Asia Pacific Viewpoint最新文献

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the issue of climate change in the Pacific Islands, in terms of its geopolitical implications, and through the lens of mitigation and adaptation policies and strategies. Comparatively little focus has been given to the domestic politics of climate change in the region: How a changing climate is affecting internal political dynamics. This article traces the boundaries of a new research agenda on the impacts of climate change within Pacific states as an animating political dynamic. It considers climate change as a possible source of political change and contestation; as a critical domestic policy issue; and as a driver of political participation and organisation. Climate change is an existential threat to the Pacific Islands, yet it has unique power as a mass mobilising factor in the largely localised and fragmented politics of the region. We conclude with some reflections on the potential of climate change as a key political driver in the region, and fruitful avenues for future research.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted wide scholarly attention. However, discussions among social scientists on BRI have largely premised on the academic infrastructure in English language contexts. Academic research on BRI in China has often been only briefly mentioned as background information in English language publications. This disjuncture between scholarship on BRI inside and outside China reflects the multiple geographies of BRI. Thinking through BRI in English and Chinese scholarship, this paper considers how existing and future factors such as funding sources, language politics, political framing of the research and institutional surveillance may yield different intellectual spaces for understanding the knowledge production of BRI.

In terms of spatial imaginaries and as physical infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spurs new geographies of comparative urban study. Irrespective of whether it is the primary driver for developments carried out in its name, ‘the BRI’ is a label that serves to bring previously unassociated project sites and non-place-based infrastructural developments into comparative relation. This paper considers some of the possibilities presented by the BRI for comparative urban studies in – and from – Asia. Building upon insights from postcolonial urban studies, planetary urbanisation and inter-Asia cultural studies, I sketch two key possibilities of the BRI as (comparative urban) method. The first concerns the BRI as a series of openings to much (spatially) wider and historically deeper forms of comparison. Second, I argue that BRI as method impels forms of urban comparison beyond conventionally territorialised units of analysis at a variety of scales, including both the city and the (area studies) region.

A variety of maps depict a usefully approximate but inexact network of roads, rails, sea lanes and other infrastructures to represent something called China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And yet, for a global programme that reflects and advances Beijing's new position as a leader of international development, BRI maps remain largely imprecise and unofficial. Taking this as a starting point of critical cartography, I ask why BRI development throughout the Tibet-Himalaya region remains conspicuously blank on most maps, and what work is accomplished by such cartographic silences. In contrast to this apparent invisibility, however, the BRI is very much present in Nepal – discursively, materially and cartographically. Chinese development programmes are widely anticipated, embraced and promoted as grand and spectacular things throughout Nepal. Following this friction of representation in the case of Chinese development in Nepal, I argue that the apparent paradox between the BRI as invisible thing and BRI as promised future reveals the manifold ways in which infrastructures articulate politics and, vice-versa, how politics articulate infrastructures.

As frame for the set that follows, this article first considers the range of theoretical interpretations of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our focus, however, is on a related yet distinct set of questions. Rather than theorising BRI per se, we approach BRI as a source of theoretical implications and reflection – asking what it signals and implies for wider cultural, economic, political, social and urban theories, and for histories of and afterlives of imperial geopolitics.

This paper reflects on how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can contribute to more cosmopolitan forms of theory-making and the diversification of knowledges. It focuses on emerging Chinese narratives of the Digital Silk Road (DSR) that cast the initiative as emblematic of an improved BRI 2.0 in the (post-)pandemic era. With subterranean fibre-optic cables and satellite systems constituting important components of the DSR, I argue that these Chinese discourses fundamentally expose the ‘horizontal’ bias in infrastructure debates, thereby forcing an analytical re-orientation towards the notion's volumetric possibilities. Reconceptualising infrastructures in volumetric terms opens up opportunities for interrogating issues of representational politics, power and sovereignty that matter for the DSR and beyond. Using Chinese perspectives of the DSR for the purpose of theory-building, however, does not equate to endorsing Sinocentrism or privileging the BRI as a totalising framework for interpreting the world. Rather, it signifies an effort to ‘provincialise’ the BRI – ensuring that different voices and subjectivities can co-exist in the ongoing and unfinished project of rethinking/reconstructing the BRI.

