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The Art of Not Being Governed
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them-slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an \"anarchist history,\" is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.
In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of \"internal colonialism.\" This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott's work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
eBook
Dancing with the river : people and life on the Chars of South Asia
An intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of \"hybrid landscapes\" and their inhabitants. With this book, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of \"hybrid environments.\" Focusing on chars -- the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal -- the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about land, people, and people's ways of life. Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a senior fellow in resource management in the Asia-Pacific Program at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She lives in Canberra. Gopa Samanta is an associate professor in geography at the University of Burdwan. She lives in Golapbag, Burdwan, India.
eBook
The promise of reconciliation? : examining violent and nonviolent effects on Asian conflicts
\"Questions the relationship between violence, nonviolence, and reconciliation in societal conflicts. The contributors maintain that reconciliation per se is not a panacea. If not managed properly, reconciliation programs can become contests of competing victimizations, and can even spark future conflict. The contributors examine international influences on the peace/reconciliation process in Indonesia's Aceh province, as well as the role of Muslim religious scholars. They also examine the effect of violence in southern Thailand, where insurgent violence provides \"leverage\" during the fighting, but negatively affects their post-conflict objectives. The Sri Lanka chapter shows that \"successful\" violence does not necessarily end conflict--Sri Lankan society today is more polarized that it was before its civil war. The Vietnam chapter argues that the rise of nonviolent protest in Vietnam reflects a profound loss of state legitimacy, which cannot be resolved with force. The following chapter examines \"Red Sunday,\" a Thai reform movement engaged in nonviolent protest in the face of violent government suppression. The book ends with a look at ethnic conflict in Indonesia after it emerged in 1998 from three decades of dictatorial rule. In studying violent conflict and programs for reconciliation, the contributors found that they are dealing with highly complex issues, such as historical grievances, dysfunctional states, or civil wars. Understanding such conflict issues is crucial in the efforts to curtail violence and strengthen reconciliation possibilities\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Secret Trades, Porous Borders
Over the course of the half century from 1865 to 1915, the British and Dutch delineated colonial spheres, in the process creating new frontiers. This book analyzes the development of these frontiers in Insular Southeast Asia as well as the accompanying smuggling activities of the opium traders, currency runners, and human traffickers who pierced such newly drawn borders with growing success.The book presents a history of the evolution of this 3000-km frontier, and then inquires into the smuggling of contraband: who smuggled and why, what routes were favored, and how effectively the British and Dutch were able to enforce their economic, moral, and political will. Examining the history of states and smugglers playing off one another within a hidden but powerful economy of forbidden cargoes, the book also offers new insights into the modern political economies of Southeast Asia.
eBook
Asia inside out : connected places
\"Asia Inside Out : Connected Places reveals the dynamic forces that have historically linked regions of the world's largest continent, stretching from Japan and Korea to the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and the Middle East. This volume highlights the transregional flows of goods, ideas, and people across natural and political boundaries--sea routes, delta ecologies, and mountain passes, ports and oasis towns, imperial capitals and postmodern cities. It challenges the conventional idea that defined geopolitical regions as land-based, state-centered, and possessing linear histories. Exploring themes of maritime connections, mobile landscapes, and spatial movements, the authors examine significant sites of linkage and disjuncture from the early modern period to the present. The chapters reveal how eighteenth-century pirates shaped the interregional networks of Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf, how Kashmiri merchants provided intelligence of remote Himalayan territories to competing empires, and how for centuries a vibrant trade in horses and elephants fueled the Indian Ocean economy. Other topics investigated include cultural formations in the Pearl River delta, global trade in Chittagong's transformation, gendered homemaking among mobile Samurai families, border zones in Qing China and contemporary Burma, colonial spaces linking India and Mesopotamia, transnational marriages in Oman's immigrant populations, new cultural spaces in Korean Pop, and the unexpected adoption of the Latin script by ethnically Chinese Muslims in Central Asia. The book shows the constant fluctuations over many centuries in the making of Asian territories and illustrates the confluence of factors in the historical construction of place and space\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
East Asia Observed
This collection brings together themes in East Asian history, diplomacy, culture and politics written by J. E. Hoare since the early 1970s. His writings derive from his training as a historian, from his time as a Research Analyst in the British Foreign Office from 1969-2003, and from his experiences as a diplomat in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), the People's Republic of China, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). The writings selected for this volume include academic papers, book reviews and some quasi-journalistic articles which reflect both historical research and analysis of current events and issues. The wide-ranging content speaks to the author's specialist fields of interest including diplomacy, biography, extraterritoriality and architecture on which he has published extensively.
eBook
Sites of Asian interaction : ideas, networks and mobility
\"Develops the rich historical literature on port cities across Asia, the quintessential sites of Asian cosmopolitanism, as well as more recent work on the 'moving metropolises' and 'mobile cities' of contemporary Asia\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Globalisation, Domestic Politics and Regionalism
This book examines the relationship between globalisation and regionalism through a detailed analysis of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) project. It analyses how the interaction between globalisation and domestic politics shaped the evolution of AFTA over the past 10 years, arguing that although AFTA was triggered primarily by the pressures of globalisation, it was a tussle between the imperatives of growth and domestic distribution that shaped the way economic cooperation unfolded and the forms it took.
eBook