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This book provides a comprehensive country overview of Southeast Asia’s newest nation, Timor Leste (East Timor). This book focuses on its cultural and ethno-linguistic diversity, and its political history from the pre-Portuguese period up to 2009. The book pays particular attention to the historical roots of the current challenges to nation-building by reviewing the Indonesian occupation; guerrilla warfare by the Timorese against the occupiers; the politics leading up to the United Nations’ popular consultation and the vote for independence in 2002. Explaining the structure of the government and its parliamentary system, this book highlights the problems and historical and cultural under...
Grandchildren of the Gaíe Ancestors focuses on the social organization, cosmology and ritual system of Hoga Sara society on the island of Flores. The first anthropological account of this eastern Indonesian people, this study challenges the classical models of descent and alliance by demonstrating the limitations of these analytical abstractions for understanding the social system of the Hoga Sara. The intricacies of social organization and the formation of social identities of groups and individuals are disentangled by utilizing the concepts of 'house society', 'origin structures' and 'orders of precedence'. Aspects focused on include the pivotal role of the first-born, historical development of the society, sacrificial practices, and the instrumental role of the ritual system in the continuing exchanges among people and with their ancestors.
This book examines the relationship between population policies and individual reproductive decisions in low-fertility contexts. Using the case study of Singapore, it demonstrates that the effectiveness of population policy is a function of competing notions of citizenship, and the gap between seemingly neutral policy incentives and the perceived and experienced disparate effects. Drawing on a substantial number of personal interviews and focus groups, the book analyzes the developmental welfare state's overarching emphasis of citizen responsibility, and examines population policies that reinforce social inequalities and ignore cultural diversity. These factors combine to undermine elaborate...
What makes large, multi-ethnic states hang together? At a time when ethnic and religious conflict has gained global prominence, the territorial organization of states is a critical area of study. Exploring how multi-ethnic and geographically dispersed states grapple with questions of territorial administration and change, this book argues that territorial change is a result of ongoing negotiations between states and societies where mutual and overlapping interests can often emerge. It focuses on the changing dynamics of central-local relations in Indonesia. Since the fall of Suharto’s New Order government, new provinces have been sprouting up throughout the Indonesian archipelago. After de...
Brings together research on the study of men and masculinities in Southeast Asia. Drawing on rich ethnographic fieldwork from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, this book examines both dominant constructions of masculinity and the ways in which marginal men engage with these.
Reporting the findings of a comprehensive study of human trafficking in Cambodia, this book focuses on the characteristics and operations of the traffickers. It provides a theoretical framework that explains the emergence of the phenomenon, and the role of moral panic and western hegemony in the war on human trafficking. Using a multi-method and multi-source research design, which includes an examination of police and prison records as well as interviews with 91 incarcerated human traffickers, police and prison officers, court officials, and members of NGOs, this book investigates five major themes about human traffickers in Cambodia: who are they, how do they operate, how much profit do they make, why are they involved in human trafficking, and how does the Cambodian Criminal Justice System (CJS) control their activities? A novel and unique analysis, this book is of interest to a wide academic audience in the fields of Asian Studies, Human Trafficking, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Human Geography and Critical Legal Studies.
Since the end of the Cold War, considerable scholarly debates have been devoted to the nature and scope of international state-building interventions in ‘fragile’, post-colonial states and their effectiveness in instituting democratic rule. By examining the construction of political institutions in East Timor, this book highlights the relationship between the social and political realms during these processes. Focusing on the roles of East Timorese leaders and civil society organisations during the independence movement, it analyses the effectiveness of democracy building in East Timor. It examines the processes of drafting the new constitution, establishing key political institutions (s...
One of the most challenging environmental threats to the ten countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been the haze, the sickening and deadly cloud of smoky pollution caused by widespread burning of land and forests in Indonesia. This book examines both the threat and response to it by analysing environmental cooperation in Southeast Asia from an international regime perspective. Tracing the development of regional cooperation on the haze and evaluating the effectiveness of the cooperation, the author argues that the haze crisis, combined with the economic crisis of 1997, has profoundly challenged the ASEAN modus operandi, and resulted in ASEAN’s efforts to establish an environmental regime to cope with environmental challenges. The emerging ASEAN haze regime is a unique case study of a regional environmental institution in multi-levelled global environmental governance. Based on in-depth original research, this case study is integrated into international relations, political science, and comparative political analysis literatures and contributes to a better understanding of processes within the regional organisation.
This book examines, through the case study of Indonesia over recent decades, how the reporting of violence can drive the escalation of violence, and how journalists can alter their reporting practices in order to have the opposite effect and promote peace. It discusses the nature of press freedom in Indonesia from 1966 onwards, considers the relationship between the press and politicians, and explores journalistse(tm) working methods. It goes on to outline in detail the communal wars in eastern Indonesia in the period 1999-2000, arguing that communication as much as physical preparations for violence were key to bringing about the wars, with journalistse(tm) rigid professional routines and newswriting conventions causing them to reproduce and enlarge the battle cries of those at war. The book concludes by advocating a "development communication" approach to journalism in transitional settings, in order to help journalists to counter the disintegrative tendencies of failing states and the communal strife that can result.
This book addresses the complexity of Islam in Thailand, by focusing on Islamic charities and institutions affiliated to the mosque. By extrapolating through Islam and the waqf (Islamic charity) in different regions of Thailand the diversity in races and institutions, it demonstrates the regional contrasts within Thai Islam. The book also underlines the importance of the internal histories of these separate spaces, and the processes by which institutions and ideologies become entrenched. It goes on to look at the socio economic transformation that is taking place within the context of trading networks through Islamic institutions and civil networks linked to mosques, madrasahs and regional p...