Showing papers in "Critical Asian Studies in 2012"

Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

Abstract: Alfred W. McCoy. Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. xviii + 659 pp. Policing Am...

Transitional justice as an elite discourse: Human rights practice between the global and the local in post-conflict Nepal

Abstract: Nepal's Maoist insurgency emerged out of a highly unequal society in which indigenous, lower castes, and women were subject to systematic social, political, and economic exclusion. This study seeks to understand how post-conflict agendas to address Nepal's violent past emerge, and it compares the agendas articulated by indigenous victims of the conflict from a remote rural district with the agenda of civil society, which is dominated by Kathmandu-based elites and uses the language of “transitional justice.” An empirical study has been made of the needs of transition of families of those disappeared during the conflict in the midwestern district of Bardiya, the worst affected by disappearances during the insurgency. The agenda of families that surfaces from this study is then compared and contrasted with that articulated by those leading advocacy for transitional justice in Nepal, namely, national and international human rights agencies. Indigenous rural victims remain ignorant of rights and articulate an ...

LAND, LIVELIHOODS, AND REMITTANCES: A Political Ecology of Youth Out-migration across the Lao–Thai Mekong Border

Abstract: This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao–Thai border. The author highlights how the departures of rural youth for wage labor in Thailand and the remittances they return to sending villages are becoming important for understanding agrarian transformations in Laos today. In the first section the author introduces the contemporary context of cross-border migrations across the Lao–Thai Mekong border. The second section shifts focus to a village in Laos's central Khammouane Province, where extended field research was conducted between 2006 and 2009. In this village, youth out-migration to Thailand has become a widespread phenomenon, with nearly every household involved. The segmented cultural and gendered features of this migration and its salience for understanding contemporary transformations in this locale invite a broadening of agrarian studies analysis...

Challenging the Atomization of Discontent: Patterns of Migrant-Worker Protest in China during the Series of Strikes in 2010

Abstract: Based on a review of divergent interpretations of migrant-worker protests in China, this article analyzes strike patterns during labor struggles in the summer of 2010. The analysis reveals (1) a shift toward more offensive demands for wage increases and (2) a high level of strike contagion. While these elements were evident to some extent in earlier struggles, the authors see their specific combination in 2010 as an indicator of an ongoing process of “class formation.” The strikes were centered on auto supplier factories, however, and this shows the limitations on cross-sector protest due to the fragmented conditions in China's heterogeneous industrial structure and a continuing ban on independent organization. Taking a broader perspective on the peculiarities of the strike movement, the authors discuss the impact on the government's comparably permissive stance toward the strike movement. This stance created favorable conditions for the proliferation of strikes. Attempts by state authorities to instituti...

DISPLACEMENT, RESETTLEMENT, AND MULTI-LOCAL LIVELIHOODS: Positioning Migrant Legitimacy in Lampung, Indonesia

Abstract: This article examines shifting attitudes toward rural migrants in Lampung Province, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, in the context of a history of enclosure, commercial expansion, and dispossession. The author examines how contemporary multi-local livelihoods in Lampung reflect an adaptation to the vulnerabilities associated with being a migrant, as people position themselves to qualify for livelihood resources. The author's interpretation draws on Michel Foucault's analysis of the production of governable subjects and, in particular, norms of conduct that produce subjectivities and identities that “fit.” The article explores how different policy phases associated with environmental governance in Lampung have created contrasting positionings and norms of conduct for migrants, as they have been defined, on the one hand, as pioneer entrepreneurs, bringing progress to Indonesia's hinterland, and, on the other, as forest squatters, threatening the cultural and ecological integrity of the province. The au...

Thai mobilities and cultural citizenship

Abstract: In recent decades geographic mobility in Thai rural communities has intensified and broadened in scope. As a result, the lives of many and perhaps most rural citizens no longer (if they ever did) fit easily with popular portraits of rurality as stable, isolated, and intrinsically different from the dynamic modernity of urban Thailand. Nevertheless, as the rhetoric of the ongoing national political crisis illustrates, rural–urban divisions remain powerful symbols in contemporary Thai society. This article examines how Thai mobilities both reflect and contribute to processes of self-imagining and national identification, posing questions for conventional understandings of the “rural–urban divide” in Thailand. Dominant discourses of urbanity and rurality contrast sharply with villagers' lived experiences of rural–urban flows and other mobility practices. Drawing on fieldwork with migrants and others in rural and urban Thailand, as well as on related scholarship, this article explores some of the ways in whic...

