Kanishka Jayasuriya

Policy advice in earlier times with respect to the linkage between integration and security was based on a positive effect from the former to the latter. Subsequent improvements in security would also lower the impediments to integration that might otherwise be present. Since the circle was a virtuous one, then policy advice on integration could rest on its positive consequences for security. Benefits of further integration if anything would be understated. Different ways of thinking about the relationship of trade to security are presented. The complicating factors which have not been sufficiently studied are related to domestic political processes. This chapter highlights the reciprocal role of geopolitical relations and global economic relations in shaping the interests of domestic social groups in relation to strategies of trade and regional integration. These issues have been neglected by much of the existing literature on regional integration and the economics-security nexus. Economic relations and security relations are always linked through their mediation by domestic social groups. This linkage is traced through the evolution of institutions in East Asia. More recently, there has been the appearance of the emergence of competing regional regulatory and infrastructure projects. This very much complicates the advance of integration in the region in future.

In recent years the ideological landscape of East Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia, has been characterized by the discourse of ‘Asian values’: that cultural traditions in East Asia are different from those of the ‘liberal’ West, and in turn political behaviour in East Asia demands to be judged against these relative cultural standards. It follows from this that no universal political standards and norms can be deduced and, therefore, political categories need to be relativized to appropriate cultural norms. This article outlines and evaluates three approaches to the analysis of Asian values ideology: culturalist, instrumentalist, and structuralist. It then proceeds to argue for a particular structuralist perspective, that is termed ‘reactionary modernism’, which coptures the distinctiveness of Asian values as an ideological hybrid of reaction and modernity.

This article explores the relationship between the emergence of the rule of law and the growth of capitalism in East Asia. The basic argument is that legal institutions in East Asia are embedded in the system of state-dominated corporatist capitalism of East Asia. This distinctive form of capitalism has produced a system of law and legalism that needs to be clearly distinguished from the orthodox model of liberal legalism that underpins the conventional Weberian model. This authoritarian and statist legalism of East Asia is characterized by two main features: first, the legal subject is constituted in terms of the enterprise or institution rather than the legal person (natural or juristic); and second, law is used as a technique of rule to implement the policy objectives or goals of the state. Therefore, East Asian legalism is characterized by rule through law rather than the rule of law.

In this chapter, we argue that our analytical efforts should be focused on explaining how global and regional changes–by regional, we broadly refer to Oceania–in the political economy lead to contestations within established state institutions, as well as layering new practices of governance within established institutions (Jayasuriya, 2008, 2009). State institutions are not external to the market, but are partially shaped by economic and market processes (Glassman, 2011; Gough, 2004). We explore how Australia's increasing ...

This volume engages with debates about research and study on Asia and engaging with the knowledge produced in the Asian region in the next few decades.1 My argument is simple: the advent of the so-called Asian Century is not simply about making us knowledgable about Asia or developing institutional capacities for such knowledge. Rather, it also challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. This has become problematic for some of the key assumptions driving Asian studies. It has also become problematic, in the Australian context, for some of the public policy assumptions about ‘Asia literacy’, or ‘Asia capability’ as it is called in its latest incarnation (Asialink 2013; Department of Education 2014; see also Heryanto in this volume). In turn, this has a number of implications for the way we do research on Asia as well as broader public policy implications for research investment—particularly in which research programs to invest, as well as the kinds of skills and expertise we need to ‘study Asia’.

The strength of the introductory chapter by Dubash and Morgan is their clarion call to understand the specificities of the regulatory state in the global South (see also Dubash and Morgan 2011). They ask us to give serious consideration to the notion that the regulatory state in the global South confronts issues, problems, and pathways of development which are different from those apparent in the Eurocentric literature on the regulatory state where it is portrayed almost as a triumph of a European mode of governance. From this point of ...

By the turn of the twenty-first century a new concept was gaining traction in accounting for disappointed expectations of the so-called 'third wave' of democratization: the hybrid regime. The now pervasive influence of the concept reflects diverse attempts to describe and explain the absence or partial nature of democratization in many countries around the world. It emphasizes not just the combining of elements of both democracy and authoritarianism, but also the possibility of qualitatively distinct regimes transcending existing categories.

For some, hybrid regimes are necessarily transitory ones, even if their collapse is not imminent. Other theorists countenance the possibility that we may be witnessing the development of sustainable regime alternatives to democracy. Crucially, the very notion of a hybrid regime is a manifestation of transition theory's underlying assumption that capitalism and liberal democracy are natural partners. This has constrained regime analysis, systematically discouraging more open-ended enquiries into the nature and causes of political change outside the West.

Thus, despite greater recognition of the complexity and uncertainty of democratic consolidation and transition, much hybrid regime literature is consumed with developing detailed descriptions and typologies of different hybrid regime variants. Moreover, as per the earlier transition paradigm, analysis remains largely focused on the institutional and strategic incentives of political actors to engage with and support 'competitive authoritarian' or other forms of hybrid regimes, with evaluation of the functional quality of political institutions against democratic criteria a central focus.

Legal pluralism – as practice and theory – is frequently viewed as a functional response to the diversity of legal culture and practices around the globe, or, as Michaels (2009) so succinctly observes, as a process driven by pressures from below for the recognition of local customs or norms. Such a bottom-up perspective elides the questions of “who” promotes these experiments and for “what” reason. In essence, we argue that legal pluralism should not be judged by its own terms, but rather understood as a technology of jurisprudence that provides templates for institutional entrepreneurs such as transnational agencies as they develop novel institutions of legal governance. This essay is a first cut at analyzing the emergence of legal pluralism as a regulatory project within the field of “law and development.” The term regulation is extensively used here to describe the system of rules and standards governing the conduct of agents or organizations. Regulatory projects grounded in the theory and practice of legal pluralism are attempts to steer “rule of law” programs via the incorporation of private or civic actors within institutional hybrids. These projects carve out spaces of legal governance that lead to the juridification of civic or customary legal regimes. Using customary regimes – often around reinvented customary practices – has resonance with regimes of legal governance in the late colonial state (Mamdani 1996). A regulatory focus places the accent on those new institutional forms through which localized legal and social norms are given recognition and authority in seeking to implement the rule of law. Institutions, not the diversity of legal culture, need to be at center stage in the study of legal pluralism. Within a law and development context, we need to ask why legal pluralism has become such an important question for many transnational actors and organizations involved with legal and governance reform? Proceeding from this question – rather than from the usual question, “What is legal pluralism?” – allows us to problematize rule of law projects as forms of institutional bricolage, that is, the conscious attempt of actors to weave new institutional forms by drawing on past social and cultural practices. More than that, the diverse institutional experiments subsumed under the label of legal pluralism are not a product of the purely “local” circumstances and norms, but rather stand at the intersection of the local and transnational legal order.