Search Results

Wartime Pan-Asianism was discredited with Japan’s defeat, but the government did not completely abandon its vision of regional leadership. Unable in postwar circumstances to exert strong political leadership, Japanese representatives to the 1955 Bandung Conference redeployed wartime alternatives to standard diplomacy, emphasizing supposedly apolitical initiatives such as economic cooperation and cultural exchange. Such postwar internationalisms played a part in the creation of a new Japanese national identity. At Bandung, Japanese representatives once again sought to define Japan as part of Asia, but as an economic and cultural leader, instead of a hegemon.

What happens to our understanding of liberal international order--its history, material bases and ideological claims--if we read its development not solely as a social formation built by the West and exported around the earth, but rather as an economic and political encounter with the world of the Global Indian Ocean? This chapter analyzes how the Global Indian Ocean was built and how it evolved over time: its origins in so-called "archaic globalization" as well as the shape it took following the post-1750 "Great Transformation" which, through successive waves of imperialism, spawned a first liberal international order. British-dominated hegemony was replaced after 1945 with a more ambitious system of liberal governance under American leadership. Such reworked "thin hegemony" spurred renewed integration and exchange but also violent resistance and heterodox imagination, processes that further intensified after 1989.

This chapter argues that the 1955 Bandung Conference’s anticlimactic impact is most usefully understood in the present as inevitable, yet its normative surplus remains valuable. It describes a collection of conditions that manifest in what it terms ‘Bandung’s fate’: a narrow understanding of Bandung’s legal utility in its immediate present that was in many ways preordained. The chapter argues that pre-1955 discourses in the ‘First World’ created a place for Bandung in its immediate aftermath from which it could not escape, and it draws this understanding primarily from newspaper reporting from major outlets in the First World and contemporaneous reports from Indonesia’s National Archives that detail Indonesia’s understandings of First World perceptions of Bandung. After contrasting these with reports that detail perceptions from the ‘Third World’, the chapter suggests that for the nations that controlled international law, Bandung served preordained purposes that undermined its immediate impact. However, recent scholarship revisiting and revising the story of Bandung, along with renewed interest in what the failure of the NIEO can teach us in the present, indicates that the Conference created a ‘normative surplus’—an unveiling of acceptable norms at a particular point uncodified in law. In specifying elements of Bandung’s ‘normative surplus’ that could be revived, the chapter attempts to recast Bandung not as a story of possibilities lost but a catalyst for new possibilities in the present and future.

This chapter examines the differences between old and new xenophobia, but also explains their areas of overlap and, in particular, illustrates how new xenophobia can draw upon older forms of xenophobia, sometimes even in opposition, for sustenance. It concludes by offering examples of new xenophobic legislation from Denmark, and linking it to similar slippages elsewhere.

According to the World Health Organization’s No Health Without a Workforce report, the global shortage of community health workers (CHWs) is expected to reach 12.9 million by 2035. This shortfall raises pressing questions about how CHWs are recruited, trained, and supported as front-line care providers. Lay people become CHWs in a variety of ways; they might be chosen by a non-governmental organization or a government programme, elected by community members, or simply volunteer themselves at the right time and place. After recruitment, CHWs typically undergo training, and the scope and quality of this training can vary enormously. Often, limited funds are stretched to conduct trainings in person at facilities that may or may not be readily accessible for health workers, and refresher trainings are often cut in times of budget shortfall. While there may be no simple solution to these challenges, many now look to the use of digital technologies as a promising opportunity. Digital health interventions have come to play a growing role in healthcare in the last decade, yet the uses of technology for training, ongoing education, and supportive supervision remain understudied in lower-income settings. In this chapter, we examine a case study of digital health interventions in Nepal. We examine matters of baseline literacy and access to technology, the interweaving of technology and health system design issues, and prospects for integrating digital and face-to-face education and support. While the role of technology is easily overstated, we nonetheless argue that new digital workflows can address real implementation challenges if designed in a human-centred manner.