Although infrastructures may be material manifestations of state territorial power, the political effects of infrastructures are seldom straightforward. And yet, many accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) assume a relatively conventional approach to politics, and to political power. Geopolitical intentionality and top-down policy and strategic planning tend to be emphasised over project-level analyses. In response to what might be viewed as an invented BRI geopolitics, this essay suggests a more technopolitical framing of the Belt and Road and seeks to apply an infrastructural analytic to the question of how political power is realised or frustrated, enhanced or diverted, by the distributed and relational nature of infrastructure projects. It argues that our understanding of the socio-technical complexities of infrastructure is poorly served by viewing them through a conventional geopolitical lens. Instead, it seeks to lay out a research agenda and analytical framework for addressing the questions of how infrastructure projects grow and evolve, how they are embedded within the social-political-cultural contexts in which they develop and how they produce political effects that at times align with broader-scale geopolitical agendas and at other times do not.

While accepting that the migration–development nexus is best understood from a transnational perspective, recent studies analyse this nexus in a partial way rather than holistically. We review the literature, then attempt an enriched account of the complex and rapidly evolving relationship between diaspora and development in China – a country undergoing profound demographic, economic and social changes. Using in-depth interviews with a variety of key informants or stakeholders and a transnationally oriented framework, we analyse features across three core policy dimensions that incorporate both international and domestic dynamics: citizenship, top talent recruitment and soft power. Our findings contribute to the literature on Chinese-state-diaspora relations. They show that China's approach to its diaspora policy and development, practice and outcomes reaches with powerful new effects across national borders. The transnational–relational perspective gives an optimal paradigm for researchers and policymakers to understand changing strengths and complexities in interactions (contestation, conflict, negotiation, cooperation) between multi-scalar and multi-dimensional linkages, and to form diaspora policy and engagement programmes responsive to unprecedented global political, economic and social disruption.

The Kuang Si Waterfall in Luang Prabang, Lao PDR, is an iconic tourist destination and supplies critical irrigation water to several downstream villages. The upstream catchment area, or the Kuang Si watershed area, comprises several villages belonging to three separate districts. The aim of this study is to understand how the watershed area of the Kuang Si Waterfall has been managed to ensure a steady, reliable flow of water resources for downstream agricultural and recreational use, in a context whereby slash-and-burn is commonly practised by upland farmers. The governance of the watershed has evolved from a top-down approach in the 1980s to one that embodies integrated watershed management in the recent decades: community-based forest and land allocation along with livelihood improvement projects. However, the focus on watershed health could be diluted through the latter approach. Drawing on ideas in the commoning literature, I show that there are ongoing forms of ‘lite commoning’ that enable upstream communities to see a stake in protecting the downstream water resource. Transitioning from ‘lite commoning’ to ‘strong commoning’ could help wean watershed programmes off development aid and make them more self-sustainable, but I argue that it is foremost important to determine the hydrological watershed boundaries.

This paper explores the ways in which the religious subject can be a contingent position that is responsive to the broader socio-religious context within which it is expressed. These contingencies are acutely observed among short-term missionaries (STM), who seek out encounters with difference in pursuit of a more cosmopolitan subjectivity. Yet, while spaces of missionary encounter are inherently relational, the missions literature has tended to downplay the effects of relationality on the realisation of these subject positions. By focusing on the experiences of Singaporean missionaries working among Christian communities in Southeast Asia, I contribute a more nuanced and less pre-determined understanding of the dynamics that underpin intra-Asian missionary encounters. Drawing on interviews conducted with Singapore's STM community, I explore how materiality and new media can structure encounters and subject positions within relational missionary space. I also emphasise the limits of relational space by highlighting its untranslatability beyond the missionary terrain.