On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, an earthquake with an epicenter 130 kilometers east of Sendai off the Pacific coast of northern Japan shook the Tohoku region more violently than any tremor in a thousand years. The quake was approximately 9.0 in magnitude, and it in turn triggered a set of tsunami hurtling across the Pacific Ocean, striking first the coast of Tohoku with waves of unprecedented height and strength, along a coastline stretching roughly 400 kilometers. In Fukushima, 180 kilometers west-southwest of the epicenter, 15-meter waves roared over seawalls supposedly protecting a nuclear reactor built just a few meters from the ocean's edge, starting a chain of events that resulted in an explosion the following day that began the release of radioactive materials (which continues still), sparking high anxiety if not palpable panic in Tokyo, the center of which is 240 kilometers to the south-southwest of the Fukushima nuclear complex.

In 1993, Cambodian history turned a very significant corner with the promulgation of a new liberal constitution aimed at moving the country forward from its turbulent past. Many challenges remained, however; one of which was how to deal with the most horrific crimes of the “despicable Pol Pot” regime (1975–79)—as Cambodians called it—during which the radical pursuit of utopian revolutionary ideas cost roughly two million Cambodians their lives. Searching for mechanisms to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes is seldom simple, as this essay, an assessment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal twenty years on from the founding of the new Cambodian state and thirty-four years after the fall of the Pol Pot regime, attests. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, whose formal name is the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), was established in 2006, providing the first hope that Khmer Rouge leaders would finally be brought to justice and held to account for their hideous crimes.

“I wish for you two boys and two girls,” the elderly man pronounced. He was addressing both myself and my fiancé as he reached out to shake our hands as we were leaving his traditional wooden house. He had told us earlier that he spends his days in this late chapter of his life enjoying his grandchildren and tending his vegetable plot. Now at the door ready to leave I hesitated, not wanting to extend my hand, but then I did so anyway. This grandfather was Nuon Chea, “Brother Number Two” of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime, officially known as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79). The year was 2002. My fiancé, a cameraman, was working with reporter and author Tom Fawthrop on a documentary about former Khmer Rouge leaders' evasion of justice and I had been invited to come along.

In early 2013, India's then comptroller and auditor general (CAG), Vinod Rai, while delivering a speech at Harvard University's Kennedy School, wondered whether his office should be confined to being “mere accountants.” That this question could be raised in a public forum, and that too outside India, spoke to the transformation in recent times of Rai's stature and the office that he held. The winds of change were reflected in the Indian Supreme Court's rejection in 2013 of a public interest litigation challenging the authority of the auditor general, who is a constitutional authority, to conduct performance audits of the government. Significantly, the Court ruled, the “CAG is not a munim [accountant] to go into the balance-sheets. The CAG is a constitutional authority entitled to review and conduct performance audit on revenue allocations . . . and examine matters relating to the economy and how the government uses its resources.”

After more than thirty years of economic reforms, China appears to have settled into a form of state capitalism that is likely to endure as long as the Communist Party retains power. This essay provides a critical overview of some of the key features and contradictions that characterize this particular form of capitalism and reviews some recent influential critiques of this system. Many observers have viewed the resurgence of the state-controlled economy as a shift away from policies more hospitable to both indigenous entrepreneurs and foreign capital in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on the author's own research with entrepreneurs in China, however, this essay argues for the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of the controlling state and the free market.

Malaysia's plans to become a transnational hub for Islamic finance represent an effort to mobilize religion to create new global networks for the circulation of capital. This article first contextualizes such efforts within the broader contours of Malaysia's political history, addressing the classification of ethnicity and religion by both the colonial and postcolonial states. The article describes how Islamic finance is defined by practitioners in Malaysia and explains the key features they invoke to distinguish it from what they call “conventional finance”. Finally, it identifies the steps undertaken by the state to make the country a global center of Islamic finance. As the recent financial crises have shaken confidence in North Atlantic financial systems, Malaysia is geographically and culturally well-positioned between two emergent economic regions currently at the forefront of global economic growth.

