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After the Coup »
Myanmar’s Political and Humanitarian Crises
Edited by: Anthony Ware, Monique Skidmore
Publication date: 2023
The coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 abruptly reversed a decade-long flirtation with economic and political freedoms. The country has since descended into civil war, the people have been plunged back into conflict and poverty, and the state is again characterised by fragility and human insecurity. As the Myanmar people oppose the regime and fight for their rights, the international community must find ways to act in solidarity. There is an urgent need for new policy settings and for practical engagement with local partners and recipient groups.
The contributors to After the Coup offer timely insights into ways international actors can try to reduce the suffering of millions of citizens who are again being held hostage by a brutal and self-serving regime. Chapters analyse topics including coercive statecraft, international justice, Rakhine State (Rohingya) dynamics, pandemic weaponisation, higher education, non-state welfare and aid delivery, activism from exile, self-determination and power sharing in the National Unity Government’s alternative constitution, and the roles of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
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East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 15, Number 3, 2023 »
Publication date: September 2023
As ASEAN and Japan celebrate the 50th anniversary of their official relationship, the challenge to redefine the goals and purpose of this relationship is now pressing. Great power rivalry, regional power relativities, and sweeping political and economic disruption have injected new dynamics and exposed serious vulnerabilities. With ASEAN member states and Japan each facing their own domestic challenges, the opportunity presents itself for a more 'equal' partnership that is able to 'co-create' a regional economy and society, from paternalistic origins. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly addresses these challenges for the ASEAN–Japan relationship and offers ideas, vision and initiatives that might guide its future: exploring the policy options for a relationship challenged by regional economic fragmentation; detailing the lessons available for policymakers beginning to act on sustainability and digital and green transformation; and examining the opportunities taken and thus far unrealised for the fashioning of new soft diplomacy and investment in intra-ASEAN infrastructure.
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Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity »
Aceh’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Publication date: August 2023
Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity examines the role of Indonesia’s first truth and reconciliation commission—the Aceh Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or KKR Aceh—in investigating and redressing the extensive human rights violations committed during three decades of brutal separatist conflict (1976–2005) in the province of Aceh.
The KKR Aceh was founded in late 2016, as a product of the 2005 peace deal between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). It has since faced many challenges—not least from Indonesia’s security forces and former GAM leaders, who have joined together in their determination to maintain impunity for their respective roles in the conflict. Indeed, the commission would not have been established without the tireless work of civil society actors, including non-government organisations and other humanitarian groups.
In Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity, the editors set out to amplify the role of these civil society actors in the KKR Aceh and in transitional justice in Indonesia. Each chapter has been written by a team of authors, composed predominantly of commissioners and staff from the KKR Aceh itself, members of key civil society organisations, and academics. Further, the editors aim to scrutinise the KKR Aceh from the inside and analyse the establishment and operation of what is perhaps the only genuine state-sponsored attempt to implement transitional justice in Indonesia today.
Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-First Century »
The Dilemmas of Policy Implementation
Authored by: Lior Rosenberg
Publication date: 2023
Implementing national policies is a crucial function of the local Chinese bureaucracy and an indispensable part of Beijing’s overall state capacity. Yet the specifics of how and why local officials interpret and implement such policies have so far escaped sufficient attention. In Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-First Century, Lior Rosenberg fills this gap by examining the national Village Redevelopment Program, one of China’s most significant policies of recent decades to promote rural change.
Based on Rosenberg’s on-site research, Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-First Century investigates the Village Redevelopment Program’s implementation in both the industrialised county of Chenggu, in Shandong province, and the predominantly agricultural county of Beian, in Anhui province. At the book’s heart is a puzzle: the program was supposed to prioritise poorer villages, but in both Chenggu and Beian—despite being carried out in surprisingly divergent ways—it has subsidised improved infrastructure and services in already industrialised and prosperous villages, while leaving behind poorer ones. In explaining this outcome, Rosenberg elaborates on the larger economic, political and social environment in which Chinese local officials operate, as well as the pressures they face from above. He analyses the dual role played by higher-level authorities, as both policy enablers and thwarters in a system that sanctifies commandism but where the distinction between principals and agents is blurred.
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Watershed »
The 2022 Australian Federal Election
Publication date: August 2023
Australia’s 2022 federal election played out in ways that few could have expected. Not only did it bring a change of government; it also saw the lowest number of primary votes for the major parties and the election of the greatest number of Independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the Teal Independents and the Greens, along with the appetite voters showed for ‘doing politics differently’, suggested that the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system of Labor versus Liberal. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.
In Watershed, leading scholars analyse the election from the ground up—focusing on the campaign issues, the actors involved, and the successes and failures of campaign strategy—and show how digital media, visual politics and fake news are changing the way politics is done. Other topics include the impact of COVID-19 and the salience of climate, gender and integrity issues, as well as voting patterns and polling accuracy. This authoritative book is indispensable for understanding the disenchantment with the major parties, the rise of Community Independents, and the role of the Australian Greens and third parties.
Watershed is the eighteenth in the ANU Press federal election series and the tenth sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Dilemmas in Public Management in Greater China and Australia »
Rising Tensions but Common Challenges
Publication date: July 2023
This book draws on more than a decade of workshops organised by the Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration, involving scholars and practitioners from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia. Although these workshops recognised the major differences in the institutional frameworks of these jurisdictions, until recently they focused largely on the shared challenges and the diffusion of ideas and approaches.