REINVENTING THE SELF UNDER SOCIALISM Migrant Male Sex Workers ("Money Boys") in China

Abstract: As part of a massive rural-to-urban migrant population in post-Mao reform era China, rural male migrants in their early twenties are increasingly entering the sex industry, which offers same-sex sexual services to other men. These young men, known as “money boys,” form a new urban subject. From continuous ethnographic research on the male sex industry in China since 2004, the author argues that this new urban subject represents the site of multiple contradictions in China's continual transformations, which are at once authoritarian and neoliberal. The neoliberal reconfiguration, such as development strategies, commercialization of bodies, and liberalization of identities, opens up new social and sexual spaces and nurtures in thema new enterprising and desiring ethics of the self. However, their pursuit of needs, wants, and desires for work, love, and sex remains constricted by authoritarian codes such as the hukou system, antiprostitution measures, and the stratified cosmopolitan tongzhi community. Money ...

CITY OF GHOSTS: Migration, Work, and Value in the Life of a Ho Chi Minh City Saleswoman

Abstract: This article links motorbike use with the work and living conditions of young migrant women in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) to highlight an example of the social and economic consequences of migration-assisted economic development in Southeast Asia. It traces a woman's life from her teenage years in the market of a small seaside town in Vietnam to her purchase of a motorbike, migration to HCMC, move into a rooming house, and work in a major department store as a cosmetics saleswoman. The reflections on urban life by the woman and her roommates lead the author to consider the notion that the condition of the unregistered and temporary migrant is like that of the unrequited wandering ghosts (co hon), which are said to invisibly roam the city's streets. While the author details the political economy of marginalization that situates the migrant saleswoman, he also shows how she struggles within it to constitute herself over time rather than in the present and to free herself from abstraction-producing social categ...

Adivasis in and against the state

Abstract: The question of the state has come to occupy a central place in recent debates on subaltern politics in contemporary India. Against those critical voices that have claimed that the emancipation of subaltern groups can only proceed by challenging and moving beyond the modern Indian state, a range of scholars and commentators have asserted that it is precisely by seeking to harness the state that social movements can hope to advance their oppositional projects. Intervening in this debate, this article argues that although these new perspectives constitute a decisive advance in terms of developing a relational understanding of subaltern politics in India, questions pertaining to the structural constraints that social movements face in advancing their oppositional projects through the institutions and discourses of the state are still neglected. The article addresses these questions through a detailed exploration of the ways in and extent to which Adivasi movements have managed to democratize local state–soci...

THE POLITICS OF PROTECTION IN BURMA: Beyond the Humanitarian Mainstream

Abstract: This article explores how people living in areas of Burma/Myanmar affected by armed conflict (Karen populations in the southeast) and natural disaster (Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy Delta) understand “protection” and act to minimize risks and protect themselves, their families, and communities. What do vulnerable people seek to protect, and how do they view the roles of other stakeholders, including the state, non-state actors (armed and political groups), community-based organizations, and national and international aid agencies? Are these viewed as protection actors, or sources of threat—or a mixture of both?

Limited war, unlimited targets

Abstract: In the early days of the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) had a policy of precision bombing military targets only. Policy-makers in Washington, D.C., formulated this policy to ensure the protection of Korean civilians and to increase the effectiveness of their air operations. Senior USAF officers in Korea, however, were unhappy about the limitations placed on them by Washington. In their strategic air operations against targets in North Korea USAF officers followed Washington's precision bombing policy, but they insisted that USAF bombers be permitted to use incendiary bombs against population centers in North Korea. China's entry into the war in November 1950 led to a drastic change in the precision bombing policy. On 5 November 1950, when the UN forces began suffering defeat after defeat in battles with the new enemy, General Douglas MacArthur designated cities and villages in North Korea as “main bombing targets” and permitted the use of incendiary bombs, which had been used in attacks against Jap...

