The recent history of healthcare privatisation and corporatisation in Malaysia, an upper middle-income developing country, highlights the complicit role of the state in the rise of corporate healthcare. Following upon the country’s privatisation policy in the 1980s, private capital made significant inroads into the healthcare provider sector. This paper explores the various ownership interests in …

WPS 76 The Emergence of a Transnational Healthcare Service Industry in Malaysia Read More »

In this paper the author has firstly reconfirmed some names related to the most northern minor states of the Champa kingdom that were noted in Champa inscriptions during the eleventh to fifteenth centuries and are presented in comparison with the place names of the current provinces of Quảng Bình, Quảng Tri, Thừa Thiên-Huế in Central …

WPS 75 Cultural Resource and Heritage Issues of Historic Champa States: Champa Origins, Reconfirmed Nomenclatures and Preservation of Sites Read More »

I explore how the rhetoric of nationality or ethnos (minzoku) became a central element in Japanese imperial ideology of Manchukuo and Asia in the Pacific War. Japanese imperialism from the 1930s sought to put nationality at the center of its expansionist ideology. At the same time, anthropology or ethnology (minzokushugi), became the means to study …

WPS 74 Ethnos (minzoku) and Ethnology (minzokushugi) in Manchukuo Read More »

This paper examines regionalism in Myanmar foreign policy mostly in the context of ASEAN-Myanmar relations and it argues that Myanmar’s decision to embrace regionalism was primarily motivated by her desire to enhance state security, which also meant regime security; the threat to which was more internal than external in nature. Her subscription to regionalism was …

WPS 73 Regionalism in Myanmar’s Foreign Policy: Past, Present and Future Read More »

Compared to Southeast Asia, Dhaka city represents an apparent anomaly: a rapidly growing metropolis with relatively little change in early marriage practices, with 51 percent of 15-19 year-old females in 2000 already married. The rapid influx of rural poor families to Dhaka has led to a rapid increase in urban population growth, slum settlements and …

WPS 72 Marriage Practices in an Urban Slum: Vulnerability, Challenges to Traditional Arrangements and Resistance by Adolescent Women in Dhaka, Bangladesh Read More »

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Thai-Isan (the Northeastern Thai), male migrant workers in Singapore’s construction industry in 2004, I propose ‘village transnationalism’ as a conceptual model for understanding the transnationalization and globalization processes from below. Exclusively hailing from rural working-class and farming backgrounds, Thai-Isan migrant workers have redefined their transborder identities by relying on their …

WPS 71 Village Transnationalism: Transborder Identities among Thai-Isan Migrant Workers in Singapore Read More »