As rising international tensions inevitably draw attention to areas where interests and philosophies diverge, it is the differences that must now be highlighted. Yet, despite the tensions, this book reveals that these jurisdictions continue to address shared challenges in public administration.
The book’s contributors focus in detail on these four areas:
intergovernmental relations, including the shifting balance between centralisation and decentralisation
budgeting and financial management, including during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
the civil service, its capability, and its relationship with government and the public
service delivery, particularly in health and aged care.
This book is aimed at a wide readership, not only at those within the jurisdictions it explores. It emphasises the importance of continued engagement in understanding different approaches to public administration—confirming fundamental philosophical differences where necessary but also looking for common ground and opportunities for shared learning.
Chains »
Edited by: Linda Jaivin, Esther Sunkyung Klein, Annie Luman Ren
Publication date: July 2023
Speaking to the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, in October 2022, President Xi Jinping reiterated his commitment to the ‘opening up’ policy of his predecessors — a policy that has burnished the party’s political legitimacy among its citizens by enabling four decades of economic development. Yet, for all the talk of openness, 2022 was a year of both literal and symbolic locks and chains — including, of course, the long, coercive, and often brutally enforced lockdowns of neighbourhoods and cities across China, most prominently Shanghai. Then there was a vlogger’s accidental discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, sparking an anguished, nationwide conversation about human trafficking. That was part of a broader (if frequently censored) conversation about gendered violence and women’s rights, in a year when women’s representation at the highest levels of power, which was already minimal, decreased even further. There was trouble with supply chains and, with the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, in August, island chains as well. Despite the tensions in the Asia-Pacific, the People’s Republic of China expanded its diplomatic initiatives among Pacific island nations and celebrated fifty years of diplomatic links with both Japan and Australia. As the year drew to a close, a tragic fire in a locked-down apartment building in Ürümqi triggered a series of popular protests that brought an end to three years of ‘zero COVID’. The China Story Yearbook: Chains provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories from 2022.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 15, Number 2, 2023 »
Publication date: June 2023
Global trade stands at a crucial crossroads. The multilateral trading system that underpinned globalisation for three-quarters of a century is being pulled apart by big power politics and the way forward is fogged in mistrust. Global growth is projected to decline this year and remain anaemic. Inflation, the rising rivalry between the world’s two largest economies, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine weigh heavily on the global outlook. The European war underscores how quickly the trading ties between nations might be undone and weaponised. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly examines the impact of trade sanctions as they rip into the trading system well beyond the battlefield. It interrogates how far sanctions have succeeded in hobbling Russia’s war machine and questions their deterrent value outside of conflict or their universal application, explores how supply chains have reshuffled around the reach of regulators, and asks how nations are probing opportunities created by the conflict.
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‘Order, Order!’ »
A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives
Edited by: Stephen Wilks
Publication date: May 2023
‘Order, Order!’: A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives shines a first-ever historical light on the remarkable men and women who have served in these national offices since Federation.
The Speakers include Frederick Holder, whose campaign to embed a Westminster-style Speakership died with him when he collapsed dramatically in the parliament; the much-loved Joan Child, Australia’s first female Speaker, whose struggles as a widow with five children fostered her commitment to social justice and made her, in the words of another Speaker, Anna Burke, ‘pretty fierce’; and Ian Sinclair, a warhorse of a parliamentarian who seemed to prove the poacher-turned-gamekeeper principle. The Deputy Speakers, a particularly eclectic assortment, include the strange and bleakly serious James Fowler, who once hopefully mailed a film synopsis to the American director Cecil B. DeMille and who ended his days warning of the perils of democracy. Amongst the Clerks are Frank Green, who, at the height of the Cold War, indiscreetly befriended members of the Communist Party, and the popular Jack Pettifer—a true child of parliament—who grew up in an apartment in the building.
This book includes analysis of what sorts of individuals typically filled these vital parliamentary positions, and the appearance of an Australian model of the Speakership based on pragmatic compromise. All three offices are typically more than just creatures of political parties—something that Australians should be prepared to defend against the remorseless encroachment of political partisanship.
More Than Fiscal »
The Intergenerational Report, Sustainability and Public Policy in Australia
Publication date: May 2023
Every five years, the Australian treasurer is required to publish an intergenerational report (IGR), which examines the long-term sustainability of current government policies and seeks to determine how demographic, technological and other structural trends might affect the economy and the budget in coming decades. Despite these lofty objectives, the five IGRs produced from 2002 have received only muted applause. Critics say that they are too mechanical, too narrow and too subject to the views of the government of the day and that they don’t provide the intended wake-up call for public understanding of looming economic, social and environmental issues.
This analysis of the most recent IGR (2021) is based on a workshop hosted by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. While finding that the 2021 IGR is an improvement on the previous report (2015), the authors identify several fiscal and broader policy issues that deserve greater attention, including Australia’s structural deficit, rising inequality and the impacts of climate change. They argue that the report fails to discuss the policies required to support greater resilience against future shocks, including the case for earlier budget repair. They propose that future IGRs be prepared with greater independence, cover all levels of government, have more transparent analysis and draw upon a wider ‘wellbeing’ approach to long-term sustainability.
This book aims to attract close attention from public officials and politicians and generate constructive debate in the community.