This article investigates how the Chinese Expeditionary Force joined the Burma Campaign and retreated to India in 1942, and how the Chinese, American, and British authorities negotiated to determine the destiny of Chinese forces in India. This article argues that the choice of Ramgarh, a small town in northeast India, as the site of a training centre for the Chinese Expeditionary Force sheds light on a decades-long programme of colonial internment-camp building in British India, and illuminates the difficult relationship between Chinese and British authorities during World War II. In doing so, it also argues that the historiography of China's War of Resistance requires Southeast and South Asian perspectives.

The year 2019 marked the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Making use of published and unpublished Chinese, Vietnamese, and English sources, this article traces the tensions between official and popular memories of the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 in China and Vietnam, respectively. We argue that these tensions existed because the development of the official Chinese and Vietnamese memories of the war largely mirrored each other. Between 1991 and roughly 2006, when bilateral relations between the countries improved, both Beijing and Hanoi claimed victory for their side while simultaneously downplaying the bloodshed, tragedy, and loss experienced during the war. However, they have reacted to the rise of popular memories since the early 2000s in very different ways. While Beijing walks a thin line between accommodating appeals for greater recognition of the sacrifices made by ordinary soldiers without provoking social discontent with the political system, Hanoi has been more successful in mobilising Vietnamese popular memory of the war to strike a measured nationalistic response to China. How China and Vietnam remember and downplay the Sino-Vietnamese War points to the bigger picture of the sensitivity of bilateral relations to historical memory in Asia. In particular, historical memory shapes how a country perceives external threats and opportunities, while historical memory is created, suppressed, and re-created as international relations evolve.

Remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora have played an important role in Vietnam's post-Cold War economic development, providing important inputs to a range of household spending areas, from education to health care. In the case of Vietnam, however, remittances are also caught up with memories and traumas of war, betrayal, separation, and exodus. This article traces that history and illustrates how Vietnam's particular post-war refugee and remittance situations and channels illuminate networks and exacerbate inherent contradictions and comparisons in the mobile flows of finance, people, and goods across borders. Examining genealogies of remittance reception and management offers insight and intervention into analytical assumptions of the distancing and mediating functions inherent to classic conceptions of money, as well as the reciprocity and recognition perceptions mapped onto gift economies.

Myanmar was under a military government for almost six decades, during which time the state maintained an ‘authoritarian public sphere’ that limited independent civil society, mass media and the population's access to information. In 2010, Myanmar held flawed elections that installed a semi-civilian government and established a hybrid governance regime, within which civil, political and media freedoms expanded while the military's influence remained significant. In this paper, we examine ‘hybrid governance at work’ in the ‘hybrid public sphere’, that holds in tension elements of an authoritarian and democratic public sphere. The boundaries of these spheres are demarcated through legal means, including the 2008 military-created Constitution, associated judicial and administrative state structures and the actions of civil society and community movements toward political, military and bureaucratic elite actors. We develop our analysis first through an assessment of Myanmar's political transition at the national level and, then, in an empirical case of subnational politics in Dawei City regarding the planning of the electricity supply. We suggest that the hybrid public sphere enables discourses—associated with authoritarian popularist politics in Myanmar—that build legitimacy amongst the majority while limiting the circulation of critical discourses of marginalized groups and others challenging government policies. We conclude that for substantive democracy to deepen in Myanmar, civil society and media must actively reinforce the opportunity to produce and circulate critical discourse while also facilitating inclusive debates and consolidating legislated civil, political and media freedoms. On 1 February 2021, shortly after this article was finalized, a military coup d’état detained elected leaders and contracted the post-2010 hybrid public sphere, including constraining access to information via control of the internet and mass media and severely limiting civil and political rights.

The relationship of the bourgeoisie and democratisation has been inconsistent across the history of democracy. This work offers an alternative explanation taking the example of the Thai middle class, which had promoted democracy, turned against it. From the democratic transition of 1973 until the present day, the Thai middle class has played contradictory roles in the democratisation of the country. This work investigates the effects of democratic institution-building after regime change and the efforts to consolidate democracy in the middle class. This work proposes two major observations. The first is the failure of the middle class to establish themselves in democratic institutions and processes in either the legislature/executive, political parties, local government or structured interest groups. They have learned of the uncertainty of free elections and how the elected executives have benefitted other classes but not them. The second regards the missing prerequisite of democracy. Insufficient understanding of majority rules and two-turnover elections, caused the middle class who were disappointed with the outcome of democratic regimes and systems to easily turn away from democracy.

Hosting a sports mega-event strengthens connectivity with the world and provides opportunities to establish or increase networks and to build soft power. These events operate as hubs for the global flow of capital, people, knowledge and technology, and they perform important rituals and symbolic functions. In particular, they become coveted opportunities to enrich the soft power portfolio of governments or individual leaders. Despite its regional character, the Asian Games have developed into such a mega-event. In 2018 – only for the second time in the history of the Asian Games – Indonesia staged the event in Jakarta and Palembang. This paper scrutinises the ways in which Indonesia used or failed to use the Asian Games as a platform to increase the country's soft power and reputation and to strengthen intra-Asian connectivity. Three aspects serve as examples to assess Indonesia's soft power initiatives: (1) the “spirit of 1962”, (2) the host country's emergence on the Asian stage and (3) Indonesia's cooperation with other countries and intra-Asia connections in the context of the sports event. Examining the prominence of domestic politics reveals shortcomings and untapped potential. The analysis shows that the inward-looking foreign policy approach of the Jokowi administration limited the initiatives to increase Indonesian soft power and to establish and address Asian themes and debates; consequently, this approach downgraded the sports event to a tool to generate political capital for domestic affairs.

The concept of al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (loyalty and disavowal) has become the ideology of modern Salafism; it is used to justify unfriendly relationships with non-Muslims. This concept is usually implemented by reserving love only for fellow Muslims and showing insularity towards non-Muslims. What is the ideological concept that guides some Muslims in their relationship with groups that are considered heretics? This article intends to scrutinize the theological matrix used by vigilante groups in their anti-heresy campaign or attacks on the Ahmadiyya. It also aims to determine why some people believe that persecuting the Ahmadiyya is a theologically justifiable idea. What theological and ideological reasons can be used to justify attacks against the Ahmadiyya community? How do they cope with the conflict between divine law and human/state law? This article argues that instead of feeling guilty, the perpetrators of faith-based violence often feel they have just fulfilled a good religious duty. Committing violence against religious groups deemed heretics is believed to be more than al-amr bi al-màrūf wa al-nahy `an al-munkar (“commanding right and forbidding wrong”)—it is a jihad. Violence is seen not as an illegal act, but as a “virtue” or an effort to save them from the punishment of God in Hell. In justifying the breaching of state law, the idea of a hierarchy in the law is constructed, i.e. state/human law is hierarchically lower than divine law, so attacking the Ahmadiyya is seen as a transgression of human law for the sake of upholding the divine view.