Since the end of the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, Northeast Asia and its comprising countries have avoided international conflict as well as any regional set has done over the past few decades. The absence of nuclear weapons among Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, in particular, is striking, given their technological and scientific capabilities. Though each of those countries has come close at times to developing their own nuclear weapons, one factor or another contributed to the failure of those upstart programs. The United States has played a significant role in all of them. Still, other factors remain. The purpose of this thesis is to determine in detail what caused the lack of a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia, beyond the American angle, as far as could be done. Existential threats exist to each country involved in the study, theoretically and tactically. Additionally, what causes an outlier like North Korea, which has boldly moved forward with nuclear weapons development? An important work by Scott Sagan is utilized in the thesis to assist with developing some far-reaching conclusions, with great importance to other parts of the world, beyond northeast Asia. Other literature can assist with those conclusions, as well. The framework of this thesis will be to intermingle a somewhat amended version of Sagan's nuclear proliferation rationalizations with historical analyses to draft some region-specific conclusions about why northeast Asia has not had a nuclear arms race. Processes going on between countries, within countries, and among countries, militarily, culturally, and economically, play such important roles than none can be discarded. The economic power centered on the capitalist core of northeast Asia can show how nuclear weapons acquisition is no longer among the things necessary to gain international respect or even security.

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The following 18 best described as a comparative survey. It was written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the American Academy of Asian Studies, a graduate school of the College of the Pacific. Since Its formation 1n 1951, the Academy has sponsored an almost unique approach to Asian Studies. The emphasis has been on what the people of the contemporary Western world have to learn from, rather than about, the cultures of the Near and Far East. Until recently, most oriental scholars have accepted a scholarly taboo against "getting too close" to the cultures they studied, lest they "go native" by absorbing unscholarly prejudices. Reinforcing the taboo was the colonialistic vlew that all Asian peoples were culturally well behind the technology of the West, 30 that we could have nothing to learn from Asia.

This dissertation examines the role of women in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as both productive members of society and the loci of national anxieties that have created fault lines in public opinion, government policy, and international development programs. It explores how Kazakh cultural concepts of ideal womanhood are used to identify categories of women eligible for state support or who become targets of community intervention. These include survivors of domestic violence, unwed young mothers, and “at risk” girls who may strive to fulfill or deviate from the expected Kazakh norms deemed appropriate for their specific life stage. These contested expectations are embodied in national legislation, international human rights programs, and Kazakh civil society. They are implemented by social service officials who provide the aid and who perceive the women involved in them as objects of their reform projects. Ethnographic fieldwork that provided the bulk of the research data was conducted between March 2018 and August 2019 in urban Almaty and provincial cities in southern and eastern Kazakhstan in domestic violence shelters, homes for unwed mothers, and girls’ empowerment programs. This included extended periods of participant observation supplemented by open-ended interviews with activists, crisis shelter directors and employees, and other stakeholders to generate multi-cited case studies. Because media played a significant role, the research incorporated an analysis of relevant Kazakhstani films and plays that highlight the challenges of negotiating ideals of womanhood and motherhood, propriety and martyrdom, which are also central themes animating my text. The research concludes that women in these programs respond to directives from international human rights organizations, national legislation, and changing social mores by deploying and reinterpreting Kazakh life stage ideals of womanhood. In so doing, they illustrate how women’s work and reproductive choices intersect with the goals of a national state, a changing Kazakh society, and the global discourse on women’s rights. As a contribution to the larger discourse on identity and citizenship in post-Soviet states, gender, Islam, and contemporary Kazakhstan, this study illustrates how “women’s issues” remain an unusually sensitive barometer of social values where the implicit becomes the explicit. / 2024-03-04T00:00:00Z

The concept of regionalism has been the subject of vast research. However, there have been few empirical studies of South East Asia. Although several authors have examined regionalism on a global scale (Russett 1967), the theoretical constructs have been primarily based on regionalism in Western Europe (Haas 1964). Few of these theories have been applied in the context of South East Asia. The current members of ASEAN were chosen for my research paper. (1) ASEAN includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, with the later addition of Brunei in 1984. The research paper was an attempt to the following questions: • What degree of regionalism do the ASEAN countries show with regard to each variable defined as measuring regionalism. An analysis of the usefulness and limitations of each variable will be considered in the study. • What is the significance of regionalism in South East Asia, in terms of current theories in the field of Political Science/International Relations. Data was used from a variety of secondary sources including UNDEX United Nations documents, International Trade Directory and the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. The variables were then correlated to check the extent of regionalism in the ASEAN countries. Factor Analysis and Pearson's correlation statistic were used to determine the relationship between variables used to measure regionalism. From the study, the concept of regionalism was defined and measured by multiple indicators. The results indicated that some of the variables used to operationalize and measure regionalism may be inappropriate in an Asian setting. My study found that regionalism in terms of observable cooperation, in domestic and international policy had increased but has not reached the stage of political and economic integration among the ASEAN members. (1) ASEAN stands for the Association of South East Asian Nations. / Master of Arts

