Struggle For Asia Research Articles

Land reform rationalities and their governance effects in Indonesia: Provoking land politics or addressing adverse formalisation?

While land remains a critical element of diversified rural livelihoods across the Global South, especially during crises, mounting inequalities and enduring rural vulnerability lead to demands for redress. In response, rival reform ideas have emerged concerning how to improve land governance, drive rural development and rectify distributional injustices. Yet, reformist programs in Southeast Asia struggle to address the pervasive problem of ‘adverse formalization’ – a term we use to describe processes where the state claims sovereign control of extensive ‘public lands’ and embarks on formalization processes that include local populations into new land-based production systems on adverse terms. Using the natural experiment of Indonesia, where four tenurial reforms coincide, this paper draws on the governmentality literature to examine how travelling tenure knowledges work as rival and ambiguous political rationalities. We demonstrate how political economy, the need for political legitimacy, and frictional encounters between political knowledges, interests and practices shape the governance effects produced by tenure rationalities. Formalisation processes institutionalise state governance in areas previously resistant to such political rationalities, stabilise existing property relations, and accommodate ad hoc settlements without substantially resolving adverse formalisation while provoking a new politics of land.

Increasing sustainability for rice production systems

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the staple food for millions of people in Asia and the world; however, it is also the largest consumer of freshwater resources worldwide. More than 75% of the world's rice is grown under flooded conditions. However, the long-term sustainability of this flooded system is threatened by the rapid changes in climatic events causing erratic rainfall and abiotic stresses, looming water and energy crisis, low nitrogen use efficiency, increasing micronutrient deficienties, increasing labor costs and reduced labor availability, increased methane emissions, yield stagnation, and the negative effects of rice crops on post-rice crops. The narrow genetic background in rice has also slowed the pace of breeding rice cultivars tolerant to abiotic and biotic stresses which has resulted in yield stagnation. While direct-seeded rice has become popular in developed countries, saving water and labor resources and reducing methane emissions, developing countries in Asia struggle to disseminate direct seeding technologies due to the lack of government support and policy. Weed management in direct seeded rice is still a major bottle neck in wide scale adoption of this rice system in developing world. Mechanical transplanting of rice is gaining momentum in Asia, reducing labor requirements, ensuring timely transplantation, and saving water during initial growth. Nonetheless, government support and strong policy are needed to boost its uptake by providing subsidies to purchase mechanical transplanters and training farmers to use this technology. With deteriorating soil health due to continuous cultivation of rice with cereals in rotation, overuse of synthetic fertilizers, and increased co-occurrence of abiotic and biotic stresses in rice, there is a need to adopt integrated crop management techniques, and to identify genes of interest and quantitative trait loci (QTL) for their introgression into desired plants. These interventions will improve the improve biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in rice. There is also a need for extensive campaign and policy support from the government to force farmers to harvest their rice crops using specific rice harvesters that can save the yield losses that occur when using wheat combine harvesters—a common practice in many developing countries.

A thorny path: the developmental course of problem-based learning for health sciences education in Asia.

Problem-based learning (PBL), has been in existence for half a century as of 2019 and still remains the most innovative medical education innovation due to its revolutionary pedagogical approach characterized by student-centered learning (SCL) and self-directed learning (SDL) using simulated real-life scenarios as the learning platform. Here, learning becomes more self-driven, meaningful and relevant, pertaining to the social accountability principle of higher education. Being popular worldwide and driven by a strong demand for medical education reform during the past two decades, PBL has rapidly swept across the medical education communities in Asian countries. Many medical schools in Asia were drawn in by the innovative pedagogical methodology that PBL embraces, but tended to neglect with time, often unintentionally, the philosophy that PBL embodies. As a result, PBL in Asia, for various local academic, cultural, economic and administrative reasons started drifting away from its intended educational purposes. Consequently, the acceptance and practice of PBL in Asia has taken compromised forms as PBL-hybrids embedded within long existing and incorrigibly traditional curricula, or other less effective forms for easier implementation and management, at the expense of SCL and SDL. PBL in health sciences education, which has had a 50-year flourishment in the West, remains a continuous struggle in Asia. PBL for health science education in Asia is certainly no panacea, and is probably heading for a thorny path, despite the ultimate hope for a promising future.

