During the Covid-19 pandemic, China was known for its onerous zero-Covid policy, which required tremendous work at the local governance level. This paper examines the extent to which the state penetrated local society with its Covid-related governance, and in what manner. What role did local residents play in this governance? Based on through two years of ethnographic work, this research examines Covid-related communications in WeChat groups of thirteen gated communities (xiaoqu weixin qun), which were intersections of physical and digital spaces to which people were confined during pandemic-related lockdowns. Findings, analyzed through a theoretical framework of governmentality, reveal that governance at the community level functioned only partially, as residents lacked familiarity with local bureaucratic actors. Nevertheless, the state machine functioned indirectly by constantly creating cultural and material conditions that impacted citizens' conduct. In response, citizens engaged in self and mutual governmentality by aligning their pragmatic everyday decisions with the state's agenda.
This article examines the dynamics of clientelism within Dayak communities in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, focusing on how ethnic institutions sustain long-term intermediary networks that operate beyond electoral cycles. In contrast to mainstream scholarship, which often emphasizes transactional and temporary forms of electoral clientelism, this study focuses on the role of the Dayak Customary Council (Dewan Adat Dayak or DAD) as a social network structure that mediates access to state resources and consolidates local elite power through institutional capture. The study examines how DAD integrates customary structures into the state's bureaucratic hierarchy, from the village to provincial levels as well as through customary law (kedamangan) institutions. The findings reveal that political actors capitalize on their Dayak ethnic identity to secure investment flows and long-term political support within bureaucratic arenas. This article expands understanding of clientelism by showing that institutionalized ethnic networks in Indonesia can generate stable patronage arrangements in which ethnic organizations function as permanent intermediaries within the country's decentralized governance system.
In 1907, after months of prospecting across India, the little-known and remote hamlet of Sakchi in Singhbhum was chosen by Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839-1904), founder of the Tata Group, as the location for India's first indigenously owned iron and steel works. This paper examines the construction of an institutional cultural memory of what would become the planned city of Jamshedpur as an integral part of India's industrial heritage, steeped in ideas of progress, modernity and cosmopolitanism. The article juxtaposes this cultural memory with the lived experiences and memories of Jamshedpur inhabitants who have witnessed its transformation in response to and beyond the institutional narrative of the ideal steel city. Finally, the article discusses the immediate and long-term impacts of communal riots in 1964 and 1979 and the ways in which this violence is remembered or forgotten. In doing so, the article argues that public and private histories and memories of Jamshedpur intersect, overlap, and negotiate with each other in ways that complicate and contradict a carefully cultivated discourse of model industrial urbanism that has been erected on a foundation of manufactured cosmopolitanism.
When I applied for Truku Indigenous status in 2022, I discovered that my mother had never been officially registered as Indigenous in Taiwan and my application was therefore denied. Only through an arduous bureaucratic process was I able to obtain state recognition of my Truku Indigenous identity. This experience led me to ask what epistemic and ideological foundations structure Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples Status Act (IPSA). Drawing on narrative inquiry and combining autoethnographic reflection with legal and policy analysis, this article identifies two ideologies underlying the Act: post-colonial dossierism and patriarchal governance. Taiwan's recognition regime privileges colonial archives over Indigenous self-determination while operating through patriarchal norms of descent and identity transmission. This study contributes to the literature on postcolonialism in two ways. First, it identifies dossierism and patriarchal governance as mechanisms through which colonial epistemology is reproduced in law. Second, it shows that once colonially produced documents are codified as mandatory state law, it legitimized the colonial way of seeing and, in turn, shapes how colonized subjects come to understand themselves.
