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Analyses discourses pertinent to democratic politics in Malaysia, including the political elite's interpretation of 'Asian values' and 'Asian democracy', contending Islamic views on democracy, the impact of developmentalism on political culture, and the recovery of women's voice in everyday politics. eBook available with sample pages: PB:0700711619
Analyses discourses pertinent to democratic politics in Malaysia, including the political elite's interpretation of 'Asian values' and 'Asian democracy', contending Islamic views on democracy, the impact of developmentalism on political culture, and the recovery of women's voice in everyday politics.
This book examines five countries in South East Asia that are
instructive case studies of how the region has had to negotiate
pathways of development beyond crises and traps. At two ends of
just one decade, 1997-2007, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines,
Thailand and Vietnam all had to weather the shocks of an East Asian
financial crisis and a global financial crisis. Some economies
might have buckled completely under those shocks and been condemned
to long-term stagnation. Yet these five economies, part of the
larger Asian region, emerged with continued if slower economic
growth. An important theme of this book is that their resilience
has been partly derived from the pursuit of growth and
competitiveness along less known or recommended pathways. The
chapters of this book take a novel approach to South East Asia's
search for growth and improvement. They do not begin by evaluating
how far macro-level performances would take a particular country
towards high-income status. Instead they provide original insights
into actual cases of intermediate ways of achieving growth,
upgrading and income improvement in non-privileged sectors. Such
cases may hold more relevant lessons for the majority of developing
countries than the experiences of highly developed economies.
With contributions from leading scholars in their field, this
collection of fourteen essays offers wide-ranging but incisive
perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Studies. Apart from
informing and enlightening the reader, the essays offer a tribute
to Professor Takashi Shiraishi, the renowned Japanese scholar, for
his many contributions across continents and disciplines as well as
his personal qualities as a long-time colleague, teacher and
friend. Now Professor Emeritus of the National Graduate Institute
for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, Shiraishi-sensei has had an
outstanding career as a teacher, scholar, administrator and policy
advisor, his many roles including Deputy Director of the Southeast
Asia Program at Cornell University and president both of GRIPS and
the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan. Often with Japan at
their nexus, the essays speak to three enduring themes in the
research interests that spanned Shiraishi's half-century career,
namely, political movements in Southeast Asia; national and
regional politics in China and Japan; and the links between
ideology, networks and policies at critical junctures of state
formation. An introduction by the editors reviews Shiraishi's
contributions to many areas of scholarship (these are documented in
the back matter, in a bibliography of his publications and writings
in English and Japanese). Among authors of the fourteen essays that
follow are Patricio Abinales, Chris Baker, Caroline Hau, Peter
Katzenstein, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Thongchai Winichakul. In a
concluding lengthy interview Shiraishi speaks for the first time,
in a frank if light-hearted tone, of his diverse experiences in
academia, as student, faculty and administrator, his thoughts on
area studies and their connections with official policy-making, and
his initiatives for building regional networks of research and
intellectual exchange. A festschrift in English being a rarity for
a Japanese scholar, this collection offers valuable if indirect
insights into the links and influences that have animated a
burgeoning community of international academic exchange and expert
cooperation. This has been facilitated by Shiraishi's position,
time and again (even if an accidental one, as he likes to say), as
a transnational intersection point for colleagues, students and
friends in their many various research pursuits. A rich and
rewarding collection.
Anwar Ibrahim, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1993-98, and
Opposition Leader, 2008-15 and since March 2020, is associated with
two lasting, seemingly contradictory images. Those were of the
young Anwar as a radical Islamist for whom economics seemed not to
matter, and as a pro-market reformer during the 1997 East Asian
financial crisis for whom Islam no longer mattered. Yet there was
economics in the young Anwar's Islam and, conversely, Islam in the
mature man's economics. Between them lay certain "moral
ambivalences" that occupied Anwar during the pre-crisis period when
economic growth, prosperity and ambitions were dogged by
rent-seeking, corruption and institutional degradation. Anwar had
expressed various thoughts on "Islam and economics", notably when
he was President of Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM, or
Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement), Minister of Finance (1991-98),
and leader of the post-Reformasi opposition. His thoughts formed
the core of a "humane economy" that he envisioned and advocated
upon his return to active politics from 2006 onwards. The vision of
a "humane economy" holds personal, ideological and political
significance at a specific political juncture in Malaysian history.
In late February 2020, the Mahathir Mohamad-led Pakatan Harapan
(Harapan, or Pact of Hope) government ended abruptly. Amidst
ensuing confusion, Muhyiddin Yassin led defecting Harapan Members
of Parliament, joined by UMNO and PAS, in an ad hoc Perikatan
Nasional (PN, or National Alliance) coalition to form a "backdoor
government". The PN protagonists cast themselves as a "Malay-Muslim
front" for preserving Malay dominance. Yet they unwittingly exposed
the parlous state of their "Malay politics", as shown by an absence
of "Malay unity", strongly contested claims to represent the
Malays, intense party factionalism, and subverted leadership
transitions. The parlousness of Malay politics emerged from the
failure of the Malay political class to meet many challenges
between 1997 and 2018. As the New Economic Policy and Vision 2020
political orders shed their combined twenty-five-year hegemony,
Malay politics could not recover its declining popular support and
legitimacy, or craft a fresh, broadly supported settlement. The
present is an unsettled conjuncture: the old order is passing while
Harapan's experimental regime has been subverted. Yet Malay
politics is unable to reform or tackle current issues
authoritatively. Instead Malay politics has turned inwards and
precipitated a disorder of the political system.
"Beyond Mahathir" is a timely response to the planned retirement in
October 2003 of Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia,
and poses vital questions about "Malaysian politics after
Mahathir." It examines Malaysia's long-term social transformation,
the global disruptions of July 1997 and September 11, 2001, key
leaders' calculations of power, and the pitfalls of leadership
transition that intersected to produce the political dramas of
Mahathir's final decade in power. Organizing arguments around the
critical but unstable fortunes of a thirty-year
nationalist-capitalist project, it brings to life Mahathir's
predicaments, contradictions in Anwar Ibrahim's career, Reformasi's
creative dissent, and the cultural imperative behind the
Alternative Front's "rainbow coalition." The result is an
instructive guide to the momentous events that ultimately revolved
around competing conceptions of what the future portends or should
portend for Malaysia, and the bitterly contested ways of getting
there.
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 regime had the best chance to supply a fresh
vision, deeper social understanding, and commitment to reform. The
present Perikatan Nasional regime's fixation on "Malayness"
overlooks twenty years of intense intra-Malay conflicts that began
with the failure of the first transition. As the "7th Prime
Minister", Mahathir had a rare chance to redeem himself from major
errors of his first twenty-two-year tenure. He squandered his
chance by not honouring the Pakatan Harapan transition plan. Anwar
Ibrahim's opponents mock him for being obsessed with wanting to be
prime minister. Yet they obsessively fear his becoming prime
minister. Anwar may be twice loser in political succession but "the
spectre of Anwar" still haunts Malaysian political consciousness.
With contributions from leading scholars in their field, this
collection of fourteen essays offers wide-ranging but incisive
perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Studies. Apart from
informing and enlightening the reader, the essays offer a tribute
to Professor Takashi Shiraishi, the renowned Japanese scholar, for
his many contributions across continents and disciplines as well as
his personal qualities as a long-time colleague, teacher and
friend. Now Professor Emeritus of the National Graduate Institute
for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, Shiraishi-sensei has had an
outstanding career as a teacher, scholar, administrator and policy
advisor, his many roles including Deputy Director of the Southeast
Asia Program at Cornell University and president both of GRIPS and
the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan. Often with Japan at
their nexus, the essays speak to three enduring themes in the
research interests that spanned Shiraishi's half-century career,
namely, political movements in Southeast Asia; national and
regional politics in China and Japan; and the links between
ideology, networks and policies at critical junctures of state
formation. An introduction by the editors reviews Shiraishi's
contributions to many areas of scholarship (these are documented in
the back matter, in a bibliography of his publications and writings
in English and Japanese). Among authors of the fourteen essays that
follow are Patricio Abinales, Chris Baker, Caroline Hau, Peter
Katzenstein, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Thongchai Winichakul. In a
concluding lengthy interview Shiraishi speaks for the first time,
in a frank if light-hearted tone, of his diverse experiences in
academia, as student, faculty and administrator, his thoughts on
area studies and their connections with official policy-making, and
his initiatives for building regional networks of research and
intellectual exchange. A festschrift in English being a rarity for
a Japanese scholar, this collection offers valuable if indirect
insights into the links and influences that have animated a
burgeoning community of international academic exchange and expert
cooperation. This has been facilitated by Shiraishi's position,
time and again (even if an accidental one, as he likes to say), as
a transnational intersection point for colleagues, students and
friends in their many various research pursuits. A rich and
rewarding collection.
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