Great game East: India, China, and the struggle for Asia's most volatile frontier

Since the 1950s, China and India have been locked in a monumental battle for geopolitical supremacy. Chinese interest in the ethnic insurgencies in northeastern India, the still unresolved issue of the McMahon Line, the border established by the British imperial government, and competition for strategic access to the Indian Ocean have given rise to tense gamesmanship, political intrigue, and rivalry between the two Asian giants. Former Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent Bertil Lintner has drawn from his extensive personal interviews with insurgency leaders and civilians in remote tribal areas in northeastern India, newly declassified intelligence reports, and his many years of firsthand experience in Asia to chronicle this ongoing struggle. His history of the Great Game East is the first significant account of a regional conflict which has led to open warfare on several occasions, most notably the Sino-India border war of 1962, and will have a major impact on global affairs in the decades ahead.

How the Republic of Georgia has nearly eliminated the use of institutional care for children.

Countries throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia struggle to change their childcare systems from one that is predominantly based on large-institution care to one that has a continuum of services and is family-focused. Georgia has shown, in large part, that the laudable goal of ending large-scale institutions for children is possible, including for children under the age of 6 years. Between 2005 and 2013, the Government in the Republic of Georgia closed 32 large, state-run institutions housing children without adequate family care. Social work was strengthened, a robust program was created to reunite children with their families, a foster care system was put into place and scaled up, and small group homes housing 8 to 10 children were established. What happened in Georgia is unique in the region. The Ukraine, which by many accounts has 100,000 children living in large, Soviet-style orphanages, has struggled to reform its childcare system. It has been estimated by childcare professionals in the Ukraine that institutional care for children accounts for over 1% of the gross domestic product. Romania, which has made considerable progress over the past 10 years, still has over 40,000 children in large-institution care. This article aims to tell how this transformation was accomplished, the conditions in Georgia that made the reform possible, how the institutions were closed, how the alternatives were established, and how sustainable the progress has been.

China’s Fourth World Borderlands

China’s Fourth World Borderlands Edward Friedman (bio) Sulmaan Wasift Khan. Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xxiv, 189 pp. Hardcover $34.95, isbn 978-1-4696-2110-4. Bertil Lintner. Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. vi, 343 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 978-0-30-019567-5. In a state-centric approach to international relations, a nation-state is, at its core, a capital with an army and, usually, a language. The mainstream approach to China– India foreign policy therefore can be reduced to Beijing–New Delhi relations. From this perspective, Beijing–Delhi relations are about how state centers manage flows across borders, goods and people, trade and migration. In contrast, Lintner and Khan, in line with the postmodern negation of “centrism,” ask readers to de-center the nation and to focus not on the capital but on the peoples of the frontiers and the borderlands. These cross-border communities are threatened by self-aggrandizing and narcissistic centers demanding purity and loyalty. When Beijing insists that people cannot be both Tibetan and Nepalese or Chinese and Sikkimese (Khan, p. 67), it turns cross-border people into traitors. The communities are made vulnerable targets of state power. The center’s relation to the state’s periphery crucially informs the nature of state power and the relationship with the neighbor on the other side of the new border. Borderland studies, a field of knowledge with its own journal, has much to teach. It suggests that a singular and homogenous national identity does not offer a solution to complex issues of community identity. For much of human history, large aggregations of people lived in empires with divine rulers — kings, emperors, shahs, khans, tsars, etc. Empires waxed and waned. Frontiers expanded or shrank as power expanded or shrank. There were no fixed borders behind which lived citizens who could get legal travel documents. The nation-state, however, would destroy the open frontier regions of prior empires. Modern India was founded in 1947, the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Lintner and Khan ask about the fate of frontier peoples in these new states. [End Page 97] Cross-border communities were not part of the liberation or independence movement in either China or India. They therefore do not, out of an imagined historical experience, identify with the new nation. Burmese or Indian patriots, before the nation won independence from Britain, could ally with a militarily expansionist Japan. These patriots would treat the prior colonial national army as the inherited tool of colonial rulers. They could even reach out to borderland communities. Complex clashes would ensue. The consequences would be long lasting. On both sides of a new border are people, not just nomads, whose economic fate still depends on being able to freely cross what were once open frontiers that have suddenly become controlled borders run by groups who are not friendly to frontier peoples. Such cross-border communities are likely to be suspected by the new state of disloyalty to the new state. Indeed, frontier communities can experience the new central state as the greatest threat to the very survival of their community, ethnicity, tribe, or nation. In the China–India case, those suspected of disloyalty by one nation-state, let’s say India, for example, Naga (Lintner, chap. 2), Mizo (chap. 3), Manipuri (chap. 4), or Assamese (chap. 5) may be courted, and even welcome being courted by the government of India’s rival, China or Myanmar or Pakistan. The threatened border community can experience help from the foreign power as a welcome lifesaver, although its own state center sees something else, a subversive tie to a rival state, which means it no good. The big question for state formation then is how, say, a Chinese Communist Party state will respond to the ambiguous position of Nagas on the Indian side of the border or Tibetans on the Chinese side. The major hypothesis that follows from this logic of threat and survival for frontier peoples who historically cross...

