War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While "America" offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, "Asia" exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation.

Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about "Asia," as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics-Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.

In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated "civilization and enlightenment" while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a transnational one.

Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men's lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing "history on the diagonal," Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century.

Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how local personalities together transformed Japan.

Routledge Readings on Security and Governance in Northeastern India: Resource Conflicts, Militarisation and Development Challenges presents some of the finest essays on a region that stretches across the Northeastern Himalaya, eight Indian States and many tribal and non-tribal peoples.

With a lucid Introduction, this and its companion volume, Routledge Readings on Colonial to Contemporary Northeastern India offer a compelling look into the society, polity, contemporary security and developmental issues in northeast India. It covers several critical themes and unravels complexities fraught by the unique biogeography and socio-political history of the region. The fifteen chapters in this multidisciplinary volume, divided into three sections, examine land laws, conflict and resource management and local governance. It discusses the political interplay of ethnicities and resource appropriation in a modernizing, globalizing economy as well as instances of conflicts and violence in highly militarized spaces in the region. It offers an engaged and insightful look into the rural and urban human development contexts in the region from authors who have contributed significantly to the academic and/or policy discourse on the subject.

This book will serve as essential reading for students, scholars, policymakers, practitioners of South Asian studies, Northeast India studies, history, development studies, labour studies, sociology, public administration, environmental studies, law and human rights, regional literature, cultural studies, geography, and economics.

This book focuses on security dynamics in the contemporary Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. It highlights the development of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, the contemporary challenges and opportunities confronting the principal powers that are active in this important sub-region, and analyzes and evaluates their policy responses. The various perspectives of the chapters all suggest that the stability and security of the Gulf sub-region is now and will continue in the future to be of vital importance to the global community. The chapters that compose the volume are organized into three thematic sections. Part I, 'Security Challenges and Power Configurations in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula: The Historical Context', comprises three chapters. Part II, consisting of seven chapters, is entitled, 'Contemporary Security Challenges and Opportunities in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.' Part III, 'Contemporary National Interests, Objectives, and Strategies of the Major Powers in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula', comprises five chapters. Finally, the volume ends with a concluding chapter.

Unfortunately, the contemporary unstable, heterogeneous Gulf sub-region is fraught with extremely serious and often urgent challenges that threaten the sub-region's security. This volume helps to illuminate the nature of the sub-regional environment and the contemporary challenges and opportunities that confront the various powers that are active in the Gulf. It also contributes to a greater understanding of the interests, contemporary objectives, and strategies of those powers as they formulate and implement policies in response to the challenges and opportunities that they confront.

This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, Middle Eastern politics and International Relations.

Seven minutes past midnight on 9 March 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a more than 1,800-degree firestorm that liquefied asphalt and vaporised thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: "If we lose, we'll be tried as war criminals".

James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight "precision" bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians-which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

While past public crises were addressed by focusing on protecting the public safety and maintaining public order, public crises today, such as the COVID-19 outbreak, require different responses and face more challenges. Crisis Communication in China examines crisis communication strategies taken by the Chinese government during public crises and discusses how the public react to these strategies, exploring the cultural context and the development of digital media as critical factors underlying the strategies adopted.

Much of the previous research on crisis communication in China adopted Coombs' Situational Crisis Communication Theory. However, as a theory proposed and developed in the West, its application in a non-Western culture requires testing. In addition, cultural influences and the role of digital technology have been discussed in some existing literature, but few studies have attempted to integrate these elements into crisis communication theories. In order to fill these two gaps, this research analyses the Chinese government's crisis communication strategies during the H7N9 crisis, examining not only the government's management of the crisis but also the public's reaction to the official communication process. It also explores the cultural context and the development of digital media as critical factors underlying the strategies adopted. The analysis contributes to development of a comprehensive theory that incorporates these two elements, which shows and identifies related crisis communication strategies emerged from cultural traditions and the development of digital media.

Following the success of The China Questions, a new volume of insights from top China specialists explains key issues shaping today's US-China relationship.

For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the US-China relationship? For the global economy and international security? Seeking to clarify central issues, provide historical perspective, and demystify stereotypes, Maria Adele Carrai, Jennifer Rudolph, and Michael Szonyi and an exceptional group of China experts offer essential insights into the many dimensions of the world's most important bilateral relationship.

Ranging across questions of security, economics, military development, climate change, public health, science and technology, education, and the worrying flashpoints of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, these concise essays provide an authoritative look at key sites of friction and potential collaboration, with an eye on where the US-China relationship may go in the future. Readers hear from leading thinkers such as James Millward on Xinjiang, Elizabeth Economy on diplomacy, Shelley Rigger on Taiwan, and Winnie Yip and William Hsiao on public health.

The voices included in The China Questions 2 recognize that the US-China relationship has changed, and that the policy of engagement needs to change too. But they argue that zero-sum thinking is not the answer. Much that is good for one society is good for both-we are facing not another Cold War but rather a complex and contextually rooted mixture of conflict, competition, and cooperation that needs to be understood on its own terms.

This interdisciplinary book offers a new analysis of the concepts, spaces, and practices of activism that emerge under diverse authoritarian modes of governance in Asia.

Demonstrating the limitations of existing conceptual approaches in accounting for activism in Asia, the book also offers new understandings of authoritarian governance practices and how these shape state-civil society relations. In conjunction with its tripartite theoretical framework, the book presents regional knowledge from an array of countries in Asia, with empirically rich contributions from both scholars and activists.

Through in-depth case studies, the book offers new scholarly insights that highlight the ways in which activism emerges and is contested across Asia. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, law, and sociology.

NGOs and Civil Society in Thailand critically examines the relationships of civil society to nongovernmental organisations in Thailand, and examines the 'NGOisation' of civil society, how NGOs are funded and governed, and in what way the NGOs has been shaped to work with the funder.

NGOisation is a phenomenon by which the funded organisations are impelled to transform suit their funder as reliable partners. Focusing on Thailand, an Asian country where NGOs have been heavily relied on the public sector for funding, the book analyses the relations between NGOs and their significant funder, Thailand Health Promotion Foundation (THPF), one of the biggest and most influential players in the NGO sector. As the NGO funded organisations are impelled to transform and adapt to become more professionalised, institutionalised, bureaucratised, and depoliticised to suit their funder as reliable partners, their characteristics and relations with the state are complex and interactive. Engaging with key stakeholders in the field of NGO and public governance in Thailand, the book demonstrates how THPF changed the NGO landscape, integrating them and innovatively coordinating non-state initiatives into public governance system.

A novel contribution to the study of NGOs and the state, the book also addresses NGO transformation, politics, and governance. It will be of interest to academics working on Asian Politics, civil society, public policy and public management.