Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Publishing partners
  4. ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
  5. Content Listing

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

15945 results in ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute

Page 636 of 798

  • 6 - Southeast Asian Security Challenges: A View from Russia

  • from Part III - Security Issues in Southeast Asia
  • Book:
    ASEAN-Russia Relations
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    27 February 2006, pp 43-48

  • Summary

    THE BURDENS OF STUDYING ASEAN

    In a sense, the mere diligent registration of ASEAN-related events and schemes, not to mention academic analysis, has never been such a difficult task as it is now. By the standards of the association's recent past, the number of statements, programmes and plans generated after the outbreak of the Asian crisis is stunning. Summits deemed historical are often separated from each other by just a few months. New political, economic and cultural initiatives — some of subregional character, others of intercontinental scope — are announced while implementation of those produced and publicized before them have barely started. One way to realize the magnitude of this process is to look at the list of official ASEAN acronyms on the association's website. Consisting of fourteen pages in small font, it contains, along with catchy, comprehensible and easy-to-pronounce formulas like VAP (Vientiane Action Programme), not a few clumsy abbreviations (for instance, FOCPF standing for the Future Oriented Cooperation Projects Fund) plus such pearls of bureaucratic creativity as IDEA (The Initiative for the Development of East Asia) and ACCORD (ASEAN-China Cooperative Operations in Response to Dangerous Drugs). 1 What is this — a sign of vibrancy or a reflection of vulnerability in a quickly changing world? One unfortunate historical parallel that comes to mind is Sukarno's Guided Democracy — an era when a seemingly powerful regime was inventing acronyms by the dozen trying to dress reality up to its tastes and slipping in the meantime into a deadly crisis.

    WHAT'S NEW ABOUT THE NEW SECURITY THREATS?

    Be it as it may, it must be acknowledged that some issues arousing concern in the ASEAN capitals are called in the association's documents by their names. These are terrorism, sea piracy, human smuggling, drug trafficking and new diseases, known together in the official parlance as the New Security Threats. Obviously, all and each of them represent a serious problem. But are they so terribly new? For instance, is drug-trafficking so novel to Southeast Asia?

  • 1 - ASEAN Engages Russia

  • from Part I - Overview of ASEAN-Russia Relations
  • Book:
    ASEAN-Russia Relations
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    27 February 2006, pp 3-6

  • Summary

    This chapter seeks to present the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ perspectives on Russia — that is, the perspectives of ASEAN as a group — within the context of the relations between Russia and, again, ASEAN as a group. I will not deal with the perspectives on or the relations with Russia of individual ASEAN members, although those perspectives and relations help shape those of ASEAN as a group and the other way around.

    ASEAN's relations with Russia are anchored on:

  • • The “dialogue” relationship;

  • • The ASEAN Regional Forum;

  • • The senior officials consultations;

  • • The Joint Cooperation Committee;

  • • Science and technology linkages; and, now,

  • • The ASEAN-Russia Summit Meeting scheduled in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005.

    • During the Cold War, the ASEAN countries recognized the Soviet Union as a superpower with global reach and significance. Accordingly, by 1976, most Southeast Asian countries had diplomatic relations with Moscow, after decades of hesitation and wariness. However, there persisted obstacles to closer relations with the USSR on the part of ASEAN as a whole and of its individual members. The Soviet Union's centrally planned economy constituted a barrier to a thriving economic relationship. The Cold War and geopolitical considerations engendered mutual suspicions. Vietnam's incursion into Cambodia, starting in late 1978, reinforced ASEAN's suspicions of Moscow, even as those suspicions influenced ASEAN's vehement opposition to Vietnam's move. After all, just before the incursion, Vietnam had joined COMECON and entered into what amounted to a mutual defence treaty with the USSR, whose communist ideology and perceived aggressive stance were regarded by ASEAN members as a threat.

    In the late 1980s, several developments conspired to ease the way to improved ASEAN-Soviet relations. Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were transforming the Soviet Union's domestic situation and foreign relations. Vietnam completed the withdrawal of its troops from Cambodia in 1989. Soviet support for Vietnam had perceptibly diminished. The peace process on Cambodia was gaining momentum, partly as a result of an apparent Sino- Soviet understanding. There was the larger improvement in Sino-Soviet relations. Finally, the Soviet Union broke up and the Cold War ended.

  • 2 - Russian Perspectives on ASEAN

  • from Part I - Overview of ASEAN-Russia Relations
  • Book:
    ASEAN-Russia Relations
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    27 February 2006, pp 7-14

  • Summary

    As a Eurasian country Russia — similarly to the former Soviet Union — has strong national interests in Asia in general and in Southeast Asia in particular. They are formed not by mere geography but by a rich variety of political, economic, security, demographic, cultural and other factors. Obviously at different periods of the Soviet/Russian history some of these factors became more prominent than the others thus influencing the choice of national objectives and means of their achievement.

