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Carolina Asia Center
Talking About Asia
Korea-Japan Economic Relations: The Role of American Pressure
Yul Sohn is Professor of International Studies at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Carolina Asia Center.
Abstract:The US government has applied political pressure to Japan for improved market access. Do the sectors given U.S. access equally open to third-country firms? Is Japan opening to Korean firms as much as it is to U.S. firms? Using the cases of the petroleum products and construction, Yul Sohn argues that the success or lack thereof of Korean firms in these sectors was not determined by Korean firms’ competitive edge vis-à-vis Japanese counterparts. Nor was it an outcome of the variations in the degree of exogenous disruptions caused by U.S. pressure. Success depended on the varying degrees of liberalization, precipitated by U.S. pressure and, more importantly, by the way economic and political players responded to incentives for change conditioned by the challenges posed by Korean firms.
Date: April 14, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30PM
Place: GEC 4003
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Monks, Metta and the Military in Burma
Maureen Aung-Thwin, Director of the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative of the New York-based Open Society Institute, part of the network of foundations created and funded by philanthropist George Soros.
Abtract: Burma, also known as Myanmar, has been ruled by secretive, xenophobic military juntas since 1962. In 1988, a nationwide uprising against military rule was brutally crushed and thousands of civilians were killed. An election in 1990 was won overwhelmingly by the democratic opposition, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi—but the results were ignored and she remains under house arrest. Last fall an overnight rise in fuel prices of up to 500 percent triggered street protests by a few brave citizens that were led by a group of ex-political prisoners known as the "88 Generation Students". When these protestors were arrested, thousands of Buddhist monks took their place and demanded that the regime address the grave economic crisis in the country. The monks' demands were met with violence. Aung-Thwin’s talk will examine the extraordinary intervention of the monks, the fall out from the so-called “Saffron Revolution”, and the prospects for a genuine political transformation in Burma.
Date: Monday, March 31, 2008
Time: 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Place: Bingham 103
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Making Sense of Thailand's Southern Violence: Islam and Legitimacy
Duncan McCargo is professor of Southeast Asian politics at the
University of Leeds, UK.
Abstract: Thailand's Malay Muslim majority Southern border provinces
have been
experiencing a renewed violent conflict since January 2004.
Thispresentation will explore the political underpinnings of the violence,
arguing that this is essentially a struggle over land, legitimacy and
power, rather than an example of a global or regional jihad. It will
call into question simplistic readings of the conflict which try to link
the conflict to problematic issues such as 'Islamic violence' and the
'global war on terror'.
Date: Monday, April 7, 2008
Time: 4:00 - 6:00 PM
Place: GEC 1005
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Talking About Asia
An Analysis of China’s Foreign Policy in a Changing International System
Wang Chuanxing, Institute for International Political Studies, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
China’s foreign policy has experienced considerable change since the 1990s. In this presentation, Wang Chuanxing considers the external forces of the changing international system and China’s internal forces of culture and tradition that have driven the country’s foreign policy in recent years.
Date: Monday, January 28, 2008
Time: 12:00-2:00 PM
Place: FedEx Global Education Center Room 4003
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South Korea’s New Political Landscape and Implications for U.S.-Korea Relations
Sook-Jong Lee, Department of Public Administration/Graduate School of Governance of Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea
On December 19, 2007, Lee Myung-bak, standing for the conservative Grand National Party, won a landslide election to become the new president of South Korea. His victory can be regarded as a significant switch to pragmatic conservatism ending the decade long rule by progressives. One of Lee Myung-bak’s major foreign policy agendas is reinvigorating the relationship with the United States. This talk will introduce the new government’s policy agendas and discuss potential challenges in the contested politics of contemporary Korea.
Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Time: 5:30 – 7:00 PM
Place: New West 219
Top
Time: Wednesdays 7:30 - 10:00 pm
Place: FedEx Global Education Center Auditorium
Dates and Films:
Geography South Asia Research Presentations
Fraternal Capital: Peasant workers, self-made men, and globalization
in provincial India
Sharad Chari, Ph.D
Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, United Kingdom
School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Date: Thursday, January 31, 2008
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Toy Lounge, 4th Floor Dey Hall
Abstract:
During the last decade of the 20th century, the South Indian town of
Tiruppur underwent a boom in the production and export of knitted
garments. This boom has been important in several respects. Scholarly
and popular opinion in the early 1990s focused on the spatial
organization of work in Tiruppur's baroque web of worksites. My
research turned to the class and caste origins of capital, to find that
the most significant fraction emerged from modest Gounder caste,
agrarian, and working-class origins. These "self-made men" explained
development and their class mobility as hinging crucially on their
propensity to toil. Within this native theory of work and value, lies a
specific practice of the past through which certain Gounder men have
become capitalists, to make an entire town work for the global economy.
This talk explores the ways in which these subaltern Gounder men from
the countryside drew on relations of gender, caste, and
work-discipline, to renovate the agrarian past in the industrial
present. Once they had consolidated their place in an emergent spatial
order of networked work, the emerging Gounder fraternity of capital
displaced older industrialists of mercantile origins, the landlord
elite, and a rich tradition of labor militancy. I suggest that we take
seriously the dynamics of transition and translation in writing
historical ethnographies of capitalism. I also suggest the efficacy of
gender in holding together the tense relations between capital
accumulation and working-class misery. As Tiruppur shifted from
domestic to global production, fraternal hegemony shifted to
accommodate an ascendant apex class of exporters as well as a new
diversity of workers. Global articulations also brought new discourses
of feminization harnessed by capital to fragment workers in new ways.
This account of Tiruppur's dramatic transformations demonstrates a
historical and cultural-geographic approach to the globalization of
capital and its multiple effects on the lives, imaginations, and
political possibilities of subaltern populations in contemporary India.
'The Global War on Terror', Geopolitical Boundary Narratives, and
Border Fencing in India and Bangladesh
Reece Jones, Phd Candidate, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Date: January 14, 2008
Time: 2:30 pm
Place: Toy Lounge, 4th Floor Dey Hall
Abstract:
The border between India and Bangladesh in the region of Bengal was
created in 1947 with the partition of British India. Despite the
religious justifications for the partition, the populations along the
border speak the same language and follow similar cultural practices.
The border remained open and lightly guarded for its first fifty years
of existence, which allowed many social and economic connections to be
maintained across the border. However, in the past five years, India
has unilaterally fenced and securitized the entire 4000 km border.
Drawing on ethnographic research with residents of the Bengal
borderlands, I analyze the boundary narratives from the ‘global war on
terror’ that are used to justify the border fence and I examine the
consequences the strict patrolling of the borderlands has on the lives
of local populations in terms of social, economic, and political
connections across the border. In the conclusion, I emphasize the
importance of geopolitical boundary narratives in the categorizing and
ordering processes of modernity.
To see our past events in archives, click the links below:
Spring 2003 | Fall 2003 | Spring 2004 | Fall 2004 | Spring 2005 | Fall 2005
Spring 2006 | Fall 2006 | Spring 2007 | Fall 2007