This paper focuses on the majority population in the People's Republic of China—the Han—and their various collective identities. The Han play a pivotal role in consolidating the Chinese territory and the multiethnic Chinese nation. Therefore, the governments in the twentieth century have invested substantial efforts in promoting a unitary Han identity. In spite of that, powerful local identities related to native place, occupation, and family histories persist. This essay traces these identities and analyzes their intertwinement. Further, it discusses the question of ethnicity of both the Han and local identity categories, and concludes that while Han enact ethnicity in their relations to other minzu, local identity categories are more social than ethnic. It further posits that moments of confrontation, “degree” of ethnicity, scales of categorization, and relationality of identities are notions that should be given particular attention in the studies of ethnicity in China and elsewhere.

Using an unusual case of a democratic and militant shipbuilding union in 1960s South Korea as a window on society, this article explores the politics and ethos of the first decade of Park Chung Hee's rule. Pronounced public support for the union in the region, dense links between the unionists and local progressives, and the surprisingly optimistic and positive expectations of the military government that shipyard workers exhibited in this period all call our attention to the still quite fluid and open terrain of politics before the full-blown authoritarianism of the 1970s. These dynamic aspects of the 1960s, when both elites and non-elites engaged major postcolonial questions of democracy, development, and unification, are mostly hidden from view today, overwhelmed by the power of the dominant minju discourse that became hegemonic in the democracy movement during the 1980s and 1990s. Excavating the forgotten alliance between an important union and the progressives surrounding it thus opens a space for alternative understandings of South Korean development and democratization.

Sites, here the eighth-century Buddhist shrine Borobudur and other remains of the Hindu-Buddhist past located in colonial (predominantly Islamic) Java, are in this article our analytical tool to provide insight into the local and transnational dimensions of heritage politics and processes of in- and exclusion in Asia and Europe around 1900. Because we recognize these “sites” as centers of multiple historical, political, and moral spaces that transgress state boundaries, we take this concept beyond the nation-state-centered lieu de mémoire. By exploring how site-related objects traveled from temple ruins in Java to places elsewhere in the world (here: Siam, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain) and back to Java, we show the transformation of heritage engagements around 1900 at multiple locations, and we make clear why, despite professionalizing state-centered heritage politics, state control was limited. We argue that the mechanisms of exchange and reciprocal interdependence, as theorized by Marcel Mauss, are crucial to understand the moral and economic engagements that define the problem of heritage, at local and transnational levels.

This study examines Chinese imperial polygamy under two aspects, as institution and actual practice. Institution refers to its existence as a set of rules and expectations, practice to the actual ways in which imperial people carried out polygamy as recorded in both historical and fictional sources. The key to the institutionalization of polygamy had to do with the idea that a ruler did not engage in polygamy because he wanted to, but because he had to in order to fulfill his role as Son of Heaven. He was obligated to extend the patriline and was as if following a hallowed directive. Practice had to do with what rules and expectations could not control or predict, including how a man justified his role as polygamist, his polygamous transgressions, and how he dealt with the main challenge to polygamous harmony, women's jealousy and rivalry.

This essay explores records from Beijing's efforts to intern and reform the city's “lumpenproletariat” after 1949. Connecting these reports to central government directives about national thought reform policy, I show that reeducators and their superiors discoursed in detail about the existence of resisters, who opposed and defied the government, but whom reformatory staff explicitly labeled as non-enemies. The case of Beijing reformatories suggests that anti-state, but non-counterrevolutionary resistance was an important symbolic and rhetorical category, central to the Chinese Communist Party's articulation of its own purpose. In the context of reeducation, opposition to the party-state constituted evidence of a founding “truth”: feudal, imperialist, and capitalist oppression had so damaged the Chinese nation that only a radical and revolutionary transformation could save it. Over the course of the 1950s, reading and analyzing resistance in this way led policy makers to redefine “The People” as well as the social place of individuals accused of activities like prostitution, begging, and petty crime.