This study investigates how Acehnese women experience, remember, and transmit narratives about prolonged armed conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In-depth interviews were conducted with women across two generational categories: those who had directly experienced these events (experiential narrators) and those who have learned the stories through familial or community transmission (post-memory narrators). The study situates narratives as a social practice, exploring how women's experiences, survival, and resilience are interpreted, negotiated, and passed on. The study reveals a striking divergence in how these two crises are remembered and narrated. The tsunami, often seen as a divine test, has been spiritualized, moralized, and publicly commemorated through museums, school drills, and religious discourse. This structured and didactic form of storytelling fosters intergenerational compassion and preparedness. In contrast, conflict memories are fraught with moral complexity, silence, and fear. These narratives, often fragmented, emotionally restrained, and selectively told, have been shaped by past surveillance, suspicion, and unresolved trauma. The study underscores the importance of integrating women-centered approaches into post-disaster and post-conflict recovery. It also shows how the recognition and protection of women's voices is vital to understanding long-term resilience, collective memory, and processes of social repair.
Air pollution has emerged as a major public health and economic threat in Southeast Asia, yet Laos has received limited attention in scholarly and policy debates despite significant mortality and economic losses. This article analyses the drivers, lived experiences, and governance of air pollution in Luang Prabang, Laos' premier tourist destination and a UNESCO World Heritage city. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, field observations, and satellite data, our findings challenge dominant policy narratives that attribute haze primarily to traditional swidden cultivation. Instead, commercial agrarian change, particularly cassava expansion, grass cultivation, and cattle pasture expansion linked to regional and Chinese cattle demand and a prolonged urban landfill fire, drove air pollution in 2023. These sources stem from labor shortages, economic insecurity, poor urban waste planning, and a reliance on fire as a low-cost management tool. Despite significant health, livelihood, and tourism impacts, haze remains underappreciated and underfunded. Weak monitoring infrastructure, fragmented institutional responsibilities, and the absence of disaggregated health data render air pollution uncertain and socially normalized. The article argues that air pollution in Luang Prabang represents a form of slow violence, maintained by epistemic gaps and administrative silence within a development model that prioritizes expanded agriculture and tourism over environmental protection.
This article examines how Pakistan's local government gender quota policy, aimed at improving women's political representation, has been undermined by entrenched patriarchal structures in rural Punjab. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, including fieldwork conducted in 2005-2006 and 2019, with follow-up observations in 2024, the study highlights the problem of proxy representation. In this scenario, elected women often act as figurehead councilors while their male relatives wield actual decision-making power. The analysis indicates that the apparent increase in female representation often amounts to mere symbolic inclusion, offering little genuine empowerment for women. By drawing on feminist theories of representation and agency, along with concepts of patriarchal bargains and a governmentality perspective, the article argues that state-led "empowerment" reforms can be co-opted and reshaped by local kinship norms concerning honor and authority. In practice, rather than fundamentally disrupting male dominance, Pakistan's gender quota has largely been transformed into a new form of patriarchy-one that maintains male control while creating a fa & ccedil;ade of female representation. These findings contribute to discussions on feminist governance by illustrating that efforts to democratize gender relations must confront deeply entrenched social structures.
This article examines the shifting dynamics of Uyghur diaspora activism, tracing its trajectory from widespread silence before 2017 to a surge of family-centered mobilization between 2017 and 2020, followed by a subsequent ebb and re-fragmentation. We argue that family has simultaneously functioned as the Chinese state's most effective lever of transnational repression and the diaspora's most effective tool of activist mobilization. Threats to relatives at home created a climate of fear that silenced Uyghurs abroad; yet the sudden severing of contact with family after 2017 undermined that control and compelled thousands to speak out. This rupture precipitated the emergence of a family-centric form of campaigning that altered the global visibility of the Uyghur issue and legitimacy of Uyghur activism within and beyond the diaspora. Since 2020, the resumption of tightly monitored contact with family members has re-muted many voices, even as others remain engaged. This arc in Uyghur political mobilization offers insights into how family ties can simultaneously constrain and propel diaspora activism - an area that remains understudied - and foregrounds the intimate scales through which transnational repression operates and diaspora activism can emerge and take shape.
