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ItemNo Preview AvailableBeyond the Crisis: Re-energizing Southeast Asian Studies(Bina Nusantara University, 2022-12-21)This article examines the main drivers of the fiscal crisis in Asian/Southeast Asian Studies and considers ways of overcoming or at least ameliorating it. In the Australian context, several leading scholars in Asian Studies have called for various new forms of strategic state financial support to help keep the field alive, including incentives and structural support for Asian languages at both school and university levels and priority in publicly-funded research grant schemes. However, re-energizing Asian Studies in fiscal terms will undoubtedly require efforts to make the field more appealing to prospective students because of the prevalence of higher education funding models in which money follows student enrollments. This will particularly be the case with Southeast Asian Studies, given the weakness of enrollments in this sub-field. In this respect, there may be some value in seeking to create new education pathways in Asian Studies that focus on cross-national issues and problems within the region as an alternative to the traditional country-focused area studies approach.
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ItemImplementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Insights from Indonesia(JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS, 2022-02-01)Following the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011, attention has shifted towards challenges of implementation. Through detailed analysis of the case of Indo-nesia, this article analyses the conditions under which implementation oc-curs and explores strategies for strengthened implementation. While UNGP implementation has often been argued to depend on strong collaborative learning networks, we demonstrate instead that power balances between rights coalitions and politico-business and technocratic elites have proved decisive—implementation varying across sectors and over time depending on configurations of market power, histories of rights struggles, and patterns of high-level political support.
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ItemIntroduction: Transnationalism, diaspora and the migration-development nexus in Asia and Australia(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2021-11-10)The number of people living outside their country of birth has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1970, according to estimates produced by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), there were 84 million people living abroad, representing 2.3 percent of the world’s population. By 2020, these numbers had increased to 281 million and 3.6 percent respectively.
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ItemFailing to Engage: The Politics of Diaspora Policy in Australia(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2021)In 2003, the late Professor Graeme Hugo, one of the country’s top migration and population experts, and his collaborators published a major report for the Australian government on the Australian diaspora and associated policy issues. Still the most detailed study of this subject, it recommended that the government adopt a diaspora policy to harness ‘the potential of the diaspora to be a positive factor in national economic and social development’. One year later, Dr. Michael Fullilove and Chloë Flutter published another major report on the Australian diaspora, this time for the Lowy Institute, a prominent international affairs think tank. They also called on the government to adopt a diaspora policy to harness its potential for Australia’s development.
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ItemConflict, contestation, and corruption reform: the political dynamics of the EITI in Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-03-14)1. We know little about the political dynamics shaping country responses to the EITI, despite their importance as a determinant of these responses and the fact that the EITI’s success hinges on its ability to attract country members. This paper seeks to enhance our understanding in this respect by examining the Indonesian case. Indonesia was slow to sign up to and implement the EITI but eventually did so. It has remained compliant with the initiative more or less ever since, although its commitment has waned in recent years. We argue that this response reflected the changing balance of power between four sets of actors – national politico-business elites, regional politico-business elites, controllers of mobile capital, and subordinate classes and their NGO allies – as affected by economic shocks, political mobilisation, and elites’ political strategies. We accordingly suggest that EITI proponents consider the nature of such dynamics in devising reform strategies.
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ItemPandemics, politics and principles: business and human rights in Southeast Asia in a time of crisis.(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)Business activity has been a key driver of economic dynamism in Southeast Asia and one of the main reasons for the region’s growing prosperity in recent decades. It has led to increases in investment and consumption, boosted exports and, in so doing, promoted economic growth. This has in turn created jobs, improved incomes, increased governments’ ability to provide social welfare, and lifted millions out of poverty.
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ItemOvercoming Oligarchy? The UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in the Philippines(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)