Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The ancient Silk Roads are reputed for demonstrating a more tolerant Asia–Europe interaction than is believed possible today among modern nation-states. What is the Silk Roads' contribution to global thought? Along the original Silk Roads, a cosmopolitan ethic of hospitality to foreigners emerged from a confluence of hostile secular attitudes as well as accommodation of differences within each religion's conception of ecumenism and standardization. This is manifest in the writings of Marco Polo, a quintessential traveller along the ancient overland Silk Road, assorted Christian monks serving as Papal representatives to the Mongols, and two Buddhist pilgrims, Fa-Hsien and I-Tsing of China. In treating these underappreciated writings as contributions to global thought from Asia, the author identifies three indelible elements that add up to an amorphous cosmopolitanism in progress: the role of violence in managing social order, piety through ritual, and the custom of travellers and hosts exchanging gifts.

The subject of economic security has always been bandied about in academic discourse since the emergence of an interconnected world economy. With ASEAN states getting increasingly enmeshed in free trade agreements, and common market like arrangements, it is imperative to explore what economic security means for national governments today. The shocks of the 2017-20 Donald Trump presidency of the USA and the COVID-19 pandemic impart timely momentum for inquiring after economic security. If the USA currently embodies the idea of zero-sum economic logics as the way forward into the twenty first century, it becomes even more urgent that Asians re-examine the degrees of openness needed to sustain growth and prosperity. Contributors to this Special Section will not only examine government-to-government trade interactions, the prospects of Islamic Finance and gender inequalities will also be analysed in terms of how they can make or break conventional notions of economic security.

According to Munshi Abdullah, the author of the Hikayat Abdullah (Annals of Abdullah), 'knowledge and skill are the ladder to riches, and riches lead to greatness. Of a truth, all things created by Allah in this world have their value which can be reckoned in terms of money; learning alone commands a price which no man can determine' (Abdullah, 1970: 40). This empowerment of ethical behaviour through the disciplining of the mind in the practice of principles frames the Hikayat's approach to the practice of mercantilism and good government in the service of commerce. This article interprets the dimensions of this 19th-century Asian vision and uncovers three themes related to the maritime Silk Road: impartial administration of law and order, beneficent autocracy and the proper prioritization of wealth and good manners.

AbstractAndrew Linklater'sViolence and Civilization in the Western States-Systemis to be both praised and critiqued for opening spaces for discussing civilisational standards in the era of a globalising world. It offers a healthy provocation for inquiry into how non-Western states ought to comprehend the legacies of Western political evolution colouring existing 'IR' as a discipline. Linklater's book inspires three thematic reactions: globalisation does bring harm; the notion of a universal civilisation remains open to debate; and the possibilities of civilising patterns in premodern Southeast Asia serving as supplementary mirrors and extensions of the relationship between violence and civilisation. It is suggested that Linklater's sequel must consider the trajectory of non-Western sociologies of IR.

AbstractAsian diplomatic practices consistently frustrate western policymakers. This, I argue, is due in large part to cultural factors and the differences in interpreting political modernization. I will identify the features that contribute to a 'diplomacy of encounter' by, firstly, performing a historical reading of early indigenous annals that treat diplomacy in Asia, as well as of Jesuit and Portuguese encounters with Asia in the 1500s and 1600s; secondly, by reading a sample of nationalist tracts from Asia between the late 1800s and 1960s; and, thirdly, by reading the practices of ASEAN and wider Asia-Pacific regionalism between the 1990s and 2000s. It is only through discourse analysis of the Foucaultian variety that one can tease out the cultural and modernization-related road bumps in so-called 'modern Asian diplomacy'. This study hopes to contribute to enhancing appreciation of the ongoing procedural and substantive tensions between Asian states and their western, and mostly developed, dialogue partners.

While information warfare (IW) has been treated by its foremost western proponents as a strategic revolution, the reasons for such a claim are actually rather weak if one considers how non-western approaches to the informational components of warfare have put forth their positions within a multidimensional context of strategy. This article ventures an Asian perspective that can potentially offer a more nuanced contribution to the study of IW. This article will pan out by first critically analyzing the predominantly American interpretation of IW as a set of five characteristics that can be contrasted to an Asian rival. Subsequently, we will elaborate a list of features likely to characterize a generic Asian IW approach, which I will argue, is more appropriately termed information operations (IO). These Asian IO features will be teased out through a reading of Sun Tzu, Mao Zedong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. An Asian IO approach will not distinguish wartime and peacetime applications, and neither will it place a premium on liberal democratic ideology as a basis for information superiority. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]