Critical Asian StudiesPub Date : 2024-10-18eCollection Date: 2024-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2024.2414376
William Jamieson
{"title":"Reclaiming Resilience Through Granular Arbitrage: Anticipating Sea Level Rise in Singapore.","authors":"William Jamieson","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2024.2414376","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14672715.2024.2414376","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Over the last sixty ears, Singapore has expanded its land footprint over twenty-five percent by reclaiming land from the sea. Its outsized demand for sand to resource these projects has rendered regional sand markets precarious, and successive countries have banned sand exports to Singapore. Nevertheless, the Singapore government has committed to spending $SG one billion (US$ 767 million) a year until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise. While this includes a range of strategies, from improving drainage infrastructure to exploring adaptive solutions, in the main this involves reclaiming vast amounts of land from the sea to act as a bulwark against rising tides. These plans for resilience will be examined through the spectre of Long Island, a proposed project that will act as a barrier against sea level rise and incorporate nature-based solutions that are emblematic of resilience fetishism, all the while obscuring the more foundational element of this resilience, which is sand that will be obtained through granular arbitrage.</p>","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"56 4","pages":"555-575"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11601044/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142751936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A “Forgotten” Massacre: The Battle of Thakhek in Laos, 1946","authors":"Vatthana Pholsena, Suriya Khamwan","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2295917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2295917","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"22 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139445545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Bizarre Encounters to Native Strangeness: Indigenous Otherness and Insider-Outsider Interactions in Indonesia","authors":"Geger Riyanto","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2024.2301719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2024.2301719","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"21 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139380739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forest Reserves as Frontiers of Indigeneity: Semai Orang Asli Investments of Work, Cultural Use and Identity in the Bukit Tapah Forest Reserve","authors":"Karen Heikkilä, Anthony Williams-Hunt","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2278046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2278046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"28 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139269858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hindutva, OBCs and Koli Selfhood in Western and Central India","authors":"Dolly Daftary","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2283003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2283003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"11 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139268667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Politics of Misalignment: NGO Livelihood Interventions and Exclusionary Land Claims in an Indonesian Oil Palm Enclave","authors":"Tessa D. Toumbourou, Wolfram H. Dressler","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2272736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2272736","url":null,"abstract":"Across Southeast Asia’s extractive frontier, Indigenous people increasingly negotiate an influx of nonstate actors pushing partnerships and projects to steer livelihoods away from extractivism and toward forest conservation. Yet, NGOs and their donors often struggle to grasp Indigenous peoples’ changing needs and expectations that may prioritize sustaining an income, often via the promises extractive industries propose, over preserving fragmented forests for posterity. This paper examines three interventions by conservation NGOs in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, which leveraged custom (adat) and “alternative” livelihoods through territorial practices to dissuade a Dayak Modang community from releasing ancestral lands for palm oil plantations and coal mines. Drawing on the state’s definition of adat to demarcate Modang territory, NGOs and some Modang engaged in counter-mapping and livelihood initiatives as hopeful expressions of indigeneity and making a living through acts of territorialization. We explore how NGO territorial practices unfolded as simplified spatial expressions that leveraged adat identity, enclosures, and livelihoods, neglecting the contemporary realities of living in a fragmented forest frontier. Although NGO-Modang strategies temporarily slowed dispossession and deforestation, their misaligned livelihood and conservation programs may have reinforced social differentiation between and across Dayak and migrant groups to ultimately facilitate extraction’s expansion.","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"30 34","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135818596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Patani Malay Dilemma: The 2023 Electoral Landscape in Thailand’s Deep South","authors":"Duncan McCargo, Chanintira na Thalang","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2272158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2272158","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"24 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136157073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Compound Capitalism: A Political Economy of Southeast Asia’s Online Scam Operations","authors":"Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, Mark Bo","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2268104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2268104","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn the past few years, the online scam industry has undergone seismic changes. After emerging in Taiwan and mainland China in the 1990s, in the 2010s scam operations began to relocate servers and offices to Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia and the Philippines. While initially the majority of operations were small-scale and largely hosted in apartments, villas, and hotel rooms, in the second half of the decade they began to assume industrial dimensions, coalescing into bigger walled compounds often hosting dozens of companies, many staffed by workers held against their will and forced to perform scams. