonesia's labor movement achieved many of its goals first through the disruptive power of contentious politics and later by combining street and electoral politics. Labor and Politics in Indonesia challenges the dominant theoretical approaches in the study of Indonesian politics, demonstrating how this movement became an active, and surprisingly effective, participant in Indonesia's democracy. Caraway and Ford break new theoretical ground in their analysis of how legacies of authoritarianism, the post-transition political opportunity structure, and the tactical creativity of Indonesia's unions combined to propel Indonesia's labor movement to success.

ASEAN Consumer Law Harmonisation and Cooperation
  • Achievements and Challenges
  • Luke Nottage, Justin Malbon, Jeannie Paterson, Caron Beaton-Wells
  • Published online:
    24 August 2019
    Print publication:
    19 September 2019
  • This is the first Western-language research monograph detailing significant developments in consumer law and policy across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), underpinned by a growing middle class and implementation of the ASEAN Economic Community from 2016. Eight chapters examine consumer law topics within ASEAN member states (such as product safety and consumer contracts) and across them (financial and health services), as well as the interface with competition law and the nature of ASEAN as a unique and evolving international organisation. The authors include insights from extensive fieldwork, partly through consultancies for the ASEAN Secretariat, to provide a reliable, contextual and up-to-date analysis of consumer law and policy development across the region. The volume also draws on and contributes to theories of law and development in multiple fields, including comparative law, political economy and regional studies.

Services Trade in ASEAN
  • The Road Taken and the Journey Ahead
  • Dora Neo, Pierre Sauvé, Imola Streho
  • Published online:
    21 June 2019
    Print publication:
    20 June 2019
  • The member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) set themselves the ambitious aim of establishing a region-wide economic community by 2015, and to deepen it in the context of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Blueprint 2025. To achieve these goals, service sector reforms will occupy a central place in ASEAN's policy pantheon. This can be attributed to both ASEAN's integration process and its deepening ties within a dense layer of external economic partners. This book takes stock of the experience of ASEAN member states in pursuing trade and investment liberalization in services. It identifies key challenges that the regional grouping can be expected to encounter in realizing its AEC Blueprint 2025 aims. Using a law and economics lens, the book assesses where ASEAN is and is headed in services trade, situating it alongside efforts at crafting a European single market for services.

Page 1 of 6