Migration to the countryside

Abstract: The study of migration in the countryside, particularly in Southeast Asian developing countries, has been heavily focused on one-way out-migration of people with smallholder farming backgrounds to work in cities or even abroad. Recently, however, with improvements in infrastructure that allow intensified flows of commodities and information, as well as enhanced personal mobility, rural migration processes have become increasingly complex and dynamic. A particularly intriguing phenomenon is the migration of urban middle-class residents away from the city. Such newcomers bring with them different lifestyles, values, and expectations about the countryside, both in terms of its landscape and its social relations. This article will explore an example in the peri-urban zone around Chiang Mai, Thailand. The author argues that the arrival of newcomers in rural settings has created a new set of class relations, rooted more in culture than in relations of production. This argument is illustrated through an analysis...

The changing politics of thailand's buddhist order

Abstract: Thailand's monastic politics are in turmoil No longer can the sangha be written off as a political force and viewed simply as a fount of legitimacy for the nation and the monarchy The role played by a few hundred pro-Thaksin “redshirt” monks in the March to May 2010 mass demonstrations testified to growing unease within the rank-and-file monkhood, which is drawn from the same regions and segments of society as the redshirt movement more generally But beyond these overt displays of dissatisfaction, the sangha faces a range of serious challenges While long-standing tensions between the rival Thammayut and Mahanikai orders have apparently declined, a dearth of moral and administrative leadership has paralyzed the Thai monkhood and rendered it seemingly incapable of reforming itself Competing power groups linked to secular politics are vying for influence within the Supreme Sangha Council, while there is no widely supported successor ready to replace the current supreme patriarch, himself nearly a hundre

Detention in mass violence

Abstract: This article examines the formulation and implementation of Indonesian Army policy regarding the detention of communists and other leftists in Indonesia from 1965 to 1968 The article highlights the relationship between the two primary forms of violence—killings and detentions—in the aftermath of the failed September 30th Movement Placing detentions at the center of analysis changes our understanding of the mass violence in several ways First, it demonstrates that the policy to detain and “classify” large numbers of suspected communists helped to fuel the attack on the political Left Second, it shifts the locus of analysis away from identification of the perpetrators and victims and instead seeks to highlight the processes that enabled and shaped the violence Third, by examining the ratio between the estimated number of individuals killed and the number of individuals who remained alive in detention at a particular point in time, the article proposes a new explanation for variation in the scale and in

From kokusaika to tabunka kyōsei

Abstract: Demographic shifts and increased migration, coupled with restrictive immigration and citizenship policies, have left Northeast Asian states ill equipped to confront the challenges of growing numbers of long-term sojourners. When the policy of a state that is resistant to immigration is at odds with the local reality, as is the case in Japan, local governments attempt to shape how people understand or make sense of a geographical area in ways that integrate foreign residents. The resulting contest over the “meaning of place” in Japan results in multicultural policies that highlight the importance of place. These policies, called tabunka kyōsei (broadly understood as multiculturalism), have become an important part of discussions about diversity and difference in Japan, although the extent to which these policies will result in a more critical engagement with difference remains to be seen. This article offers an ethnography of Shijuku Ward's Ōkubo administrative area to illustrate how local governments skir...

Mediating and consuming memories of violence

Abstract: Considered by many as the founding moment of Muslim separatism in Mindanao, the Jabidah massacre, which took place on Corregidor Island, involved the killing of Muslim trainees who were being prepared by the Philippine military in 1967 and 1968 to infiltrate and sabotage neighboring Sabah. This article analyzes the ways by which memories of this iconic event have in the past four decades been recorded, remembered, mythicized, appropriated, or simply consumed for their own purposes by political elites, civil society actors, and ordinary people in the Philippines. Our angle of vision is directed toward what we term “contentious vectors” —news media, novels, films, and blogs—to analyze the processes by which memories are recast. The ways by which the Jabidah massacre is remembered and appropriated reflect the contestations between civil society and the government in the Philippines, as well as the intense rivalry among the political elites both within and between the Christian-elite–dominated Filipino polity...