Supporting the War: Britain's Decision to send the Thompson Mission to Vietnam, 1960-61

The British Advisory Mission (BRIAM) to Vietnam was established in September 1961. Its official task was to help the South Vietnamese to cope with the administrative challenges of the insurgency. This article deals with the origins of this mission. It shows that the British decision to form BRIAM was not made in response to American pressure. It was a genuine British initiative, and London even had to overcome substantial opposition to an increased British involvement in Vietnam from the American military. The Macmillan government's reasons for sending an advisory mission were twofold. First, London believed that BRIAM could make a valuable contribution because of Britain's experience of defeating the communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s. Second, the British wanted to demonstrate particularly to the Americans - but also to their Commonwealth allies Australia and New Zealand - that they were willing to share the burden of the cold war struggle in Asia, and that Britain had a very useful and important contribution to make.

Phantoms and Spectres: Capital and Labour at the Millennium

As the financial system tailspins and ‘Asian Flu’ reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marx's ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marx's insights on the “laws of motion” of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing global political-economic disorder. I discuss, more specifically, his theory of crisis and the dialectics of accumulation and circulation of “real” and “fictitious” capital as sketched out in the Grundrisse and Capital (volumes 1 and 3). I end with an exploration of the famous political prognosis from The Communist Manifesto of mass collective class struggle and the development of a “world literature”, and set all this within the context of a newly emerging workers' internationalism and social-movement unionism.

Out of the Ashes? Southeast Asia's Struggle through Crisis

Out of the Ashes? Southeast Asia's Struggle through Crisis

Ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet world: case studies and analysis

Written in an accessible, journalistic style, Jihad in Paradise focuses on Southeast Asia's struggle to deal with Islamic extremists and terrorism at the hands of Jemah Islamiyah, al Qaeda's Southeast Asian arm. Although the book gives particular attention to Singapore's attempts to deal with these issues, the story extends into Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. All of these countries have significant Muslim populations, and recent violent events have affected the business environment, tourism, and the region's tradition of religious tolerance. The author draws on personal interviews with experts in the field as well as key political and religious figures in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, including Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Minister for Muslim Affairs Jaacoub Ibrahim, and expelled Muslim dissident Zulfikar Mohamad Sharif. Millard examines the Bali bombing, Malaysia's conservative Islamic party PAS, the Malaysian province of Kelantan which is a Muslim political hotbed, Abu Saayaf of the Philippines, and Fateha.com and the use of the internet. He also provides a glimpse of how Singapore, the region's most developed nation, has been able to impose a degree of racial and religious tolerance.

Toward an Ecumenical Christology for Asia

Asian theologians recognize that Asian theology must address two pressing issues: poverty and religiosity. Most Asian Christologies tend to address one to the exclusion of the other: the Cosmic Christ embraces religiosity: Jesus Christ Liberator confronts poverty: Jesus as pain-love of God comforts the suffering. The Christologies of M. M. Thomas and Aloysius Pieris, in contrast, address both poverty and religiosity in Asia. In both Christologies Christ's presence extends to Asia's struggle for a new society which takes place beyond the church's boundaries. This similarity is not due, however, to identical christological starting points: Pieris begins with the historical Jesus of the synoptic Gospels and Thomas with the Cosmic Christ of Colossians 1:15–20. Rather, it is due to the attempt of both theologians to address Asian poverty and religiosity.

Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology: Papers from the Asian Theological Conference, January 7-20, 1979, Wennappuwa, Sri Lanka. Edited by Virginia Fabella. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1980. 202 pp. $8.95 paper

Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology: Papers from the Asian Theological Conference, January 7-20, 1979, Wennappuwa, Sri Lanka. Edited by Virginia Fabella. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1980. 202 pp. $8.95 paper

Book Review: Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology

Book Review: Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology

Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity

Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity

Book Review: The Human and the Holy. Asian Perspectives in Christian Theology, Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology

Book Review: The Human and the Holy. Asian Perspectives in Christian Theology, Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:HENRY PARKES: A Biography. By A.W. Martin.BARWICK. By David Marr.KEN LAIDLAW: A White Collar Union Leader. By Denis Murphy.THE MYSTERY OF LUDWIG LEICHHARDT. By Gordon Connell.WHIRLWINDS IN THE PLAIN: Ludwig Leichhardt — friends, foes and history. By E. M. Webster.STURT, THE CHIPPED IDOL: A study of Charles Sturt, Explorer. By Edgar Beale.UNDER ONE FLAG: The Northern Territory Elections 1980. Edited by Dean Jainsch and Peter Loveday.ABORIGINES IN COLONIAL VICTORIA 1835–86: By M.F. Christie.THE FRIGHTENED COUNTRY. By Alan Renouf.DIPLOMATIC WITNESS: Australian Foreign Affairs 1941–1947. By Paul Hasluck.GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION IN AUSTRALIA. By R. N. Spann.COLONIAL CAP AND GOWN. Studies in the Mid‐Victorian Universities of Australasia. By W. J. Gardner.REALITY AND RHETORIC: An alternative History of Australian Education. By Jean Ely.POLITICS AND THE WRITING OF AUSTRALIAN HISTORY: An Introduction to a structural Study. By John Lechte.THE PEOPLE OF PERTH: A Social History of Western Australia's Capital City. By C.T. Stannage.CRISIS OF COMMAND: Australian Generalship and the Japanese Threat, 1941–1943. By D.M. Horner.FALLING IN: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911–1951. By John Barrett.CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN AUSTRALIA: Contemporary Issues and Problems. By Ailsa Burns and Jacquelines Goodnow.WITH PEN AND TONGUE: The Jesuits in Australia, 1865–1939. By Ursula M.L. Bygott.AUSTRALIAN CHURCHES AT WAR: Attitudes and Activities of the Major Churches 1941–1981. By Michael McKernan.LAW‐MAKING IN AUSTRALIA. Edited by Alice Erh‐Soon Tay and Eugene Kamenka.IN PURSUIT OF JUSTICE: Australian Women and the Law 1788–1979. Edited by Judy Mackinolty and Heather Radi.AUSTRALIA AND BRITIAN: Studies in a Changing Relationship. Edited by A. F. Madden and W. H. Morris‐Jones.THE STRUGGLE FOR ASIA 1828–1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism. By David Gillard.ROAD TO EXILE: The Indonesain Nationalist Movement 1927–1934. By John Ingleson.THE MAKING OF A BUREAUCRATIC ELITE: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese Priyaya. By Heather Sutherland.CLASS, RACE AND COLONIALISM IN WEST MALAYSIA: The Indian Case. By Michael Stenson.ISLANDS AND BEACHES: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774–1880. By Greg Dening.ETHNIC POWER MOBILIZED: Can South Africa Change? By Heribert Adam and Hermann Giliomme.WATERSHED IN INDIA 1914–1922. By Sir Algernon Rumbold.THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF CHINA: volume 3, Sui and T'ang China 589–906, part 1. Edited by Denis Twitchett.TANAKA GIICHI AND JAPAN'S CHIA POLICY. By William F. Morton.UNFULFILLED UNION: Canadian Federalism and National Unity. By Garth Stevenson.WORKER'S CONTROL IN AMERICA. By David Montgomery.JUAREZ AND DIAZ: Machine Politics in Mexico. By Laurens Ballard Perry.MODERNIZATION IN A MEXICAN EJIDO: A study in Economic Adaptation. By Billie R. DeWalt.FOREIGN IMMIGRANTS IN EARLY BOURBON MEXICO 1700–1760. By Charles F. Nunn.THE WORLD FOR A MARKET–PLACE: Episodes in the History of European Expansion. By John Parker.ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF SOVIET SOCIALISM. By Alan Abouchar.TITO'S YUGOSLAVIA. By Duncan Wilson.PRAXIS: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Science. Edited by Markovic and Gajo Petrovic.FOOLS AND HEROES: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. By Peter Hruby.THE GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF ISRAEL. By Don Peretz.THE JEKYLL AND HYDE YEARS: Politics and Economic Policy Since 1964. By Michael Stewart.ROBERT HARLEY AND THE PRESS: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe. By J.A. Downie.THE BRITISH PHILOSOPHY OF ADMINSTRATION. By R. Thomas.AN UNGOVERNABLE PEOPLE: The English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Edited by John Brewere and John Styles.ARTISANS AND POLITICS IN EARLY NINETEENTH‐CENTURY LONDON: John Gast and his Times. By I.J. Prothero.SIR GEORGE ARTHUR, BART 1784–1854: Superintendent of British Honduras, Lietenant‐Governor of Van Diemen's Land and of Upper Canada, Governor of the Bombay Presidency. By A.G.L. Shaw.THE FEDERAL PRINCIPLE: A Journey Through Time in Quest of Meaninin. By S. Rurus Davis.THE INHERITANCE OF INEQUALITY. By L. Broom, F.L. Jones, P. McDonnell and T. Williams.PHOENIX OF HIS AGE: Interpretations of Erasmus, c. 1550–1750. By Bruce Mansfield.MARXISM‐LENINISM AND THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. By V. Kubálková and A.A. Cruikshank.RATIONAL ACTION: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. Edited by Ross Harrison.WORLD ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 1979 AND BEYOUND. By Herman Kahn (with the Hudson Institude).

