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Asia-Pacific countries must deal with the overlapping effects of a pandemic and natural hazards. This new riskscape has generated a focus on safe movement measures, securing supply chains, and building stronger relations with community leaders in order for governments and militaries to withstand shocks. Strategic resilience has emerged as a package which encapsulates these components by which countries may calibrate responses to future crises.

While people usually rely on the state in times of crisis, the scale and significance of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates a more inclusive global response. Can the private sector step in to fill existing gaps in the current response?

A notable development in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is blockchain technology. Originally created as an alternative means of financial transfer, the technology can be applied to any type of information and asset. Organisations and countries are starting to explore ways of using it in the context of humanitarian aid. Is this a panacea or a problem?

To bridge funding gaps in humanitarian assistance, states will need to re-examine their roles, relative to the private sector. Humanitarian technologies offer a potential high-volume, low-profit margin sector which can be an entry point for private companies.

The 2019 ASEAN Strategic Policy Dialogue on disaster management saw salient debates over the localisation agenda. It follows calls at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 for localisation to be a priority area. How far have we come? Where will it go?

Cover -- Half Title -- Endorsements -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction: The Interaction of Law, Technology and the Payment Services Market -- Prologue -- I. General Framework: Technology, Market and Institutional Change -- II. An Overview: The Interaction of Technology, Financial Services and Fraudulent Activities in the Payment Market -- A. Payment Process and Payment Services -- B. Technology and Provision of Payment Services: From Physical to Digital -- C. Technology and Fraud -- D. Legal Institutions on Payment Services and Fraud -- E. Summary -- III. Interested Parties in Adopting Payment Technology and Countering Fraud -- A. Regulators and Lawmakers -- B. Financial Institutions -- C. Telecommunication Firms and Internet Service Providers -- D. Other Technology Firms and Start-Ups -- E. End Users and Fraudsters -- IV. Map of the Book -- Reference -- 2 An Overview of the Evolution of Payment Services and Fraud -- I. Introduction -- II. Overview of Payment Instruments and Services -- A. Basic Scenario -- B. Cash: Coins and Notes -- C. Negotiable Instruments -- D. Card-Based Payment -- E. Wire or Inter-Bank Transfer -- F. Informal Money Transfer -- G. Electronic Payment Services -- H. Cryptocurrencies -- I. Obstacle to Cross-Border Payment -- J. Summary -- III. Payment Fraud: A Broad Overview -- A. Defining Fraud -- B. Why Is Fraud Wrong? -- C. Mechanics of Payment Fraud -- IV. Chapter Summary -- Reference -- 3 From Metal to Paper: Fraud Related to Cash Notes and Coins -- I. Introduction -- II. Cash Payment Fraud -- A. Producing Counterfeit Money -- B. Using Counterfeit Money -- III. Legal Institutions Against Cash Fraud -- A. Criminal Sanctions Related to the Production of Counterfeit Money -- 1. Criminal Sanctions for the Production of Counterfeit Money.

The purpose of this Article is to examine the corporate governance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the Asian context by empirically surveying the influence of Temasek Holdings, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, on its portfolio of government-linked companies in Singapore. Overall, the Temasek model seems to be a promising one. This Article shows that the top listed government-linked companies in which Temasek has a stake have greater board independence than the other top listed companies in Singapore. This illustrates that a high quality of corporate governance could be aligned with public interests associated with SOEs. While this research offers hope for SOE reformers in China, the Article also argues that the need for strong public governance, the role of foreign activities and market forces, and the importance of a government's desire to serve as a market leader are all underlying factors that make Temasek what it is today. Unfortunately, in the absence of those institutional factors, transplant of the Temasek model to other countries is unlikely to be entirely successful.

This article seeks to measure the development of law after transplanting common law and statutes from another country by conducting an empirical study of the citation of precedents and demography of disputes of insurance cases in Singapore. This article recognizes that there are justifications for Singapore to transplant English insurance law. However, this research shows that the transplantation of English commercial law into a small jurisdiction, even within the common law family, may cause the law to be in a static state if courts do not have enough cases to maintain the development of law or to consider new development in England. Copying English statutes completely would not solve most doctrinal problems when a large number of disputes are about contractual construction but doctrinal application. Instead of counting on courts to move the law forward, this article argues that legislative reform is necessary in the future to modernize Singapore's insurance law. In light of recent developments in England, whether Singapore needs to transplant new UK statutes will be an issue that Singapore legislators might consider in the near future.