PEACE BUILDING WITHOUT USING THE WORD “PEACE”: National NGOs' Reputational Management Strategies during a Peace–to–War Transition in Sri Lanka

Abstract: This article examines the reputational management strategies of national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in peace-building work in Sri Lanka between 2006 and 2007, a transitional period when the cease-fire was unraveling and the NGO sector was facing a “crisis of legitimacy.” It traces the structural and proximate causes of the crisis and analyzes some of the ways in which NGOs were able to counteract the negative impacts that this criticism had on their legitimacy. This analysis challenges the mainstream view of NGO legitimacy as stable, unidimensional, and capacity-based by emphasizing the contested, highly politicized, and politically symbolic nature of NGO legitimacy in the Sri Lankan context. It also highlights the way in which national NGOs reframed and adapted peace-building agendas of international actors, challenging the popular view that liberal peace building functions hegemonically and that NGOs are compelled to follow the strategies of their international funders.

Factory employment, female workers’ activism, and authoritarianism in indonesia

Abstract: This article reads the text of the pembelaan (defense speech) written by Ida Irianti, a female union leader, to reflect on the twin issues of factory employment and female workers' activism during the authoritarian regime in Indonesia in the 1980s. The pembelaan describes the factual conditions of workers toiling under the regime's antilabor policy of exclusionary corporatism and reveals how the Indonesian working class embodies the narrative of class in their demands for social justice. More than just a conventional pembelaan—a document used for legal defense purposes in criminal courts—Ida Irianti's pembelaan stands apart as a fine example of working-class literature in the context of the rapid industrialization Indonesia was then experiencing. Thus the document is comparable to other forms of writing by women workers in East Asia that were produced under repressive authoritarian regimes. Based on this reading, this article suggests the importance of Ida Irianti's pembelaan as a social reference, with i...

Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights

Abstract: James Peck. Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011. vi + 384 pp. Earlier this year, Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis, founders of th...

War against an ambiguous enemy

Abstract: In the early months of the Korean War, close air support provided by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) fighter-bombers in the front-line areas significantly delayed the advance of the North Korean Army. This article shows, however, that U.S. pilots very quickly diverged from the original policy of precision bombing and began the indiscriminate and unrestricted bombing of villages, towns, and even refugees in the South Korean region. They did so for three reasons: (1) to deal with effective countermeasures being taken by the North Korean Army; (2) the short range of U.S. fighter-bombers taking off from bases in Japan; and (3) difficulties in finding clear targets. Civilian areas were not exempt because most USAF pilots regarded the people in civilian areas as enemy troops and villages were considered to be enemy shelters. In the early months of the Korean War, the Operations Analysis Office (OAO) of the USAF had already acknowledged that “in a certain number of cases the troops in question may have been civilians....

Review essay: the east of the cold war

Abstract: The cold war, which had its official demise in 1989, was never a universal phenomenon. Every society and country experienced it differently. In the West, it was a “long peace.” In South Asia and Africa, it was a protracted struggle against the politics of decolonization. In countries such as Korea and Vietnam, the cold war vacillated between volcanic spasms of war and incidents of political violence and terror. Korea, in particular, cannot yet reminisce about the coldwar era in the past tense. And so, the narrative of the cold war must reflect the historical differences within and between the East and the West. Heonik Kwon’s The Other Cold War and Theodore Q. Hughes’s Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier are recent publications that help in this regard by focusing on the East Asian experience of the cold war. While markedly different in their methodologies, both scholars try to provide alternative perspectives of the cold war by looking at its divergent cultural formations. The dominant historiography of the cold war has been shaped within the fields of international relations and diplomatic history where the principle concern has been the contest-of-power aspect of the cold war, with the United States and the Soviet Union being the major players in a divided world. For this reason, concerns about the origins of the cold war have focused on which of two parties made the first move or, at least, harbored the dream of global hegemony. Was it the United States in 1945 with the use of its atomic weapon or was it the Soviet Russia in 1917 with its revolution? Or should we go as far back as America’s nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny? Adopting this binary historical narrative, the cold war can be said to have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Little appeared to be left to reflect on other than the clear failure of communism and the triumph of capitalism. Oft-heard catchphrases such as “the passing of an illusion,” “the end of the history,” “the liberal moment,” and “the clash of civilizations” varied in their degrees of jubilation and anxiety, but each confidently declared the cold Critical Asian Studies 44:4 (2012), 643–650