    Reflecting fundamental geopolitical changes and new security challenges in the post-Cold War world, Russia's foreign policy in the post-Soviet period became fundamentally different from that of the Soviet times both in its goals and in methods of achieving them. The former great power's assertive goals were replaced with the need to create a favourable external environment for Russia's economic development. And while the Soviet Union's main instruments of pursuing its strategic goals were ideological and military, the new democratic Russia places emphasis on diplomatic and political methods in its foreign policy.

    Shortly after Vladimir Putin was elected Russian President in 2000, a revised “National Security Concept” and a new “Foreign Policy Concept” were adopted by him. In both of these documents, economic issues were placed at the centre of the long-term national development strategy. The “Foreign Policy Concept” stated in particular that in order to ensure Russia's national security and to strengthen its sovereignty and territorial integrity, the Russian Government should concentrate on:

  • a) Creation of favourable external conditions for a progressive economic development of Russia and for a noticeable improvement in the living standards of its population;

  • b) Formation of a good-neighbourly belt along its national borders, assistance in resolution of existing and prevention of emergence of new tensions and conflicts in areas adjacent to the Russian Federation;

  • c) Search for common and complementary interests with foreign countries and international organizations while pursuing national priority goals; creation of a system of partnership and alliances on this basis that would facilitate international cooperation.

  • Foreword

  • Book:
    ASEAN-Russia Relations
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    27 February 2006, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    This timely book is the result of a joint conference organized in March 2005 by the IMEMO (Institute of World Economy and Politics) and ISEAS (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies) in Singapore. With the rise of India and China, the entire Asian continent is feeling the great impact of socioeconomic changes and challenges created by these twin engines of progress and cooperation. The question on the minds of regional analysts is: Where is Russia in the midst of these vast changes? What is its role?

    ASEAN itself is caught up in these challenges. It has responded by a series of initiatives, such as its ambitious vision to build three ASEAN Communities (economic, sociocultural, and security); its forward-looking ASEAN+3 efforts; its proposed Free Trade Agreements with all Asian neighbours, ranging from India, China, Japan, South Korea, and further afield, with the United States and Australia. Individual ASEAN members have contributed greatly, such as Thailand's Asia Cooperation Dialogue; BIMSTEC; the Irrawady-Chao Praya- Mekong Scheme; whilst Singapore has organized the Asia-Middle East Dialogue and the Shangri-La Security Forum; Malaysia has its East Asia Summit; Indonesia has revived the Bandung spirit of cooperation between Africa and Asia; Vietnam is reaching out to the United States. Both India and China are reaching out to ASEAN with several major economic and security initiatives. All these initiatives demonstrate that the region is actively responding to the ferment of the post-Cold War era/post-9/11 challenges.

    Russia is now stirring; one good example is its current interest to join the East Asia summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005. We in ISEAS set out to explore this intriguing question: how a Great Power like Russia could play an active role in the region, and in what ways ASEAN could engage Russia. Currently, Russia's interaction with ASEAN is limited to the full dialogue between both parties, and trade between both sides is categorized by Russian arms sales and ASEAN raw materials. This book sets out to examine these challenges and opportunities, by examining the state of relations between Russia and selected individual ASEAN countries.

  • 7 - From Inclusion to Re-marginalization

  • Vatthana Pholsena
  • Book:
    Post-war Laos
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    17 February 2006, pp 180-217

  • Summary

    According to the accepted wisdom, political, economic, social and cultural globalization in the late twentieth century brought about structural changes, most visibly, the decrease in the nation–state' capacity to fulfil its missions (for instance, the diminution of welfare in the case of Western European countries) and the erosion of national cultures once perceived as homogenous — that has in turn led to the fragmentation of identities (Tambini 2002). In essence, some analysts proclaim, national identity is in a state of crisis. In so-called postmodern societies, as McCrone advises, one should no longer assume “that there is much fixed, essential or immutable about identity, but that individuals assume different identities at different times which may not even be centred around a coherent self” (McCrone 1998, p. 32). Hence, from the proclaimed death of the idea of a “stable” identity has emerged the notion of “dislocation or de-centring of the subject” (Hall 1994, p. 275).