Water is a fundamental element of survival and growth on Earth. As a prerequisite for life and an important economic resource, it supports all aspects of everyday activity. Ensuring that water is available, accessible and safe for current and future generations is among humanity's greatest challenge. One of the most important Non-Traditional Security (NTS) challenges facing Southeast Asia is water security. This NTS Insight explores water security issues in Southeast Asia and examines the ways it threatens states and societies. While water security challenges are not new in the region, the nature of issues are changing, making it important to assess how such threats are defined, negotiated, and managed. The NTS governance process begins with identifying and understanding NTS challenges, and ways they are securitised. By looking at case studies at the sub-national, national and regional level, this paper seeks to present some of the major water security issues in the region, how they affect states and societies, and why they merit urgent attention and resources. This Insight explains why addressing sub-national water security challenges require consultative and participatory approaches that facilitate open democratic dialogue and local collective action. It will also lay out how deliberate planning, careful implementation, and judicious monitoring of water management policies are needed at both the national and regional levels. Further, while it is not easy to reconcile developmental goals with environmental protection, the gravity of the situation requires more preventive diplomacy and subregional collaborative mechanisms which are geared towards averting water conflicts. Overall, it aims to help formal and informal NTS actors working through various channels to gain further understanding of emerging water security challenges in Southeast Asia.

As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of natural hazards still looms large. How will humanitarian response to a major natural hazard be affected during the COVID-19 pandemic? As the monsoon season begins in the Asia-Pacific, particularly in the South West Pacific and Southeast Asia, this is a scenario that countries face. The overlapping effects of a pandemic and a natural hazard can compound socio-economic vulnerabilities in countries. While the current focus is on managing the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and communities also need to be prepared for concurrent natural hazards. This NTS Insight explores the effects of concurrent pandemic-disaster events, and how they threaten states and societies in the Asia-Pacific. This Insight demonstrates the potential challenges of dual crises on societies and vulnerable populations. It argues that the current situation calls for a broader and deeper localisation of the humanitarian system, one that places human security as its core organising principle unlike the backseat it currently takes today. To this end, it argues that inter-regional cooperation can further localisation through the experience of the South West Pacific where human security is articulated as national security and the cooperation in Southeast Asia on disaster response which builds national capacity. With overseas travel and supply chain restrictions severely hampering the movement of relief items and international humanitarian workers, the need to empower and strengthen local humanitarian actors becomes even more pressing.

The Southwest Pacific is considered one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to natural hazards. Five of the Pacific Island States rank among the top 20 most-at-risk countries in the World Risk Index, with Vanuatu and Tonga ranking first and second respectively. The Southwest Pacific neighbours Southeast Asia, and both regions are exposed to a variety of natural hazards, resulting in significant damage and loss of lives annually. This shared vulnerability raises the potential to create a coalition of affected states from the Asia-Pacific to shape the global debate on the effects of climate-induced disasters and extreme weather events. ASEAN's One ASEAN One Response (OAOR) vision of responding to disasters as one inside and outside the region could apply to the Southwest Pacific as an important region to explore how this vision can be realised. This policy report explores disaster governance in the Southwest Pacific as an area of potential cooperation for ASEAN. Particular attention is paid to Fiji and Tonga, both of which, like their counterparts in ASEAN, have standing militaries that are first responders in disasters. Fiji is also home to the headquarters of regional organisations and, therefore, the centre of regional cooperation in the Southwest Pacific.

Since Southeast Asian leaders signed the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) in 2005, the region has prioritised developing national and regional disaster management capabilities to respond to disasters. However, the recent back-to-back disasters that occurred between July and August 2018 tested the response capacities of national governments and the humanitarian community. Parts of Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines battled floods of varying severity induced by seasonal monsoon rains, tropical storms and a dam collapse on a tributary of the Mekong River. Meanwhile, Indonesia's Lombok Island, West Nusa Tenggara was hit by multiple earthquakes and aftershocks between 29 July and 19 August. The ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre) reported that at the peak of these disasters, over 588,000 people were displaced and more than 5.2 million people in Southeast Asia were affected.4 Against the backdrop recent disasters generating simultaneous responses, this NTS Insight makes key observations on Southeast Asia's ability to meet the immediate needs of disaster-affected communities while building greater disaster resilience for the future. It assesses the (i) institutionalisation of disaster management in ASEAN; (ii) localisation of disaster response; and (iii) opportunities for financial risk management for building disaster resilient communities.

How did human memory activity, conceived of as an activity that helped bring a person closer to God, become affiliated with early sociological conceptualizations of a social construction of reality? This article explores one way of answering this question by considering some social conceptions of human memory from medieval times to modernity. In the Middle Ages, a good memory was an important characteristic of the most esteemed scholars. Rhetoric was enhanced through mnemotechniques. Memory as practiced activity complemented early theological concepts of self-consciousness, or "being"closer to God, and morality and complemented early interpretations of contract law, casuistry, and jurisprudence. These concepts changed when religious belief, educational, and legal systems changed to meet the needs of a modern, capitalistic, and secular society. Capitalism facilitated the development of memory in commodity form, and human memory was claimed from metaphysical discourse as an object of scientific study by sociologists Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs.