Asian Review (ASIAN)
Asian Review is a refereed journal, published since 1987, by Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University. It is an interdisciplinary journal publishing research articles from a wide range of academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to promote an understanding of contemporary Asia. Areas of special concern include cultural studies, ethnicity, development, economics, foreign affairs, language, literature, migration, politics and religion.
Current Issue
Asian Review (ASIAN)
Volume: 30, Issue: 2 (2017)
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A morphology of liberalism, development and
trusteeship: Some implications for South East Asia |
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Trevor Parfitt |
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Page: 7 - 29 |
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[Abstract] [PDF]
This paper will apply Freeden's morphological approach
to the analysis of liberalism and development to explore the centrality
of trusteeship (as defi ned by Cowen and Shenton) in both modes of
thought. There is an intellectual kinship between development as an
idea and liberalism in that both emerged from a Western Enlightenment
context that emphasized progress and the prospects for human
development through the growing influence of rationalism and the
application of scientific method to human endeavor. Both development
thinking and liberalism bear the imprint of these influences,
one of them being that of trusteeship. The morphological approach
will be employed to examine the genealogy of development and to
trace the various pathways that development thinking has taken,
particularly with a view to illustrating its continued affinity with
contrasting strands of liberalism. Such affinities extend from what
Freeden might term the "social welfare values" implicit in Sen's
Capability Theory to the so-called liberal turn of what many see as the
hegemonic account of development today: neo-liberalism and its manifestations
in the Washington and Post-Washington Consensuses.
Some implications of this analysis will then be examined in the
South East Asian context. A few of the central accounts of development
to emerge from Asia, notably the analysis founded in Asian
values and the approach to development implicit in the typology of
the Asian Developmental State, will be analyzed to assess how far
they bear any imprint of trusteeship. The aim of this analysis will be
to draw some tentative conclusions as to the prospects for a liberal
and Asian approach to development and the variant forms that trusteeship
might take within that context.
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Urban resilience and the neo-liberal subject
of climate change in Thailand |
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Robert A. Farnan |
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Page: 31 - 55 |
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[Abstract] [PDF]
This paper analyses the ideology of resilience, as it is
manifested in Thailand, through the relationship between urban
climate change security and the neo-liberal subject. The neo-liberal
project of resilience that is commonly advocated by ideologues and
policy makers in response to catastrophic events, such as floods, has
generated considerable debate in architectural and urban design
circles but has largely failed to consider the ontology of vulnerability
that underwrites neo-liberal notions of political responsibility and its
attendant practices of (in)security. Although the literature in political
ecology has fruitfully interrogated urban climate change resilience
from the point of view of disaster management, this paper elects
to forgo this trend by demonstrating how the neo-liberal subject
of climate change is implicated in processes of global governance
that take bio-spherical life as their referent object. As an incarnation
of neo-liberalism's doctrine of sustainable development, the concept
of resilience—scripted in the 1990s and early 2000s by intergovernmental
organizations (IGOs) and financial institutions such as
the World Bank—has increasingly come to posit human exposure
to risk as positively fundamental to the adaptability and self-reliance
of so-called vulnerable populations. Focusing on Bangkok's
2011 floods, this paper therefore scrutinizes this ideology of resilience
by exploring how the environmental uncertainties and social
dangers associated with urban climate change—in particular severe
flooding—are in fact aggravated and overdetermined by an ideology
that disavows any notion of a subject with the promethean potential
to change the world, in favor of one that merely conforms to his or
her surroundings. As this paper will show, in Bangkok the critical
infrastructure and urban spaces that are protected from the threat of global climate change are closely connected to discourses of resilience
that strategically depoliticize and ultimately seek to contain
already marginalized communities.
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The Bandung ideology: Anti-colonial internationalism
and Indonesia's foreign policy (1945-1965) |
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Ahmad Rizky Mardhatillah Umar |
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Page: 57 - 78 |
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[Abstract] [PDF]
In this paper, I introduce the concept of "anti-colonial
internationalism" as the ideological source of Indonesia's foreign
policy between 1945 and 1965. This concept has been neglected by
international relations scholars in favor of the rival idea of "liberal
internationalism." I argue that anti-colonial internationalism in
Indonesia's foreign policy has been rooted in three aspects, namely
1) decolonial thought that was developed by Indonesian anti-colonial
intellectuals in early 20th century, 2) the political thoughts of
nationalist leaders and debates during the state formation process
in 1945, and 3) the memory of the diplomatic struggle during the
revolutionary era (1945-1955). The inauguration of the Bandung
Conference exemplifi es the outreach of anti-colonial internationalism,
which inspires the call for decolonization in world politics.
