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In discussing Vietnamese politics, the commentariat falls back on the word 'opaque'. This usually means that it does not know what is happening. The term is resurfacing in the wake of the resignation on 19 ...

Lately, the West—particularly the United States—has been wooing India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the bling of a monied Indian wedding. Last month, Modi was US President Joe Biden's guest for a full state visit—of ...

Perhaps now, more than ever, is the time when Australia needs outstanding foreign policy thinkers. It has lost one of its best with the death of Allan Gyngell after a short illness. When he relinquished ...

'At the Front Line: Experiences of Australian Soldiers in World War II,' by Mark Johnston, is reviewed.

McCarthy reviews 'The New Agenda for Global Security: Cooperating for Peace and Beyond' edited by Stephanie Lawson.

"Over recent decades, approaches to urban regeneration have changed dramatically throughout Europe and the USA, drawing on notions of public-private partnership, growth coalitions and local spatial alliances. The author provides critical consideration of such theories in terms of their application to practice. He shows how these notions are used to explain the nature and underlying processes of urban development and to further objectives for urban regeneration. To test their applicability, he examines the case of Dundee, including the role of the Dundee Partnership, a model for many aspects of partnership working. The resulting conclusions suggest ways in which the practice of urban regeneration can be improved in terms of inclusion, equity and sustainability."--Jacket

This book addresses the politics of environmental change in one of the richest areas of tropical rainforest in Indonesia. Based on field studies conducted in three agricultural communities in rural Aceh, this work considers a number of questions: How do customary (adat) village and state institutions work? What roles do they play in managing local resources? How have they evolved over time? Are villagers, state policies, or corrupt local networks responsible for the loss of tropical rainforest? Will better outcomes emerge from revitalizing customary management, from changing state policies, or from transforming the way the state works? And why do projects designed by outsiders so often fail? The book describes how, as key actors interact, they create arrangements that effectively manage local resources, eclipsing adat and formal state management structures. While outside interventions try to work with adat and the state, they fail to engage fully with the main problem—that is, that district webs of power and interest, coalescing around local resources and reaching into the wider society, lead inexorably to environmental decline.

Decentralization policy narratives articulated by donor agencies tend to describe decentralization as a technical process of policy design and implementation, advocating decentralization as a solution to particular problems. Drawing on research carried out in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan following the inception of a decentralization program, this article examines how political processes at the national, district and village levels have led to highly volatile socio-legal configurations that create insecurity and heighten resource conflicts. It concludes that while the politics surrounding decentralization in different domains have ensured that the patterns of governance inherited from the past remain precariously distant from the objectives of good governance, decentralization has also opened up space for positive changes.

In Indonesia, with the recent eruption of local struggles over resources and now with the new decentralization reforms, there is renewed interest in the role of customary adat institutional arrangements in village government, land tenure, and forest management. On the basis of research carried out in one locality in Sumatra over 1996-99, this article considers the nature of local institutional arrangements, how they have evolved under various conditions, their complex interaction with the parallel State order, their response to economic fluctuations, and how particular institutional patterns lead to certain environmental outcomes. This article finds that as farmers adjust to the economic and political dynamics and the changing scarcity and value of different resources in this site, the adat arrangements are constantly renegotiated. Adat customary orders are tied to local notions of identity and associated notions of appropriateness, and as such constitute patterns of social ordering associated with both implicit deeply held social norms and more explicit rules. Considering the institutional pluralism characteristic of this area, this article concludes that, while the State and adat regimes often compete to control the direction of social change, they also constantly make accommodations, and in some respects need to be considered as mutually adjusting, intertwined orders.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami brought Aceh's long-drawn separatist conflict back to international attention. Yet, the precise way in which the different aspects of the conflict entangled with resource-related grievances have remained poorly understood. Taking a political ecology approach, this paper sets out to understand the role of natural resource grievances within the complex and shifting set of mutually implicated factors leading to and sustaining the conflict from the early days of Indonesia's independence. The paper argues that the management of Aceh's natural resources - especially the rich gas and oil reserves - was not the sole or primary causal factor. Rather, state managed exploitation of natural resources had a demonstration effect, exemplifying other grievances and supporting the articulation of a separatist discourse naturalizing 'Acehnese' conceptualizations of resource entitlement. Comparing Aceh with other separatist conflicts, the paper suggests that, as conflict unfolds at the intersection of a shifting set of concerns, it is increasingly difficult to separate the underlying issues of identity, resource entitlements and human rights.