    In this chapter, I would like to explore not so much the processes of globalization as this idea of fluidity and plurality of identities within the context of ideological, cultural and economic change in today' Lao society. I have tried in the previous chapter to show the political mechanisms by which the Lao authorities attempt to forge an orderly and bounded representation of the country' culturally and linguistically diverse population with the support of state-controlled ethnographic research and the census. I intend now to discuss the notion of different coexisting (and perhaps conflicting) identities among the members of ethnic minorities whom I encountered in the course of my fieldwork, by examining their own perceptions of their ethnicity, national identity and citizenship in post-communist Laos. More specifically, how do these people take on a national identity that is increasingly essentialized? Likewise, how do they handle an ethnic labelling over which they have little, if any, control? It is paradoxically in the rural areas of southern Laos that I met veterans of the “Vietnam Wars” for whom the notion of citizenship was still quite compelling. The ties that bound them to the state anchored their identities to a larger community than their village or ethnic group. They felt a sense of belonging to, and being active participants in, a political community that, however, seemed no longer to recognize them.

  • 1 - Post-war Laos: An Introduction

  • Vatthana Pholsena
  • Book:
    Post-war Laos
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    17 February 2006, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    I have no direct memories of my father' country. Like thousands of Lao, my parents left in the late 1970s after the Communists took power, and settled in France. For a long time, Laos remained a distant country for me. But it was there that I found myself drawn to the issues of ethnicity and nationalism; like many others, I was fascinated by the country' linguistic and cultural mosaic and its turbulent history. Two initial, broad research aims eventually unfolded: first, how might sentiments of national consciousness be created in a complex society (such as Laos)? And, second, which form of “nation” would develop in a non-Western, post-colonial and multi-ethnic country (such as Laos)? My interest was heightened by Laos’ turbulent history, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. Laos, like Vietnam and Cambodia, is a former French colony. The country was entangled in the turmoil of the Second World War and the Japanese occupation of the region, which irremediably damaged the “prestige” of French colonial power. Laos was first declared independent in September 1945 (after the surrender of the Japanese and before the return of the French), an arrangement to be replaced less than a year later, in May 1946, with the status of a unified constitutional monarchy within the French Union.

    The newly built Lao polity was, however, subsequently destroyed by the impact of the Cold War and the First and Second Indochinese Wars. From the late 1940s to 1975, a civil war tore the country apart along political, ideological and geographical lines. The conflict opposed the Royal Lao Government (RLG) to the Pathet Lao, i.e. the Lao communists. Both sides were heavily dependent on foreign powers: the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (and, to a lesser extent, the People' Republic of China), respectively. The country was split into two zones, as if an imaginary (and fluctuating) line, drawn north to south, divided the eastern and western halves of the country. Broadly speaking, the government controlled areas embraced the plains, mostly inhabited by ethnic Lao, while the communists dominated the eastern and mountainous territories, which were mainly populated by ethnic minorities.

  • 6 - Ethnic Classification and Mapping Nationhood

  • Vatthana Pholsena
  • Book:
    Post-war Laos
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    17 February 2006, pp 151-179

  • Summary

    The modern State, in the Foucaldian sense, is that hegemonic apparatus whose raison d’être is to control and administer the body of the population through a series of discourses that together form the “regime of truth”, which Foucault defined as follows:

    Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true

    (Foucault 1977, p. 131).

    Truth is not transcendental, “out there”: it is produced here and now. Indeed, modern states, among other agents, participate in a continuous and uninterrupted process of generating “truth” through the use of “technologies of power” in order to legitimate and naturalize their authority. They transform innovations into everyday practice “by constant reiteration of [their] power through what have become accepted as natural (rational and normal) state functions, of certifying, counting, reporting, registering, classifying, and identifying”(Cohn and Dirks 1988, p. 225). My intention in this chapter is thus to show the determinant role that administration in general, and population censuses in particular, play in the modelling of Lao society in the image of a national community. In other words, the State in modern Laos has operated the census as a vector of ethnicity (through the manipulation of ethnic boundaries) in order to fashion an imaginary nationhood out of real heterogeneity.

    Description and interpretation of the early censuses

    Insightful works have shown the long-lasting impact of the knowledge produced by colonial administrations on the independent states they once governed.

  • 5 - An “Heroic Village”

  • Vatthana Pholsena
  • Book:
    Post-war Laos
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    17 February 2006, pp 119-150

  • Summary

    If it is commonly acknowledged that representations of the past are central to the symbolic constitution of national consciousness, the relationship between collective history on the one hand, and memories based on personal experience on the other, is a vexed one, even when a coercive state is responsible for the production of history. Perhaps it is wise to adopt Rubie S. Watson' cautious statement when she writes: “it is important that we do not credit the socialist state and its agents with too much power or its citizens with too much boldness” (Watson 1994, p. 2). People are not mere passive receivers; nor are they constantly resisting. Homi Bhabha sees the relationships between individuals and the nation' narrative through a dual lens, or in his words, in “doubletime”. The people are the “historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy”, but they are also

    the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process

    (Bhabha 1995, p. 297).

    It is precisely this duality that allows individuals a space for contesting the official representation of the past, which claims to configure the imagining of the national community. Elizabeth Tonkin argues that people are both subjects and agents in the account of memory and the constitution of history. Social conditions and political rhetoric mould identities; yet, individual subjectivity is not entirely dominated by the social, or by the actions of the nation–state. Personal and social identities are clearly intertwined; however, people have a margin for criticism and self-reflection. She states: “[…] oral accounts no less than written ones can be means of comment and reflection, in which different pasts are conceptualised, and, often, contradiction and failure admitted” (Tonkin 1992, pp. 130–31). In other words, totalizing narrations of national history are not themselves homogenous. They serve as a framework, the content and bounds of which may be re-presented by people.

  • 3 - Cultural Order and Discipline: The Politics of National Culture

  • Vatthana Pholsena
  • Book:
    Post-war Laos
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    17 February 2006, pp 46-76

  • Summary

    In 1975, the present regime proclaimed a break with a distasteful past and instead promised the beginning of a new socialist era. However, anticolonialist rhetoric is now no longer appropriate for rallying the population, and symbols of the past are being recalled in a distorted representation that equally fails to have broad appeal. The anxiety of the current Lao authorities over the preservation and strengthening of the country' national identity has many parallels with that of their predecessors (in fact, the newly reformulated national culture in post-socialist Laos borrows heavily from symbols of the former regime), but the perception of threat is no longer focused on hostile neighbours physically violating national boundaries, but rather on the dangers of social and cultural erosion by external forces. From a post-colonial perspective, the nationalist discourse is in search of “a difference with the ‘modular’ forms of the national society propagated by the modern West” (Chatterjee 1993b, p. 5, original stress). In the case of Laos, however, this desire to construct a distinctive model must first be analysed (at least as far as culture and history are concerned) in the light of Laos’ relationship with her neighbour, Thailand. This chapter therefore will demonstrate that the processes of inclusion and exclusion — that is, the politics of Majority/Minority representations — are not only induced by the necessity of constructing an encompassing and homogenized national culture, but are also subsumed within a search for cultural particularity.

    Modelling Majority/Minority representations

    The year 1999 was marked by the promotion of Visit Laos Year 1999–2000. To celebrate the event, a long parade was organized on the opening day of the That Luang festival in November in Vientiane. The procession was led by a group composed of young female and male students wearing their school uniform and waving the national flag. This first group was called “Lao Modern Time and Great Victory to the Century” [sic] (Brochure of the Lao National Tourist Authority, Opening Ceremony Visit Laos Year 1999–2000, 18 November 1999 [in English]). Strangely enough, at the tail end of the procession, the closing group, referred to by the nostalgic title, “Long Distance Friendship and the True Dream”, represented the past, embodied by men wearing red and green feudal fighters’ clothing. Some of them were perched on elephants, symbol of the former regime.

  • 8 - Conclusion

  • Vatthana Pholsena
  • Book:
    Post-war Laos
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    17 February 2006, pp 218-222

  • Summary

    The Lao Front for National Construction' loss of influence within the regime is perhaps the most revealing symptom of the end of the socialist project. As the country progressively opens itself to the market economy and to regional and international tourism, anti-capitalist and anti-Western imperialist rhetoric is no longer appropriate for galvanizing the population behind the leadership. The discourse of struggle is being replaced by a discourse of lack. The regime now calls for modernity. The education of the masses echoes the impetus to attain economic competitiveness in the world economy. In other words, the question of identity and culture is closely tied to the issue of overcoming “backwardness”. On the other hand, members of ethnic minority groups, among those who were educated during the revolutionary period, show a desire to demonstrate individual agency. Through a divergent narrative of the national past or the assertion of an ethnicity that is not officially recognized, they in effect defy their nation-state' representation. The efforts of Sisouk, until recently a senior LFNC official, to create an official ethnic category, the Bru, outside the regime' enforced categorization — but within the nation-state' ethnic classification system - may epitomize this micro-level struggle for the legitimation of a self-defined identity, despite the low probability of his succeeding at the present time.

    My specific intention in this research was to go beyond the apparent immutability of these two oppositional figures, the Majority and the ethnic minorities. In other words, I have tried to show that these two entities are dynamic. The Majority — or normality, to use the Foucaldian term — is not yet convincingly hegemonic, while the ethnic minorities — or deviant identity — cannot always be represented solely as the ethnic Other, either by the government or by academic researchers. There is no complete hegemony, as the newly reformulated nationalist discourse is itself unstable and still in the process of development. Neither is there an absence of autonomy on the part of those being represented. Simultaneously, they display openly a loyalty to the Party-State and feel they have the right to claim full membership of the nation.

Page 636 of 798