Taking the Bandung Conference as the point of departure, this
article will investigate the extent to which decolonial thought and
anti-colonial nationalism works with an "internationalist" spirit in
Indonesia's foreign policy between 1945 and 1965.
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Awkwardly included: Portugal and Indonesia's politics of
multi-culturalism in East Timor, 1942 to the early 1990s |
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Kisho Tsuchiya |
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Page: 79 - 102 |
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[Abstract] [PDF]
This article explores the history of East Timor from
1942 to the early 1990s, examining how ideological tolerance of
racial and cultural diversity functioned as a state policy under Portuguese
and Indonesian regimes to limit the appeal of separatist movements.
The Portuguese policy shift towards multi-racialism in the
middle of the 20th century reflected their experiences of Timorese
hostility during the Pacific War and the rise of international anticolonialism
in the post-war period. Portuguese multi-racialism
(1951-74) justifi ed their "European" presence in Asia and Africa,
and it resulted in the promotion of Portuguese citizenship among
the Timorese. Th e Indonesian rule of East Timor from 1976 used
the rhetoric of "unity in diversity" and racial commonality to weaken
the ground of East Timorese separatism. This was sufficiently effective
to marginalize international dissent into the late 1980s. In so
doing, Indonesia utilized the Pan-Timorese sentiment which the
Portuguese suppressed while excluding the "new Portuguese" from
East Timor. East Timorese ethno-nationalism gained momentum
only when Indonesia's atrocity was exposed through the Western
media in 1991 and East Timorese activists adopted the language
of human-rights, the dominant ideology of the post-Cold War age.
The conclusion of this paper is that East Timorese identity politics
have been characterized by the experiences of those multiple layers of
being included and excluded under the Portuguese and Indonesian
policies.
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The unbound postcolonial leviathan |
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Pranoto Iskandar |
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Page: 103 - 123 |
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[Abstract] [PDF]
This paper discusses the overlooked dimension of
the aboriginal discourse that serves as the genesis of Indonesia as
a postcolonial state. More pointedly, it argues that the nationalist's
appropriation of European romanticism should be seen as the
last attempt of the local aristocracy to preserve their hegemony in
the postcolonial order; post-coloniality does not necessarily mean
positivity. In fact, in Indonesia's case, the repeated failure to embed
liberal values is arguably a result of the half-hearted commitment
to enlightenment values of the early nationalist intellectuals. Some
of the early nationalist fi gures blatantly imbued the 1945 Constitution
with pre-colonial feudalism. More recently, the illiberalism of
the 1945 Constitution and its communalism has been joined by the
rise of nativist discourses. This piece critiques these developments as
fundamentally problematic for the democratization of Indonesia's
public life.
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Is Islamofascism even a thing? The case of the
Indonesian Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI) |
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Stephen Miller |
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Page: 125 - 150 |
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[Abstract] [PDF]
Although a term with roots going back to 1933,
"Islamofascism" did not gain wide-spread use until the beginning
of the 21st century. In the West the term has often been associated
with conservative and far right-wing politics, giving it Islamophobic
overtones. However, in Indonesia and other Muslim majority countries
at times it can emerge in public discussion and debates as a
rhetorical weapon of liberal intellectuals when discussing conservative
and far right-wing "Islamist" organizations—although in Indonesia
the more common term is "religious fascist." This paper examines
theories of fascism built up in "Fascist Studies" (the so-called
"New Consensus"), as well as those of non-Stalinist Marxists and
longue duree approaches to the history of fascism and the far right to
see what light they might shed on the character of the Indonesian
Islamic Defenders' Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI). It concludes
that while "Islamofascism" might be an interesting and productive
stepping-off point, and while there are some parallels that can be
drawn between FPI politics and ideology and those of fascism and
far right politics as identifi ed in this literature, the term "Islamofascist"
is nevertheless problematic. This is both because of its Islamophobic
overtones and because the politics and ideology of the FPI
are still coalescing as the organization emerges on the national stage.
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