Simon Avenell and Akihiro Ogawa published a co-edited volume Transnational Civil Society in Asia: The Potential of Grassroots Regionalization (Routledge, 2021). The book is a compilation of essays on civil society in Asia beyond national borders.

Dr Udan Fernando, ACSRN Colombo Charter head, discussed at a Virtual Panel Discussion Event for the World Bank’s Sri Lanka Development Update on April 28, 2021, COVID-19’s impact on the economy, referring to poverty and employment. The report is available here.

David Chiavacci published a co-edited volume Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia: Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Ming-sho Ho, Naoto Higuchi, and Akihiro Ogawa contributed the chapters. The book is available via open access here. 

Territorial disputes are one of the main sources of tension in Northeast Asia. Escalation in such conflicts often stems from a widely shared public perception that the territory in question is of the utmost importance to the nation. While that’s frequently not true in economic, military, or political terms, citizens’ groups and other domestic actors throughout the region have mounted sustained campaigns to protect or recover disputed islands. Quite often, these campaigns have wide-ranging domestic and international consequences.

Why and how do territorial disputes that at one point mattered little, become salient? Focusing on non-state actors rather than political elites, Alexander Bukh explains how and why apparently inconsequential territories become central to national discourse in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These Islands Are Ours challenges the conventional wisdom that disputes-related campaigns originate in the desire to protect national territory and traces their roots to times of crisis in the respective societies. This book gives us a new way to understand the nature of territorial disputes and how they inform national identities by exploring the processes of their social construction, and amplification.

Yooil Bae, with Jeffery M. Sellers and Anders Lidström, published Multilevel Democracy: How Local Institutions and Civil Society Shape the Modern State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). This book is the first comprehensive analysis of multilevel democracy in 21 developed countries and highlights the role of institutions and civil society.