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Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State
Mired in national crises since the early 1990s, Japan has had to respond to a rapid population decline; the Asian and global financial crises; the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; the COVID-19 pandemic; China’s economic rise; threats from North Korea; and massive public debt. In Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State, established specialists in a variety of areas use a coherent set of methodologies, aligning their sociological, public policy, and political science and international relations perspectives, to account for discrepancies between official rhetoric and policy practice and actual percep...
Risk State
The increase of new complex security challenges and the heightening significance of a diverse array of actors has simultaneously posed a challenge to traditional perspectives on international relations and foreign policy and created an opportunity for new concepts to be applied. Conventional explanations of Japan’s foreign policy have provided us with theoretically predetermined understandings and fallacious predictions. Reformulating risk in its application to the study of international relations and foreign policy, this volume promises new insights into the analysis of contemporary foreign policy in East Asia and Japan’s post-Cold War international relations in particular.
Managing Global Risks in the Urban Age
The first full-length exposition of what it terms a global city-global risks nexus, this volume crosses disciplinary boundaries to draw upon research from Security Studies; Geography; Sociology; and Urban Studies. Innovative in its approach integrating theories about Global Cities with those positing a Global Risk Society, Yee-Kuang Heng positions this research in the midst of two concurrent global trends that will gain more significance in coming years. The world is experiencing the consequences of not only rapid globalisation, but also urbanization. In 2008, the UN declared that more than half the world’s population was now urban. At the same time, highly connected global cities like New...
Special Duty
The prewar history of the Japanese intelligence community demonstrates how having power over much, but insight into little can have devastating consequences. Its postwar history—one of limited Japanese power despite growing insight—has also been problematic for national security. In Special Duty Richard J. Samuels dissects the fascinating history of the intelligence community in Japan. Looking at the impact of shifts in the strategic environment, technological change, and past failures, he probes the reasons why Japan has endured such a roller-coaster ride when it comes to intelligence gathering and analysis, and concludes that the ups and downs of the past century—combined with growin...
The Making of International Environmental Treaties
Gerry Nagtzaam contends that in recent decades neoliberal institutionalist scholarship on global environmental regimes has burgeoned, as has constructivist scholarship on the key role played by norms in international politics. In this innovative volume, the author sets these interest- and norm-based approaches against each other in order to test their ability to illustrate why and how different environmental norms take hold in some regimes and not others. The book explores why some global environmental treaties seek to preserve and protect some parts of nature from human utilization, some seek to conserve certain parts of nature for human development, whilst others allow the reckless exploit...
From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation
This book reflects on the role of social media in the past two decades in Southeast Asia. It traces the emergence of social media discourse in Southeast Asia, and its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratizing and authoritarian states. It explains the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments, and argues that social media is now an essential platform for control. The contributors detail the increasing role of “disinformation” and “fake news” production in Southeast Asia, and how national governments are creating laws which attempt to address this trend, but which often exacerbate the situation of state control. From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation explores three main questions: How did social media begin as a vibrant space for grassroots activism to becoming a tool for disinformation? Who were the main actors in this transition: governments, citizens or the platforms themselves? Can reformists “reclaim” the digital public sphere? And if so, how?
Promising Practices: Women Volunteers in Contemporary Japanese Religious Civil Society
Based upon a survey of five faith-based volunteer groups, Promising Practices offers valuable insights and fresh perspectives into the ways women’s participation in religious civic organizations may work as a gateway toward participatory democracy. By approaching women’s faith-based volunteering as a social practice, the book engages with three of the most important dimensions of civil society: gender, religion, and democracy. Cavaliere teases out the complexity of interactions among these three dimensions of civic life through stories of individual women who volunteer for three different religious organizations. The volume examines how faith-based volunteering is experienced by women in contemporary Japan and how it becomes a site of empowering and disempowering practices through which women balance the benefits and the costs of personal shifts, socio-economic changes and democratic transformation.
The Effects of Wars
War has been an ever-present feature of human existence. The analysis of wars has tended to focus on either their causes or the military and strategic consequences of a conflict. This book argues that war can have a much wider impact across layers of society that go beyond international boundaries. It presents a heuristic multi-disciplinary framework for analysing the ripple and backwash effects across five connected analytical layers around the world: material; human capabilities; economic; values belief and attitudes; policy and governance; and power. Through this framework, the book introduces a set of empirically rich and theoretically informed studies which examine the first consequences of the war in Ukraine following the invasion of Russia in February 2022. This multi-disciplinary approach shows that the effects of the war were much deeper and sustained. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of international humanitarian law, security studies, peace and conflict studies, and European history. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Policy Studies.
Arms Sales and Regional Stability
The book considers the main arms exporting countries, including China, Russia, and the US, as well as several European states, and the policies each employs in deciding advanced weapons sales to key regions of the world. It examines whether such sales are inherently stabilising or de-stabilising regarding regional security. Regions reviewed in detail include the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. Combat aircraft sales are a focus for the volume given both their practical and symbolic importance. The volume focuses on the behaviour and policies of the main arms exporting nations since the end of the Cold War, shifts in their arms export policies, and the tensions that can emerge within or between countries over proposed arms sales. It also considers the impact of countries that were previously only recipients of advanced weapons moving to develop their own defence industrial base.
The Courteous Power
Examining the pivotal relationship between Japan and Southeast Asia, as it has changed and endured into the Indo-Pacific Era