Youth mobilization and ideology

Abstract: This article, based on archival data, tracks the evolution of youth mobilization in Cambodia from the Vichy French colonial National Revolution duringWorld War II through the country's revolutionary implosion under Pol Pot in 1979. Successive regimes relied on young people to consolidate power and protect the nation from external and internal threats. An overarching ideology of agrarianism structured the political beliefs of the leaders and committed cadres of these youth corps, ranging from an ideology of civic agrarianism under colonial officials and Sihanouk, to Lon Nol's military agrarianism, and finally to the Pol Pot regime's mobilization of youth via an ideology of revolutionary agrarianism that aimed to create a utopian agrarian nation. While the lives of young Cambodians had traditionally been shaped by two institutions, the family and the sangha, the advent of state-sponsored youth organizations in the mid twentieth century provided a new space for young people beyond the family and existing rel...

MIGRANT BEGGARS AND BUSKERS: China's Have-Less Celebrities

Abstract: This article examines issues of migrancy and socioeconomic disadvantage in present-day China with references to two cases involving the celebritization of migrant beggars and buskers. The first concerns Cheng Guorong, a 34-year-old vagrant beggar with mental health issues who became an international fashion icon known as “Brother Sharp” in 2010 after an amateur photographer posted candid photographs of him walking down a street on an internet forum. The second case involves two migrant buskers in Beijing who performed to an audience of around 1 billion viewers worldwide on China Central Television Station's annual Spring Festival Gala in 2011, after a friend posted a mobile phone video clip of them singing on his microblog. These cases show how the mediated contexts provided by the World Wide Web, combined with the corollary growth of a young digital-technology–savvy population, are generating new entertainment-orientated communities and celeb-rity-making practices in China. It also shows how these seemin...

Review essay: life and death in droneworld

Abstract: Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001–2050. New York: Dispatch Books, 2012. 179 pp. Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Ne...

Recalibrating risk and governing the japanese population

Abstract: This article examines how the Japanese state recalibrates the risks Japanese nationals face when traveling outside of Japan's sovereign territorial boundaries. The author elucidates the measures the state takes to assist its nationals deal with the range of risks they are likely to encounter when traveling to another sovereign state or territory. The article focuses on how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs communicates travel advice and warnings on “risky” destinations and how the state's recalibration of risk aims to inculcate “self-responsibility” as a norm in governing the Japanese population.

Sacred cows and crashing boars : Ethno-religious minorities and the politics of online representation in Malaysia

Abstract: Starting with the incident now known as the Cow’s Head Protest, this article traces and unpacks the events, techniques, and conditions surrounding the representation of ethno-religious minorities in Malaysia. The author suggests that the Malaysian Indians’ struggle to correct the dominant reading of their community as an impoverished and humbled underclass is a disruption of the dominant cultural order in Malaysia. It is also among the key events to have has set in motion a set of dynamics—the visual turn—introduced by new media into the politics of ethno-communal representation in Malaysia. Believing that this situation requires urgent examination the author attempts to outline the problematics of the task.

Timor-leste's proclaimer of independence

Abstract: The author interviews Francisco Xavier do Amaral, one of the founding leaders of Timor-Leste's independence movement, in August 2007, a few years before his death in Dili in March 2012.

The politics of islam and democracy in pakistan

Abstract: Iftikhar Malik, Pakistan: Democracy, Terrorism, and the Building of a Nation. Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2010. 211 pp. Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in...

The Korean War: A History, by Bruce Cumings. Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion, 1950–1953, by Steven Casey

Abstract: Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History. New York: Random House, 2010. 320 pp. Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion, 1950–1953. Oxford: Oxford University ...