Consider this: Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world. It has the largest population of Muslims, the second highest measure of biodiversity after Brazil, a very stable democracy despite its ethnic and geographic diversity and the potential to be a major player on the world stage in coming years. Yet Columbia University offers no courses on Indonesia and only two on all of Southeast Asia. How is it that Indonesia has come to be...
Wikimedia Commons From a financial perspective, the last fifty years or so have not been kind to Southeast Asia. Emerging from the shadow of colonialism, Southeast Asian countries established governments that were, as a rule, economically disadvantaged by the two chief byproducts of corruption: economic inefficiency (leading to the enrichment of a small elite), and capital flight (the disappearance of those elites’ money from their home countrie...
After centuries of humiliation, domination, and colonization by the West, nearly three billion residents in the Pacific region are rising to claim what is rightfully theirs: economic prosperity, diplomatic influence, and national pride. Yet this newfound power breeds new challenges for the United States policy in Asia. The greatest headaches for US policymakers arise, of course, from the People’s Republic of China’ new aim to radically alter th...
...also portends a radical change in the way that Chinese expatriates interact with and affect the wider world. Food for thought: Just imagine how this massive demographic outpouring will affect the world. And this great leap in Asian interaction with the wider world will not stop with China. India’s population will be larger than China’s by the year 2025 and will be younger and growing to boot. Indonesia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Philippines (amo...
...st-century anti-access threats, thus threatening the national security and economic stability of not only America, but also the rest of the world. Nowhere are anti-access threats more evident than in the case of China and the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is openly developing a strategy to counter US naval hegemony and the means to carry it out. One of the largest threats facing the US Navy in the Western Pacific...
WikiCommons Drug trafficking in Southeast Asia is the epitome of high-risk activity. The latest case to infect global consciousness involves a British grandmother, 56-year-old Lindsay Sandiford, who was on 22 January sentenced to death for the trafficking of 10.6 pounds of cocaine in Bali, Indonesia. The British government has strongly rebuked the sentence, lamenting the barbarism of the verdict – the death penalty for a “nonviolent” crime – by...
...to Latin America have been generalities. His National Security Strategy, published in May 2010, mentions the Americas poetically — he writes of developing allies “from the Americas to Africa; from the Middle East to Southeast Asia”—but devotes little attention to specific cases. His 2011 State of the Union address made but one reference to the Americas; rather than discuss policy, he simply announced an intention to travel to the region. And alth...
From Wikimedia Commons The U.S. has S.E. Asia in its sights. A few months ago, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made waves with his declaration of the United States’ new naval “strategic pivot” from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. By 2020, the US aims to have the bulk of its navy in the Pacific, up from the current 50-50 split with forces in the Atlantic. Clearly the US powers-that-be think that a little more firepower sho...
Illustration by Esha Maharishi From the unannounced raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound that surprised and humiliated Pakistani officials, to a badly botched NATO operation that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, 2011 was not a great year for US-Pakistani relations. Many American policymakers are dismayed that neither friendship nor financial assistance has induced Pakistan to cooperate with American objectives in South Asia. Moreover, the strategic...
...er in economics; Wakar Uddin, the Director General of the Arakan Rohingya Union; T. Kumar, the Director of International Advocacy at Amnesty International; and Elaine Pearson, the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. There was also a roundtable comprised of Nora Rowley, a medical activist in Southeast Asia; Kyi May Kuang, a dissenting Burmese artist and writer; Jacques P. Leider, the head of the Chiang Mai Center of the Éc...
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