Book Review: Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology

Book Review: Asia's Struggle for Full Humanity: Towards a Relevant Theology

Reviews

LUITPOLD WALLACH. Diplomatic Studies in Latin and Greek Documents from the Carolingian Age. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1977. Pp. 396. Reviewed by Leslie W. Barnard ANGUS MACKAY. Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500. London: The Macmillan Press 1977. Pp. xii, 245. Reviewed by P.E. Russell G.R. ELTON. Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558. New History of England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977. Pp. 423. Reviewed by D.L. Potter A.R. DISNEY. Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1978. Harvard Historical Series XCV. Pp. X, 220. Reviewed by C.R. De Silva W.A. SPECK. Stability and Strife: England 1714–60. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press 1977. Pp. 311. Reviewed by R.M. Hatton DAVID GILLARD. The Struggle for Asia 1828–1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism. London: Methuen & Co. 1977. Pp. 214. Reviewed by Rose Louise Greaves D.C.M. PLATT, ed. Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977. Pp. x, 449. Reviewed by Richard Graham WARREN I. COHEN. The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations. New York: Columbia University Press 1978. Pp. x, 322. Reviewed by Akira Iriye CALVIN D. DAVIS. The United States and the Second Hague Peace Conference: American Diplomacy and International Organization, 1899–1914. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1976. Pp. ix, 398. Reviewed by Warren F. Kuehl SOLOMON WANK, ed. Doves and Diplomats: Foreign Offices and Peace Movements in Europe and America in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1978. Pp. xii, 303; CHARLES DE BENEDETTI, Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement: 1915–1929. Millwood, NY: KTO Press 1978. Pp. xvi, 281. Reviewed by Robert H. Ferrell GERALD J. BENDER. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality. Berkeley: University of California Press/London: Heinemann 1978. Pp. xxviii, 287. Reviewed by Douglas L. Wheeler ESMONDE M. ROBERTSON. Mussolini as Empire-Builder: Europe and Africa 1932–36. London: Macmillan 1977. Pp. 246. Reviewed by Alan Cassels CHARLES w. SYDNOR, JR. Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1977. Pp. xvi, 346. Reviewed by Robert Koehl RICHARD K. BETTS. Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977. Pp. 292. Reviewed by Robert Vogel REG CARR. Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press 1977. Pp. xii, 190. Reviewed by John C. Cairns ANNE ORDE. Great Britain and International Secuiity, 1920–26. London: Royal Historical Society 1978. Pp. viii, 244. Reviewed by Sally Marks GABRIEL GORODETSKY. The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1924–27. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press 1977. Pp. xiii, 289. Reviewed by Richard K. Debo

The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914. A Study in British and Russian Imperialism

The Struggle for Asia, 1828-1914. A Study in British and Russian Imperialism

Book Reviews

Book Reviews