The great polarized game in the Indian Ocean: Options for US, China and Pakistan

Indian Ocean (IO) has occupied an overlapping space of political concern and maritime security due to increasing geo-strategic importance in the region. A competition has been noticed amongst key littoral states in the IO, particularly among United States, India and China. In this competing game, United States is found to be proactively supporting India to expand its influence on IO. On the other hand, China is developing trade and military relationship with other countries including Pakistan to demonstrate leverage on the IO region. This paper sheds light into this great polarized game and its implications for Pakistan. The study uses secondary data and adopts a critical approach largely based upon ‘realist’ paradigm to analyse and understand the role of the aforementioned key actors in the political developments of the region The study reveals that both India and China, are competing ferociously and forming alliances (India with USA and China with Pakistan) to establish regional hegemony. This competition, in turn, has greatly politically polarized the region and threatened peace and stability. In this context, Pakistan needs to carefully develop its strategy which will serve its aspiration to have a positive peaceful image in the global politics and serve strategic national interest.

Introduction

This chapter proposes that we need a new political theory of global politics to guide us in a world increasingly marked by global interconnection, transnational activism on the part of nonstate actors, and political actors that utilize many different means (besides force and coercion) to exert influence on the world stage. The book develops such a theory by examining how justice-promoting intervention (reform intervention) implicates the values of toleration, legitimacy, and collective self-determination. The book then examines how this theory could be put into practice in the real world. Ultimately, the book argues that some reform interventions are morally permissible and may even be morally required. Moreover, we are sometimes morally required to open our own societies to reform intervention. The book presents a vision of conscientious global political contestation in which the achievement of justice everywhere can be the legitimate political concern of people anywhere.

Self-Exclusion from Gambling—A Measure of COVID-19 Impact on Gambling in a Highly Online-Based Gambling Market?

The COVID-19 pandemic, and related changes of the gambling market, have been suspected to affect the risk of problem gambling. Despite media attention and political concern with this risk, study findings hitherto have been mixed. Voluntary self-exclusion from gambling was introduced on a national level in Sweden as a harm reduction tool in 2019, and this self-exclusion service in Sweden is a rare example of such an official, nationwide, multi-operator system. The present study aimed to evaluate whether short-term self-exclusion patterns were affected by different phases of COVID-19-related impacts on gambling markets in 2020. During the lock-down of sports in the spring months of 2020, three-month self-exclusion was unaffected, and one-month self-exclusion appeared to increase, though not more than in a recent period prior to COVID-19. Despite large differences in sports betting practices between women and men, self-exclusion patterns during COVID-19 were not apparently gender-specific. Altogether, self-exclusion from gambling, to date, does not appear to be affected by COVID-19-related changes in society, in contrast with beliefs about such changes producing greater help-seeking behavior in gamblers. Limitations are discussed, including the fact that in a recently introduced system, seasonality aspects and the autocorrelated nature of the data made substantial statistical measures unfeasible.

COVID-19 situation in Indonesia: Efforts and challenges

More than a year has passed since the emergence of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. However, Indonesia still tussles to flatten the curve. To curb the infection rate, the Government of Indonesia passed public health policies to increase its healthcare system capacity and Indonesians’ awareness about COVID-19. However, existing health disparities between its regions, funding and political concern, and misinformation continue to hinder the effectiveness of these policies. This paper aims to provide a critical commentary on the current efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges facing it’s in responses in Indonesia.

From the Climate Change Threat to the Securitisation of Development: An Analysis of China

The climate change issue evolved as a significant policy priority within the China’s political establishment. The major factor that determines Beijing’s climate policy is the prevailing and potential climate change impact on the country’s economic development. As economic development is the foremost, pre-existing and abiding political concern, political leaders construct the climate change impact as a major threat to the country’s economic prosperity. Thus, political leaders’ overriding priority is to protect economic development—a referent object—from the perils of climate change. However, the interplay of climate threat and economic development drives political leaders to embrace security institution and develop military mind set to contend with climate-led development policies that trigger the securitisation of the development process in China. Employing the discourse analysis method, this paper examines the securitisation of development debate in China, especially at the domestic level, from the standpoint of the securitisation theory.

CHINA – PAKISTAN ECONOMIC CORRIDOR: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR PAKISTAN

One of the most highlighted projects of this decade is China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), between China and Pakistan this project leads its Uniqueness because both countries are different in account of social and political aspects. Despite of this Difference this paper explains about the challenges and opportunities for both countries through CPEC and also explains Pakistan’s explicit issues. Both countries facing different challenges but if Pakistan wants to have equal opportunities from CPEC so it is necessary to work on some explicit issues, initially we need skilled labor, highly qualified engineer, quality education from root to top, correct political concern also evolve for future, so we can take over all important project from chines, and avail all the coastal areas of Baluchistan, it is crucial favor for Pakistan to provides equal educational opportunity for Baluchistan people. Moreover, formulate long term policy of eliminating poverty on the other hand equal distribution of national wealth and atelic group of Pakistan, work for restoration confident of urban Sindh and Baluchistan people.

Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Denial

This chapter uses the case of the Armenian genocide as a via media for exploring a wider theoretical and political concern, namely, what can genocide and genocide denial reveal about ‘sovereignty’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘violence’, and thereby, about postgenocide and possibilities for resistance. It suggests that denials should be examined in close relationship with the unfolding of the genocide. This claim is pursued via a two-pronged framework, conjunctural and relational, inviting attention to heterogeneous and contradictory forces in a historical conjuncture, and to the relational production of political processes. The analysis shows that denials were not only integral to, but generative of, the Armenian genocide. The implications of the argument for postgenocide—the state of the political in Turkey today—are that without treating denials as generative it is futile to attempt to understand postgenocide denials, and begin to imagine alternatives to current politics.

Biocultural nation making: Biopolitics, cultural-territorial belonging, and national protected areas

While the academic literature on biopolitics has investigated how the life of the population and its biological capacities have increasingly become the target of political concern and intervention largely at the scale of the nation, the literature on nations and nationalism has explored nations as cultural-territorial units including questions of their emergence, ongoing production, and impacts. What these share is a similar if not nearly identical object of analysis: the nation or national population. These, however, are realms of scholarly debate that have largely, and quite surprisingly, bypassed one another. This paper advances the concept of biocultural nation making to bridge these debates and illustrate that nation making is at once biological and cultural-territorial and that these are deeply intertwined. We ground this in the experience of Canadian national parks, highlighting how “natural” environments like national parks are key sites of biocultural, and increasingly neoliberal, national production. Here, state conservation organizations promote park visitation as a means of, first, enabling an active, healthy, and economically productive national population. Second, parks are promoted on the grounds that they enable the experience of distinctively Canadian landscapes and places of national inclusion especially as park visitorship is expanded to include nontraditional visitors including immigrants, urban communities, and the youth. Parks, in short, have become vehicles of biocultural, and increasingly neoliberal, nation making. While there are indeed affirmative aspects to this, we also highlight hidden exclusions tied to the embrace of neoliberal logic, the limits of multiculturalism, and the ongoing erasure of Indigenous communities.

Politics of Resilience

The resilience of urban populations has been a state concern at least since the US strategic bombing surveys of World War II, but resilience really entered national security strategies and “all hazards” approaches to security and disaster management in the mid-2000s, when it was adopted as a concept for resolving the insecurities of the “war on terror” and climate change. The entry of resilience-thought into politics has several intellectual roots. Psychologically, the notion refers to individuals’ and societal groups’ capacity to recover from, or resist, misfortune speedily and easily. In the political uses of resilience, it has come to denote not only recovery from stresses and disturbances, or “bouncing back” to a previous normalcy, but also a “bouncing forward” effect through adaptation that can be considered desirable despite the general negativity attached to being vulnerable to continuous external shocks. While resilience has been a political concern since the 2000s, much of resilience research does not take politics into account when discussing, analyzing, and promoting resilient systems and practices for societies. This can lead to a normative contestation of resilience that stems from the normalization and essentialization of resilience as a universal and neutral public good for all, when it in actuality is saddled with conflicting values and involves both power and politics. Furthermore, resilience can also take on “perverse” forms where the resilience of internal elements of a system can work against the sustainability or viability of its whole, or where resilience maintains socially unjust or ecologically unhealthy practices. Even authoritarian political orders can display resilience. Accordingly, studies that focus on the politics of resilience tend to take a critical view of it, and of the politics it produces or maintains. When examining resilience with such critical awareness, questions such as resilience of what, to what, and for whom become relevant. Furthermore, when researching resilience, it is prudent to ask what it does politically and socially, what kinds of subjectivities and objectivities it produces, what kinds of values are inscribed and prescribed in its use, and who or what puts forth resilience speech and practices. One of the main critical viewpoints on the politics of resilience has been that it is a form of neoliberal governmentality that shifts responsibility to individuals and vulnerable groups for their own survival while simultaneously removing their political agency to affect change in regard to the continuous perturbations they face. Still, some suggest that resilience as such should not be conflated with the resilience politics of particular states and societies, but instead be examined more broadly, maintaining the possibility that it can also serve progressive agendas. To get a grasp on such angles of approach to resilience, the present bibliographical article presents an overview of what the politics of resilience is thought to be in its literature, what the origins and genealogy of resilience are, and what kind of debates and topics the literature has produced on the politics of resilience.