The book of Revelation reflects a story of the past that speaks to the present. The Apocalypse presents a discourse that highlights a variety of Christians in Asia Minor who must decide whether they will remain faithful in their allegiance to Jesus Christ or demonstrate unfaithfulness to Christ and his kingdom by conforming to the majority culture by engaging in practices of the broader society that stand in contradiction to their faith. When faced with such a dilemma, various people, including Christians, respond in a variety of ways. For some, their responses bring glory to God while others bring disgrace to the name of the God they say they serve. Writers often discuss Christ’s confrontation and judgment of the Roman Empire. Few, if any, address Jesus’s confrontations with the seven churches of Asia Minor. This study combines Norman Fairclough’s theory of Critical Discourse Analysis and Jay Lemke’s theory of intertextuality to demonstrate that Rev 1-3, the incorporation of concepts and ideas appearing in other resources, the further development of the Apocalypse, and the historical context in which John composed the work present the kingdom of God as an alternative empire to which he belongs and commits himself as a citizen in resisting the power, practices, and allure of Rome. Though the assemblies to which he writes experience a variety of social, political, and religious circumstances, the messages to the churches come together to reveal that Christians, no matter their power or position in society, have a mandate to live as citizens of Christ’s kingdom who maintain a countercultural stance for the sake of the gospel. John depicts Christ as king of this alternative empire, who confronts each of his communities regarding their allegiance to him, demonstrated by their non-conformity to the practices of the broader culture regarding how they function in the various power structures in which they live. He then uses the later visions of the Apocalypse to depict Christ’s vindication of those who maintain a countercultural posture in relation to the Roman Empire and highlights the advantages and blessings of non-conformity, while noting the disadvantages and curses of conformity. Throughout the history of the Christian faith, various segments of the church have faced opposition from the surrounding culture. Christians today maintain the same mandate as the early church to resist the allure of the worldly powers that surround them and remain loyal to Jesus. In addition to providing an analysis of John’s writing for early Christians, this dissertation also presents a model for Christians—no matter their time or place in history—to follow regarding how they interact with the world around them. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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No / Regional disparities within China are now an important policy question. Recently the three provinces of the north-east region have been identified as priority areas for regional development, along with the Western part of the country. The north-east is the old industrial heartland of the country and its economy is based around heavy industry, mineral extraction and state owned enterprises. This paper uses a unique database on medium and large-scale enterprises to establish how far enterprise performance in the north-east differs from the national average and the reasons for any such differences. It finds that even allowing for industrial structure and ownership, performance in the north-east is significantly below that in the rest of the country. This is attributed to aspects of the investment climate in the region.

In this dissertation, I develop a postcolonial theoretical approach to localized Muslim feminism(s) in Aceh, Indonesia, based on interviews with women in Aceh in 2009 and 2010. One of the central aims of this study is to challenge the dominant exclusivist discourse of "Islamic" feminism by providing a viable alternative for "Muslim" feminism(s), derived from collaborative, indigenous, and post-secular politics. I address the need for a religious feminist model of subjectivity that incorporates both the political and ethical dimensions of agency in potentially non-patriarchal and non-state-centric formations. I suggest a communal understanding of religious law as an alternative to conceptualizing religious law (syariah) in terms of a personal ethical code or a system of laws emanating from a state. I propose an alternative discourse of feminist agency and religious identity, one that reaches beyond a secular-liberal epistemology and challenges the hegemonic discourse of state-centrism within a privatized religious identity. / Ph. D.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第25392号 / 人博第1134号 / 新制||人||263(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科相関環境学専攻 / (主査)教授 西川 完途, 教授 市岡 孝朗, 教授 瀬戸口 浩彰, 教授 太田 英利 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM