Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance

Description

As countries in Asia try to create unified polities, many face challenges from minority groups within their own borders seeking independence. This volume brings together international experts on countries in all regions of Asia to debate how differently they have responded to this problem. Why have some Asian countries, for example, clamped down on their national minorities in favour of homogeneity, whereas others have been willing to accommodate statehood or at least some form of political autonomy? Together they suggest broad patterns and explanatory factors that are rooted in the domestic arena, including state structure and regime type, as well as historical trajectories. In particular, they find that the paths to independence, as well as the cultural elements that have been selected to define post-colonial identities, have decisively influenced state strategies.

Jacques Bertrand is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Andre Laliberte is Associate Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan, 1989-2003 (2004) and has edited, with Marc Lanteigne, The Chinese Party-State at the Turn of the Millennium: Legitimacy and Adaptation (2008).

'This book offers an unrivalled collection of essays on the (mis)management of multinationalism across Asia, in terms of separatist challenges and various efforts to accommodate them through various forms of autonomy and federalism. The book is certain to become the focal point of reference for scholarly debate on such themes. Each and every essay in the volume rewards reading and rereading, and the volume as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, in terms of the considerable light it sheds on problems of managing multi-nationalism in Asia.' John T. Sidel, London School of Economics and Political Science