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and a set of in-depth interviews conducted with survivors of scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, this paper offers the first in-depth examination of the political economy of Southeast Asia’s scam industry, arguing that these operations should be framed as part of compound capitalism, a new manifestation of predatory capital.KEYWORDS: ChinaSoutheast Asiaonline scam industrylabor rightsorganized crime Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.AcknowledgementsThe authors wish to thank Sijia Zhong for her valuable help with this research, as well as Christian Sorace, Nicholas Loubere, and Diego Gullotta for their feedback on earlier drafts of the article.Notes1 Tan and Jia Citation2022; Zhuang Citation2010.2 Chang Citation2014; Zhuang and Ma Citation2021.3 Cambodia News English Citation2021a.4 Cambodia News English Citation2021b.5 Venzon Citation2023.6 Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of the Philippines Citation2022.7 Casayuran Citation2023.8 Turton and Chheng Citation2017.9 Xinhua Citation2019.10 Manabat Citation2023.11 Senate of the Philippines Citation2023.12 The picture is further blurred by the fact that the Cambodian government generally refers to all illegal online activity as online gambling.13 Interpol Citation2023.14 Stevenson Citation2023.15 Ding Citation2023.16 OHCHR Citation2023.17 See, for instance, Zhang and Chin Citation2003; Zhang Citation2008; Chin and Zhang Citation2015; Lhomme et al. Citation2021; van Uhm and Wong Citation2021.18 The online scam industry has been absent from mainstream discussions of modern slavery until very recently. For instance, a prominent report on modern slavery released by the International Labor Organization (ILO) entitled Walk Free, and a September 2022 report by the International Organization for Migration do not mention scam compounds (see ILO et al. Citation2022). On the other hand, the release of the recent OHCHR report could be a sign that things are changing.19 Cyber Scam Monitor Citation2022.20 Southern and Kennedy Citation2022.21 These businesses collaborate with outside groups such as social media influencers, brokers, and human traffickers, to entice and facilitate individuals’ entrance into the compound, but this aspect of their operations is outside the purview of this paper, w","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"10 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136234017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crafting Utopias for Spiritual Nationhood: Digested India in Contemporary Self-cultivation Practices in China","authors":"Anna Iskra","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2271009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2271009","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis study examines how India – both as a modern nation-state and a symbolic geography – is digested by Chinese self-cultivators to negotiate their belonging in China’s spiritual nationhood, defined as the landscape of belief that corresponds to the geo-body of the nation-state. It follows the practitioners of Oneness (Heyi), one of the most popular Indian new religious movements in China today, for whom such negotiations are riddled with tensions. While Oneness practitioners align themselves with political orthodoxy disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), emphasizing China’s special role as a spiritual leader for humanity, they engage in quasi-religious heterodox practices, risking being labeled an “evil cult” (xie jiao). These frictions occur at the junction of two contrasting notions of spiritual nationhood, one derived from lingxing (spirituality) and the other from jingshen, a secularized notion of spirit that situates the CCP as the sacred center of the polity.KEYWORDS: spiritualitynationalismutopianismspiritual civilizationPan-Asianism AcknowledgementsI would like to express my gratitude to the contributors to the project BRINFAITH. (“Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road”), especially Professor David A. Palmer (PI) for generous support and feedback on this study. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their thoughtful critiques and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.Notes1 All names of research participants as well as seminars in China they organized or took part in have been changed to protect their anonymity.2 Rather than the Judeo-Christian understanding of “spiritual,” the meaning of such leadership aligns with the term jingshen and the history of sacralizing the state and, later, the Communist Party in China.3 Wielander Citation2017.4 Srinivas Citation2008, 5.5 Palmer, Katz, and Wang Citation2011.6 Platt Citation2012, xxiii.7 Duara Citation2001.8 Billioud Citation2020.9 Palmer Citation2007.10 Osho, also known as or Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh (1931–1990) was an Indian spiritual leader and a transnational New Age celebrity, known for his critique of institutionalized religion and his progressive approach to sexuality. In 1971, he funded an ashram in Pune, India that still operates. From 1981 until 1985 he relocated to the United States, where he started a commune in Antelope, Oregon. He was ultimately deported to India when his movement was investigated for multiple felonies that included attempted murder, drug smuggling, and arson. See Urban Citation2015.11 The Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University is a new religious movement founded and funded by Lekhraj Khubchand Kirpalani (1884–1969). It originated in the 1930s in in Hyderabad, Sindh (present-day Pakistan). In 1950, following the partition of India, Brahma Kumaris was relocated to Mount Abu, Rajasthan. The movement disseminates millenarian teachings and highlights the importance of meditation as the p","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"17 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135412857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Keeping A Distance: Changing Everyday Lives of Married Migrant Gay Men in China’s State-owned Enterprises","authors":"Javier Pang, Kaxton Siu","doi":"10.1080/14672715.2023.2265944","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2023.2265944","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines continuity and change in the lives of rural migrant gay men working in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) from an everyday life perspective. By examining their sexuality, migration histories, and heterosexual marriage experiences, this study contributes to sexuality and migration literature by exploring how rural-to-urban migrant gay men maintain their everyday homosexual intimacies in post-socialist China. It adds to the perspective that gay men’s perceptions, interpretations, and reactions to marriage and sexuality vary, due to their personal migration experiences. These findings also contribute to scholarly discussions of everyday life by providing a nuanced analysis of how spatial tactics are employed as forms of everyday resistance by gay men for maintaining their sexualities.","PeriodicalId":46839,"journal":{"name":"Critical Asian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}