Scholars have characterized Cambodia as a weak state, strong party governance system in which administrative institutions are subordinated to the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP). This article argues that since 2013 Cambodian governance has taken a significant technocratic turn, as party rule has become increasingly dependent on a stronger and more capable administrative state. It traces a reform pattern involving selective creation and upgrading of institutional nodes that expand overall state administrative capacity without disrupting the party-political order. Through three cases - the transformation of the National Bank of Cambodia through the Bakong digital payment system, the restructuring of public-private partnership frameworks to fund the Techo International Airport, and the creation of executive-linked agencies such as the Techo Startup Center - the article shows how new centers of administrative capacity have emerged and been positioned at the core of the state's developmental agenda. These institutions have enhanced the party-state's capacity to mobilize revenue, coordinate and develop mega infrastructures, and formalize the economy, producing a more capable but still party-embedded state. The Cambodian case illustrates a particular trajectory within broader contemporary developmental state-making under global capitalism, in which strengthened administrative states and political authoritarianism are mutually reinforcing.
This article traces a historical pathway from the Thai government's historic propaganda practices to its use of contemporary digital disinformation. Using the framework of critical juncture, it examines how perceived threats to the established order have driven reliance on propaganda against political opponents, the institutional entities responsible for orchestrating state propaganda, and the legal framework underpinning their operations. The paper analyzes the emergence of anti-opposition narratives and propaganda mechanisms during the Cold War, the modification and codification of propaganda as state policy in the 2010s, and a subsequent fusion of former propaganda infrastructure and new digital tactics. By foregrounding contemporary disinformation within an autocratic legacy, the article argues that Cold War-era practices continue to shape the institutional and legal capacities of Thailand's propaganda agencies, even as platforms' algorithmic designs diversify manipulation tactics and expand the range of actors involved, reflecting both continuity in and transformation of state propaganda practices.
The "tribal divergence" thesis argues that identities professed by Scheduled Tribes, Adivasis, and Indigenous Peoples in South Asia today are colonial artefacts. These myriad ethnicities were created by the imposition of special territories, governed separately from the rest of British India. This was either an ideological move, or a manifestation of divide-and-rule policies. This paper offers an alternative reading whereby precolonial tribes were ethnically distinct and politically independent. The British created tribal territories as the cheapest expedient to end conflicts caused by the curtailment of this independence following the dramatic expansion of the British colonial state and the subsequent exploitation of newly established tribal minorities by the majority communities of the agrarian plains. This was one of many variations in governance that emerged from the colonial liberal project's pursuit, in a Foucauldian sense, of frugal government and security.
This article is a critical inquiry into the dynamics of state governance and protest fragmentation in contemporary China. Drawing on a case analysis of veterans' activism and evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2024, it argues that three commonly adopted approaches to social governance-localization, categorization, and individualization-systematically fragment veteran constituency and shatter broad-based solidarity. However, each of the three approaches generates unintended consequences. Local governance, which is structurally incapable of resolving national grievances, often provokes cross-regional mobilization; categorized governance, by institutionalizing differential treatment for different veteran subgroups, fuels sustained contention through relative deprivation; and individualized governance encourages transactional activism, whereby veterans extract personal concessions beyond the scope of legitimate grievances. By framing state-society interactions as a dynamic process, this inquiry advances theories of contentious politics and authoritarianism, revealing how the routine operation of social governance can intentionally or unintentionally reshape the landscape of contention it seeks to manage.
This article examines spare-time learning (y & egrave;y & uacute; xu & eacute;x & iacute;) in socialist China as a form of labor-mediated pedagogical governance that expanded women's access to education while simultaneously reproducing gendered divisions of labor. Drawing on archival materials from Shaanxi Province, I trace how spare-time learning was organized across urban industrial and rural agricultural settings, showing that it constituted an ambitious effort to democratize intellectual authority by locating knowledge production within collective labor practice. Yet the capacity of spare-time learning to serve as an equalizing institution was unevenly structured across institutional contexts. I introduce the concept of a "gendered mobility loop" to specify the mechanisms through which the gendered division of labor was continually reconstituted within socialist pedagogy. By tracing shifts from early literacy campaigns to increasingly moralized political training, I argue that women's double burden was not merely a residual legacy of tradition or an effect of incomplete implementation but was continually reconstituted through pedagogical arrangements embedded in production regimes. Reconceptualizing spare-time learning as a site of ideological reproduction embedded in production, this article contributes to feminist scholarship on social reproduction under socialism and to Marxist cultural studies of the education-labor nexus.
