The subject of migrants’ rights typically conjures up a legalistic understanding as it relates to international human rights law. By contrast, this paper attempts to contribute to the debate on migrants’ human rights by focusing not only on normative and legal aspects of international human rights law, but also on the issue of political participation …
The management of foreign manpower is vital for any labor import country as failure to ensure efficacy in the achievement of labor migration policies and program goals often generates a whole range of unintended consequences like xenophobia, politicization of migration, irregular migration, and eventually, cessation of labor migration programs. Despite the abundance of research on …
WPS 57 Foreign Manpower in Singapore: Classes, Policies and Management Read More »
This paper is about the social and cultural significance of hotels in the Nepal Himalaya. Through a socio-semiotic approach, I analyse how the hotel in Himalayan tourism functions as an architectural form that mediates different social domains, and through the process embeds the ideology of ‘development’ in everyday life, producing the power relations that would …
WPS 56 Hotels as Sites of Power: Tourism, Status and Politics In the Himalaya Read More »
The short film form in Southeast Asia is a potent form of cultural production and one that contributes compellingly to the development and continued growth of the region’s moving image culture. This essay provides a preliminary theoretical framework within which to map the intricacies of the short film within Southeast Asia and offers a case …
WPS 55 Nomadic Trajectories: Mapping Short Film Production in Singapore Read More »
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRMAN Board of Management ARI is embarking on its second five-year development cycle. Much has been accomplished in the first five years. It is now a recognized research centre in disciplines of interest and importance to scholars of Asia, and it has played a visible role in promoting collaboration among researchers in …
After more than three decades of the introduction of the Green Revolution with high crop productivity as the main objectives and results, yet with various unintended negative consequences, various parties have now seriously taken steps to counter the Green Revolution’s negative consequences on people and environment. One among others was the introduction of the Integrated …
Much use has been made of Chinese texts in re/constructing the history of Champa. However, the scholars who have done such work have generally not had access to the text translated in this paper –the account of Champa contained in the Song Hui-yao ji-gao ( 宋會 要 輯稿 ), or “Draft of the Collected Statutes …
WPS 53 Champa in the Song hui-yao: A Draft Translation Read More »
In the early 1990s, the animist and Hindu traces in adat, or Malay custom, became contentious for resurgent Islam in Malaysia. Reclaiming Adat focuses on the filmmakers, intellectuals, and writers who reclaimed adat to counter the homogenizing aspects of both Islamic discourse and globalization in this period. They practised their project of recuperation with an …
Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature Read More »
This article shows how Arab geographical conceptualizations of insular Southeast Asia came to be placed under the rubric of ‘Jâwa’ in the 13th century. It does so after examining echoes of another toponym of far greater longevity in greater depth, namely Zâbaj. It outlines how this earlier term served from the mid-9th century to mark …
