The emergence of diverse forest governance arrangements during the last two to three decades is changing forest tenure patterns in developing countries. An aspect of these arrangements that has yet to be studied adequately is the conferral of forest tenure to shifting cultivators and the rural poor in the interest of social equity. This conferral …

WPS 166 How Social is Socially Oriented Forest Tenure and Land Use Change in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka? Read More »

In recent times both China and India have challenged the hegemony of developed countries in global news and information flow. Indian software and entertainment companies have tapped the large diaspora in overseas markets (Straubhaar, 2010). The Chinese news media have made international inroads through foreign investment for greater voice in the global platform (Shambaugh, 2010; …

WPS 165 News Media and Global Influence: The Story of China and India Read More »

As a significant ‘moment’ in twentieth-century international diplomacy, the Bandung Conference of 1955 is replete with symbolic meanings. How can we delve deeper into understanding the symbolic? To this end, ‘diplomacy as theatre’ as a conceptual framework enables us to re-interpret the Bandung Conference acts of symbolic performance, where ‘actors’ perform on the ‘stage’ to …

WPS 164 ‘Diplomacy as Theatre’: Recasting The Bandung Conference of 1955 as Cultural History Read More »

Population change and migration have long been hallmarks of the vast territory now bounded by the political borders of Kazakhstan.The Silk Road network of trade and cultural exchange routes and nomadic pastoralist economies were early dynamics whose cultural imprint persists today.Profound demographic changes also followed the expansion of the Russian empire and the incorporation of …

WPS 163 A Preliminary Spatial Examination of Post-independence Population Dynamics in Kazakhstan Read More »

This paper explores the impact of migration for domestic work on two categories of children. The first category is of children who have been ‘left-behind’ by mothers migrating overseas to undertake paid domestic work. The second category is of children whose mothers employ foreign domestic workers to care for them since early childhood because they themselves are …

WPS 162 The Price Children Pay: Exploring The Impact of Globalisation and Migration for Domestic Work on Both the Left-Behind and Cared-For Children Read More »

Most modern states have policies for the management of religion. For those with diverse religious communities, how to ensure the peaceful coexistence of the various religions becomes an important challenge for the governments involved. Hence, modern secular states often delineate a proper “domain” for religion in society in order to properly regulate it. In response, …

WPS 161 The Eternal Mother and the State: Circumventing Religious Management in Singapore Read More »

This Working Paper explores Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s book, Kentut Kosmopolitan (2008). I argue that Seno’s essays present a particular way of reading Jakarta and draw on and reflect practices of flânerie. His essays are both of contemporary urban conditions as well as an articulation of various specific social, cultural and political trajectories. In these essays, …

WPS 160 Writing Jakarta in Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s Kentut Kosmopolitan Read More »

This paper will examine one aspect of what I have elsewhere termed the economy of virtue, that is the field in which neoliberal logics and calculations have been incorporated into strategies for global health management as rational, technical, scientific guarantors of the integrity and dignity of The Human. These neoliberal technologies and logics are a …

WPS 159 Digital Relics of the Saints of Affliction: HIV/AIDS, Digital Images and the Neoliberalization of Health Humanitarianism in Contemporary Vietnam Read More »