Economic and Strategic Trends in Southeast Asia

Author(s):  
Heng Yee-Kuang

The tiny Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore has a reputation for adroit and nimble diplomacy, built upon an ingrained desire to overcome its vulnerability by maintaining its strategic relevance and economic prosperity in an international system that is seen as essentially anarchic. As its neighborhood experiences major shifts in the strategic and economic domains, Singapore finds itself once again having to strike a balance between getting out of harm’s way and capitalizing on opportunities.

1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 451-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wong

China has long been the world's largest producer of rice, with an annual output regularly accounting for a third of the world's total rice production. In recent years, China has also risen to become the world's largest rice exporter, with a volume coming close to a third of the world's total exported rice. The bulk of the Chinese rice exports are destined for the rice-consuming Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. Among the five Southeast Asian countries, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, which today constitute the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), only Thailand produces a food surplus while the others have to import rice in amounts which, with the exception of the city-state Singapore, vary each year according to their domestic rice harvests.


Author(s):  
Yvonne Ng

IT HAS BEEN TEN YEARS SINCE FILM PRODUCTION IN SINGAPORE WAS REVIVED IN 1991 after being dormant for almost two decades. At the time, in the 70s and 80s, the city-state was probably the only country in Southeast Asia without a film-making industry of its own. Then again, it hadn't been an independent republic for very long. A former British colony, it became self-governing in 1959. Following a short-lived association with the Federation of Malaysia, the city found itself a fully independent and sovereign nation in 1965. For the next twenty years, the government devoted itself to the task of nation-building and the challenge of changing the island's status from a developing country to that of a newly industrialised one. By the start of the 90s, it was clear that the goal of economic prosperity had been achieved. At the same time, it was equally obvious that in...


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-58
Author(s):  
Rahdiansyah Rahdiansyah ◽  
Yulia Nizwana

Cultural disputes, and others, often occur between neighboring countries in Southeast Asia and can be the seeds of disharmony, of course, this is not desirable. Southeast Asia as a cultural scope that is interrelated in history, has local wisdom in resolving disputes, resolving this dispute is known as deliberation. Deliberation is an identity that must be prioritized as a wise cultural approach for the ASEAN community. The purpose of this study is to explore the local wisdom of Southeast Asian people in resolving disputes in their communities and implementing them as a solution for the ASEAN community. Recognizing each other as cultural origins often occur between Malaysian and Indonesian communities. As a nation of the same family, this is commonplace, but the most important thing is how to solve it. Interviewing the people of both countries is the first thing to do in looking at this problem, how they understand and see culture in their culture. Questionnaires are distributed as much as possible, each data obtained will be processed and classified according to nationality, education, age, and others. The findings will be a study to see the perspectives of the two countries in understanding history, culture, and cultural results in addressing the differences of opinion that occur. At least the description of the root of the problem is obtained, why this problem occurs, what are the main causes, how to understand it, how to react to it, and lead to the resolution of the dispute over ownership of culture itself


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2019) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Delphine Allès

This article highlights the formulation of comprehensive conceptions of security in Indonesia, Malaysia and within the framework of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), well before their academic conceptualisation. These security doctrines have been the basis of the consolidation of state and military apparatuses in the region. They tend to be overlooked by analyses praising the recent conversion of Southeast Asian political elites to the “non-traditional security”? agenda. This latter development is perceived as a source of multilateral cooperation and a substitute for the hardly operationalisable concept of human security. However, in the region, non-traditional security proves to be a semantic evolution rather than a policy transformation. At the core of ASEAN’s security narrative, it has provided a multilateral anointing of “broad” but not deepened conceptions of security, thus legitimising wide-ranging socio-political roles for the armed forces.


Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Maryann Bylander

In the Southeast Asian context, legal status is ambiguous; it enlarges some risks while lessening others. As is true in many contexts across the Global South, while documentation clearly serves the interest of the state by offering them greater control over migrant bodies, it is less clear that it serves the goals, needs, and well-being of migrants.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-30
Author(s):  
Tuong Vu

The terms “decolonization” and “Cold War” refer to specific processes and periods in the international system, but they do not capture the full agency of local actors such as Vietnamese Communists. Based on recently available archival materials from Hanoi, this article maps those terms onto Vietnamese Communist thinking through four specific cases. The declassified materials underscore the North Vietnamese leaders’ deep commitment to a radical worldview and their occasional willingness to challenge Moscow and Beijing for leadership of world revolution. The article illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between global, regional, and local politics and offers a more nuanced picture of how decolonization in Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1980s sparked not only a Cold War confrontation but also a regional war.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane A. Desierto

The development of international law in South and Southeast Asia exemplifies myriad ideological strands, historical origins, and significant contributions to contemporary international law doctrines’ formative and codification processes. From the beginnings of South and Southeast Asian participation in the international legal order, international law discourse from these regions has been thematicallypostcolonialand substantivelydevelopment-oriented.Postcolonialism in South and Southeast Asian conceptions of international law is an ongoing dialectical project of revisioning international legal thought and its normative directions — towards identifying, collocating, and applying South and Southeast Asian values and philosophical traditions alongside the Euro-American ideologies that, since the classical Post-Westphalian era, have largely infused the content of positivist international law. Of increasing necessity to the intricacies of the postmodern international legal system and its institutions is how the postcolonial project of South and Southeast Asian international legal discourse focuses on areas of international law that create the most urgent development consequences: trade, investment, and the international economic order; the law of the sea and the environment; international humanitarian law, self-determination, socio-economic and cultural human rights.


2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells

Sayyidi ‘strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’, borne on the eighteenth-century wave of Hadhrami migration to the Malay-Indonesian region, boosted indigenous traditions of charismatic leadership at a time of intense political challenge posed by Western expansion. The extemporary credentials and personal talents which made for sāda exceptionalism and lent continuity to Southeast Asian state-making traditions are discussed with particular reference to Perak, Siak and Pontianak. These case studies, representative of discrete sāda responses to specific circumstances, mark them out as lead actors in guiding the transition from ‘the last stand of autonomies’ to a new era of pragmatic collaboration with the West.


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