East-West Center: Featured Publications

Mapping Change in the Asia Pacific Region: Geopolitics, Economics, and Diplomacy

The Senior Policy Seminar brings together senior foreign policy officials, private sector leaders, and analysts from countries around the region for nonofficial, frank, and non-attribution discussions of security issues in the Asia Pacific region. The 2007 Senior Policy Seminar at the East-West Center was the eighth in an annual series. In view of the profound changes that have been occurring in the Asia Pacific region over recent years and in anticipation of a 2008 presidential election in the ...

Takeaways from the 2008 Shangri-La Dialogue

Since its inaugural meeting in 2002, the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of defense ministers from the Asia-Pacific region in Singapore, has evolved to become anamp;nbsp;amp;nbsp;amp;nbsp; important event for both official and non-official discussions of regional security in the Asia-Pacific. The seventh meeting this year, which featured defense ministers from 27 countriesamp;#8212;and nearly 300 delegates from the government, non-profit, and private sectorsamp;#8212;facilitated substan...

Will Japan Be Out of Tune With A Concert of Democracies

The idea of a quot;concertquot; or quot;leaguequot; of democracies has gained greater prominence of late, with Japan frequently mentioned on the shortlist for membership. Yet Japan's recent experiment with quot;values diplomacyquot; raises questions about how it might contribute to such a grouping of like-minded states. This article reviews Japan's values diplomacy and challenges the assumption that Japan would be as active in a Concert of Democracies as its proponents envision.Weston S. Konishi...

Asia Pacific Security Survey 2008 Report

This report--and the series--bring together and compare responses from a variety of perspectives and nationalities to a set of questions on Asia Pacific regional security. The information compiled from the survey provides a generally accurate representation of the state of thinking about the security outlook in the region among security specialists.This report presents the results of an online survey completed by 128 security analysts from 16 countries across the Asia Pacific region plus Taiwan ...

Changing Education: Leadership, Innovation and Development in a Globalizing Asia Pacific

This book responds to the growing unease of educators and non-educators alike about the inadequacy of most current educational systems and programs to meet sufficiently the demands of fast changing societies. These systems and programs evolved and were developed in and for societies that have long been transformed, and yet no parallel transformation has taken place in the education systems they spawned. In the last twenty years or so, other sectors of society, such as transportation and communic...

China's Telecommunications Revolution

China's telecommunications industry has seen revolutionary transformation and growth over the past three decades. How did China conduct its remarkable quot;telecommunications revolution?quot; This book examines both corporate and government policy to get citizens connected to voice and data networks, looks at the potential challenges to the one-party government when citizens get this access, and considers the new opportunities for networking now offered to the people of one of the world's fastes...

Chinas Emergent Political Economy: Capitalism in the Dragons Lair

This edited volume represents the first collaborative effort to explicitly view China's rapid international ascent as associated with the same process that catapulted Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan to international prominence amp;#8211; the emergence of a capitalist political economy. Each chapter therefore applies the capitalist lens to analyze aspects of China's monumental social, economic, and political transition. Topics addressed range from examinations of China's indu...

Population Aging, Intergenerational Transfers and the Macroeconomy

Population aging is a global phenomenon that influences not only the industrialized countries of Asia and the West, but also many middle- and low-income countries that have experienced rapid fertility decline and achieved long life expectancies. This book explores how workers and consumers are responding to population aging and examines how economic growth, generational equity, trade and international capital flows are influenced by population aging. The contributors draw on the experience of ...

Safety, Security, and Accessible Justice: Participatory Approaches to Law and Justice Reform in Papua New Guinea

Rosita MacDonald examines the challenges facing the law and justice reform partnership between Australia and its former colony Papua New Guinea (PNG). Serious safety and security issues confront PNG, with the incidence of violent crime increasing and the capacity of the law enforcement, court, and prison systems to deal with offenders deteriorating. MacDonald acknowledges the challenge of implementing institutional reforms appropriate to the PNG cultural and political context, and highlights the...

Asias Energy Future: Regional Dynamics and Global Implications

Concerns about energy security affect economic performance and political stability all over the world. Yet nowhere is this issue more critical than in Asia and the Pacific. The United States and Asia have much in common in terms of their basic energy situation. Both regions have substantial coal reserves, but both must import large quantities of oil and natural gas, creating a worrying level of dependency on the volatile Middle East. The United States has an economy and a life s...

The Karen Revolution in Burma: Diverse Voices, Uncertain Ends

In Asia, print and electronic versions of this publication may be purchased from ISEAS Publishing; outside Asia, hardcopies of this publication may be purchased from Amazon.com. This study analyzes the various types and stages of conflict that have been experienced by diverse groups and generations of Karen over the six decades of armed conflict between the Karen National Union (KNU) and successive Burmese governments. Instead of focusing on those who are internally displaced, those in the refug...

Managing Sino-Japan-U.S. Relations: Recalibrating the Triangle

On May 30, 2008, the East-West Center in Washington held an Asian Security seminar on quot;Managing Sino-Japan-U.S. Relations: Recalibrating the Trianglequot; to explore the evolving triangular relationship between China, Japan, and the United States. Three distinguished panelistsamp;#8212;Ming Wan, Professor of Government and Politics at George Mason University; Yoshihisa Komori, Editor-at-Large of The Sankei Shimbun; and Robert Sutter, Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown Univer...

Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity, and the Evolution of Security Practice

Normalizing Japan is the ninth book in the Studies in Asian Security series sponsored by the East-West Center and published by Stanford University Press. This book seeks to answer the question of what future direction Japan's military policies are likely to take by considering how policy has evolved since World War II, and what factors shaped this evolution. Andrew Oros argues that Japanese security policy has not changed as much in recent years as many believe, and that future chang...

Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation Among Cultures

Education is the point of departure for the cultivation of human culture in all of its different forms. Although there are many contested conceptions of what is meant by a good education, there are few people who would challenge the premise that education is a good thing in which we should heavily invest. In this volume, representatives of different cultures and with alternative conceptions of human realization explore themes at the intersection of a changing world, the values we would choose to...