This article challenges the dominant externalist paradigm in North Korean studies by arguing that the DPRK's suryong yuil chido ch'eje (one leader guidance system) emerged through cultural entanglement-the creative synthesis of indigenous cultural resources with external institutional models. By reconstructing the genealogy of authority from the late Choson period to the post-liberation state, it shows how Korean traditions of millenarian prophecy (Chonggamnok), organizational innovation (particularly the Tonghak movement and colonial-era new religions employing the yonwonje system), and vernacular practices of governance furnished the symbolic grammar and institutional repertoires of rule. Kim Il Sung's ascent to power was the fulfillment of the prophesied "true man" (chin-in), enabling activists to mobilize these frameworks in tandem with Soviet institutional templates and Marxist-Leninist ideology. A cultural entanglement analysis reframes North Korean political authority as the outcome of selective adaptation and institutional hybridization, not a derivative of imported totalitarian models. This approach offers new analytic leverage for understanding authoritarian resilience and the intergenerational transmission of charisma through the lenses of vernacular governance, institutionalized charisma, and indigenous modernization. Ultimately, by demonstrating the formative role of religious movements in modern state-building, this study provides a broader framework for interpreting the relationship between cultural continuity and political development in post-colonial contexts.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) maintained contact and cooperation with the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) through multiple channels. The CPT received material support, political training, and ideological guidance from China, particularly from bases in Yunnan Province. Using the development of Thai Studies in China as a case study, this article examines how Chinese academia has engaged with-or avoided-the Cold War history of Thailand. Through a critical review of the field, it identifies structural tensions shaped by political sensitivity and institutional constraints, situating these dynamics within the broader context of Southeast Asian studies. Such constraints influence topic selection, access to sources, and publication practices, resulting in a field characterized by narrowed perspectives, uneven critical engagement, and structurally constrained academic autonomy. In this sense, Thai Studies in China reflects a paradoxical trajectory in which the field has been repeatedly shaped, disrupted, and revived by shifting political imperatives rather than by autonomous scholarly inquiry.
This study examines the role of foreign remittances in easing credit constraints among rural households in Bangladesh. Based on a mixed-methods case study of four migration-prevalent villages, the research combined primary survey data from 221 migrant households with fifty-two qualitative interviews. These materials were triangulated with nationally representative Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) data where possible. Findings show that remittances relax liquidity constraints, enhance household creditworthiness, enable asset accumulation for collateral, reduce dependence on high-interest informal loans, and facilitate productive investments in land, housing, livestock, education, and small businesses. While remittances often serve as a substitute for inaccessible formal credit and costly informal borrowing, they also complement institutional finance by enhancing borrowers' repayment capacity. Households in the study that channeled remittances into agricultural activities experienced greater development gains. This study offers micro-level evidence that contributes to the remittance-finance literature. It also highlights policy measures such as remittance-backed loan products and reducing migration costs as ways to leverage remittances for more inclusive rural financial development.
An exploratory comparison of two marginalized groups of Vietnamese citizens - Hmong Protestants in Vietnam's northern highlands and transnational labor migrants to Europe - reveals four themes of convergence. First is the "will to improve," which pervades developing countries across Asia, and its implications for those trying to catch up with popular ideals of modernity and civility. Second is the tensions and contradictions between principles of communalism and the burgeoning neoliberal values of competitiveness and individualism which play out sharply in the lives of those whose fortunes hang precariously in the balance. Third, it shows how people sidelined in Vietnam's nationalist political economy seek alternative routes to upward social mobility which cannot be contained by the state's categories of citizenship, prompting concerns about where subaltern loyalties lie. Fourth, it shows how contemporary life on the margins is profoundly mediated by brokers who facilitate interactions and transactions with more powerful political, bureaucratic, economic, and spiritual forces.
