Vietnam-US relations have kept strengthening since bilateral normalization in 1995, including in the defence and strategic domains. This has turned the two countries into increasingly important security partners for each other. The shared perception of the China threat, especially in the South China Sea, provided the strongest momentum towards ......
A Policy Network Analysis of a Southeast Asian Welfare Regime
Within the last twenty years a large-scale bottom-up privatisation has taken place in Vietnam, changing and dismantling the public health care system. This process has led to severe tensions inherent in the transitional society of Vietnam between equity and access to health care support especially for the poor, elderly, migrants, and ethnic ......
Since the Doi Moi policy of economic renovation was introduced in 1986, Vietnam has undergone deep transformations as a result of the transition to a socialist-oriented market economy. Social and urban transition has taken place in parallel, as urban dynamics were spurred on by Vietnamese public and private stakeholders, and by external agents ......
Technology, Values, Dehumanization and the Future of Economies and Politics
It is more than fifteen years since Joseph Stiglitz wrote Globalization and its Discontents, with the message that there is evidence of much unhappiness with the way global reforms have been taking place and how they have impacted developing and poor countries. Stiglitz concluded that the main issue is not with globalization, but rather that the ......
An American Perspective on Power, Trade and Security in the Asia Pacific
Free trade has become the mantra of development strategy for many countries in the world, especially those in the Asia Pacific. This book delves into the American side of the story. It is about how Singapore and the United States came to sign the agreement in 2003 (taking effect from 1 January 2004). The United States - Singapore Free Trade ......
The unrealized transitions were a setback for a "reform agenda", which Anwar Ibrahim articulated, but which emerged from dissident movements for diverse reforms. These movements helped the multiethnic, socially inclusive, opposition to win the 14th General Election. They are only seemingly dormant because of the pandemic. The Pakatan Harapan ......
This monograph argues that although the United Wa State Party (UWSP) has been branded by the international community as a "narco-trafficking army," the organisation has an ethnic nationalist agenda whose aim is to build a Wa state within Burma. The UWSP is not innocent of narcotics-related crimes, but few conflict parties in Burma can claim to ......
Situated in a remote area long a historical buffer zone between competing political entities, the Sulu Arms Market is an illicit market of a typical form in that it is both a source and a destination for less-than-legal guns. What makes the Sulu market unique is its longevity which is measured in centuries. In modern times, guns from the area ......
Selected Papers on Race, Identity and Social Order 1893-1915
Founded in Singapore in 1893, the Straits Philosophical Society was a society for the "critical discussion of questions in Philosophy, History, Theology, Literature, Science and Art". Its membership was restricted to graduates of British and European universities, fellows of British or European learned societies and those with "distinguished merit ......