Suchergebnisse

The upcoming Barbie movie is anticipated to take the box office by storm. Something as silly and innocent as a movie about dolls without reproductive organs shouldn't offend anyone, but Vietnam is concerned that, in Barbieland, the ongoing South China Sea disputes appear to have been resolved in favour of China.

China's military rise and increased assertiveness in the South China Sea are thought to have incentivised smaller claimant states to balance against growing threats. Cited as a prime example of this development was the 2014 Sino-Vietnam oil rig crisis, in which Beijing's provocation compelled Hanoi to adopt a tougher stance and reach out to other powers for leverage. From a broadly realist vantage, China's provocation is seen as manifesting an exogenous shock to the balance of power, prompting Vietnam's foreign policy adaptation. However, this view is lacking to the extent that it overrates how security incentives are self-evident without being shaped by domestic contestation. To redress these oversights, this article offers an agent-centred historical institutionalist account of the 2014 oil rig crisis, stressing the role of gradual endogenous developments in instigating foreign policy change. I argue that for Hanoi to endorse a strong position against Beijing during the 2014 oil rig crisis, the country's foreign policy institution needed to go through a decade-long process of incremental transformation, advocated by the increasingly influential nationalist revisionist camp within the Party. Findings from this article demonstrate the need to engage with deeper socio-political contexts of small states to better understand developments in one of Asia's most dangerous flashpoints. (Pac Rev / GIGA)

Background: Using social media (SM) for educational purposes might improve academic performance. Aim: This paper aims to describe health science students' use of SM for educational purposes and its association with their academic performance. Methods: Two hundred ninety-seven undergraduate health science students completed a self-administered questionnaire comprising 4 sections related to social media. Results: Almost all students (99.7%) reported using SM for learning, most (90.9%) of them daily. The most preferred type of SM learning was Facebook. Most students thought that using SM for learning is convenient and useful. They suggested there should be 1 Facebook account for each subject, that every classmate could access to obtain knowledge from lecturers and to interact between students and lecturers. The logistic regression model showed that the more time students practiced following the advice on posted information, the more likely they were to achieve a GPA at distinction level or above (OR = 4.2; OR = 5.4, and OR = 9.4, respectively with times of practicing). Conversely, the students who used SM for learning less than once a month were less likely to obtain a GPA at distinction level (OR = 0.5). Conclusions: Almost all health science students used SM to support learning and use of SM for learning was associated with higher academic performance.