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Reform politics in India reflects an increasing tendency for politicians and others to present themselves as icons of reforms. An analysis of the South Indian state of Karnataka from 1999 to 2001, the initial years of the term of Chief Minister S. M. Krishna, provides us insights into the precise role icons play in the politics of economic reform.

The proletarianization of rural migrants is distinctive to contemporary China's development model, in which the state has fostered the growth of a "semi-proletariat" numbering more than 200 million to fuel labor-intensive industries and urbanization. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangdong and Sichuan provinces between 2010 and 2014, supplemented with scholarly studies and government surveys, the authors analyze the precarity and the individual and collective struggles of a new generation of rural migrant workers. They present an analysis of high and growing levels of labor conflict at a time when the previous domination of state enterprises has given way to the predominance of migrant workers as the core of an expanding industrial labor force. In particular, the authors assess the significance of the growing number of legal and extra-legal actions taken by workers within a framework that highlights the deep contradictions among labor, capital, and the Chinese state. They also discuss the impact of demographic changes and geographic shifts of population and production on the growth of working-class power in the workplace and the marketplace. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

As part of the national consolidation of Thailand in the early twentieth century, various hinterland populations were actively marginalized and dispossessed. Anthropology and other scholarship normalized this racialized dispossession through notions of highland people's essential difference from lowland society. Two fantasies in particular cemented notions of highland otherness: ethnographic notions of autonomous and egalitarian ethnic communities, and heterosexual male notions of sexually loose and available non-Thai women. A comparative and regional approach to sexuality and politics suggests a very different reality. Across Southeast Asia, certain customs suggest a shared focus on the benefits of being well attached across differences, for women and for communities. Such customs have been obscured by anthropological and other convictions about culture and ethnicity. This case insists on the importance of customs that have encouraged good attachment and the negotiation of diversity, as common across Southeast Asia and as also shaped by the human bio-cultural evolutionary heritage. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

The racial and ethnic landscape in Australia has changed markedly since the beginning of the postwar migration period in which migrants arrived from Europe, and later from Asia in the late 1970s. While Australians with European ancestry have gradually made it into state and federal parliament, there has been less visibility for Australians of Asian descent. This article provides an overview of demographic migration trends and levels of Asian-Australian political representation in state and federal politics, drawing on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and parliamentary websites. In doing so, we reflect on why political representation of Asian-Australian populations appears to be lagging so far behind.

Recent efforts have re-dated the Wat Bang Sanuk inscription to 1219, long before the Ram Khamhaeng inscription of 1292. Attempts to assess the implications force a re-thinking of Thai rebellion against Angkor by linking rebellion to religious thought, including especially the discovery and public show of relics of the Buddha.

On the Foundation Day of the University of Malaya on 8 October 1949, Malcolm MacDonald, the Chancellor of the new university and British Commissioner-General in Southeast Asia, proudly declared that the university was founded "at a timely and auspicious moment" when "we are witnessing in Malaya the birth of a nation". MacDonald rested his inspiring theme on the British postwar policy of preparing Malaya for eventual self-government within the British Commonwealth. Under this policy Singapore was constituted a distinct crown colony with a legislature in which only six of the twenty-two members were popularly elected, whereas the other Settlements and the Malay States were merged into the Malayan Union which had fully nominated federal and state legislatures. It seems clear from the postwar political reorganization that the British policy-makers had intended to take Malaya slowly, stage by stage, to self-government and eventual independence.

In 2010, the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization agreement established a new Asian financial arrangement to help address potential currency or liquidity crises. This article analyzes the origins and basic features of the new arrangement, which reflect both progress and the continuing political challenges of building regional institutions in Asia.