The Asian Bioethics Review covers a broad range of topics relating to bioethics. An online academic journal, ABR provides a forum to express and exchange original ideas on all aspects of bioethics, especially those relevant to the region. The journal promotes multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary studies and will appeal to all working in the field of ethics in medicine and healthcare, genetics, law, policy, science studies and research.

In March 2009, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) was briefly taken over by a Christian faction. Their coup was overturned within a matter of weeks, but the episode highlighted a variety ofissues, including the role of religion in civil society, sex education, homosexuality, state intervention and media engagement. Although the immediate issue was control of an activist group concerned with women's rights, it has implications for the agendas and concerns of NGOs, "culture wars", the processes of citizenry mobilization, mass participation and noisy democracy, and liberal voices in contemporary Singapore. In this book, academics and public intellectuals examine the AWARE saga within the context of Singapore's civil society, considering the political and historical background and how the issues it raised relate to contemporary societal trends. In addition to documenting a milestone event for Singapore's civil society, the authors offer provocative interpretations that will interest a broad range of readers.

Banditry was rife around Batavia (modern Jarkata) during the late colonial period. Banditry in West Java identifies the bandits and describes their working methods and their motives, which at times went beyond simple self-enrichment. The author also explores the world of the robbers' victims, mainly city-dwellers, who viewed the bandits as the antithesis of civilization and made them into convenient objects onto which respectable citizens projected their own preoccupations with sex, violence, and magic. The colonial police force in the Dutch East Indies was reformed in the early 1920s, and banditry was subsequently brought under control. However, the bandit tradition lived on in Javanese popular imagination and folk culture, particularly in the tales of Si Pitung, a Robin Hood figure who flourished in nineteenth-century Batavia.

The Geneva conference on Laos of 1961-1962, which Britain helped initiate and bring to a conclusion, throws light on Britain's policy in Southeast Asia during what in some sense may be seen as the last of the decades in which its influence was crucial. This book is the first to make full use of the British archives to explore the conference, but it also bears on the history of Laos, of Vietnam, and of Southeast Asia generally. The core of the Geneva settlement was the neutralisation of Laos, the United States to strengthen its commitment to Thailand and Vietnam. North Vietnam could accept this result only if it allowed continued use of the Ho Chi Minh trail, which sustained resistance in South Vietnam. Under these circumstances, the agreement on neutralisation, though elaborately negotiated, had little chance of success. In the longer term, however, the agreement played a part in developing the concept of a neutral Southeast Asia advanced by ASEAN. The book is important for scholars in the various fields it touches, including modern Southeast Asian history, the history of Laos, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and international relations. It will be of expecial interest to those studying British policy at a time when Britain was seeking to reduce its commitments while continuing to avert the escalation of the Cold War.

A “conundrum” is a puzzle whose solution involves resolving a paradox. In this instance, the paradox arises from two widely held and conflicting assumptions: that the pathway to a modern economy requires exploiting and monetizing a country’s natural resources, and that the long-term prosperity of a nation depends on the conservation of those same resources. This book consciously seeks to avoid the mentality of “trade-offs,” where pro-development advocates view conservation efforts as impediments and conservationists are convinced that development inevitably leads to a loss for nature. Instead, through an evaluation of opportunities in the still pristine forests of the Cardamom Mountains and surrounding landscapes, the author seeks to demonstrate that wise management of a nation’s renewable natural resources can facilitate economic growth. Resolving the Cardamom Conundrum requires an economic model that provides robust growth, and that alleviates poverty over the short term and eradicates it over the medium term. Any other solution is impractical and morally unacceptable. The author points the way by indentifying innovative options linked to climate finance and low carbon development strategies that span the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietnamese coast. Their Indianized civilisation flourished for centuries, and they competed with the Vietnamese and Khmers for influence in mainland Southeast Asia. This book brings together essays on the Cham by specialists in history, archaeology, anthropology, art history and linguistics. It presents a revisionist overview of Cham history and a detailed explanation of how the Cham have been studied by different generations of scholars, as well as chapters on specific aspects of the Cham past. Several authors focus on archaeological work in central Vietnam that positions recent discoveries within the broader framework of Cham history. The authors synthesize work by previous scholars in order to illustrate what "Champa" has represented over the centuries. The book's fresh perspectives on the Cham provide penetrating insights into the history of Vietnam and on the broader dynamic of Southeast Asian history.

Published thrice yearly in April, August, and November by Singapore's East Asian Institute, China: An International Journal focuses on contemporary China, including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, covering the fields of politics, economics, society, geography, law, culture and international relations.

The interactions and mutual perceptions of China and Indonesia were a significant element in Asia's postcolonial transformation, but as result of the prevailing emphasis on diplomatic and political relations within a Cold War and nation-state framework, their multi-dimensional interrelationship and its complex domestic ramifications have escaped scholarly scrutiny. China and the Shaping of Indonesia provides a meticulous account of versatile interplay between knowledge, power, ethnicity, and diplomacy in the context of Sino-Indonesian interactions between 1949 and 1965. Taking a transnational approach that views Asia as a flexible geographical and political construct, this book addresses three central questions. First, what images of China were prevalent in Indonesia, and how were narratives about China construed and reconstructed? Second, why did the China Metaphor -- the projection of an imagined foreign land onto the local intellectural and political milieu -- become central to Indonesians' conception of themselves and a cause for self criticism and rediscovery? Third, how was the China Metaphor incorporated into Indonesia's domestic politics and culture, and how did it affect the postcolonial transformation, the fate of the ethnic Chinese minority, and Sino-Indonesian diplomacy? Employing a wide range of hitherto untapped primary materials in Indonesian and Chinese as well as his own interviews, Hong Liu presents a compelling argument that many influential politicians and intellectuals, among them Sukarno, Hatta, and Pramoedya, utilized China as an alternative model of modernity in conceiving and developing projects of social engineering, cultural regeneration and political restructuring that helped shape the trajectory of modern Indonesia. The multiplicity of China thus constituted a site of political contestations and intellectual imaginations. The study is a major contribution both to the intellectual and political history of Indonesia and to the reconceptualization of Asian studies, it also serves as a timely reminder of the importance of historicizing China's rising soft power in a transnational Asia.

Lo Jung-pang (1912‒81) was a renowned professor of Chinese history at the University of California at Davis. In 1957 he completed a 600-page typed manuscript entitled China as a Sea Power, 1127‒1368, but he died without arranging for the book to be published. Bruce Elleman found the manuscript in the UC Davis archives in 2004, and with the support of Dr Lo’s family prepared an edited version of the manuscript for publication.Lo Jung-pang argues that during each of the three periods when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises (the Qin and Han dynasties, the Sui and early Tang dynasties, and the Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties), coastal states took the initiative at a time when China was divided, maritime trade and exploration peaked when China was strong and unified, and then declined as Chinese power weakened. At such times, China’s people became absorbed by internal affairs, and state policy focused on threats from the north and the west. These cycles of maritime activity, each lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction.In the early 21st century, a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance, with important implications for trade, diplomacy and naval affairs. Events will not necessarily follow the same course as in the past, but Lo Jung-pang’s analysis suggests useful questions for the study of events as they unfold in the years and decades to come.

Chinese cuisine has had a deep impact on culinary traditions in Southeast Asia, where the lack of certain ingredients and acess to new ingredients along with the culinary knowledge of local people led Chinese migrnats to modify traditional dishes and to invent new food. This process brought the cuisine of southern China, considered by some writers to be "the finest in the world," into contact with a wide range of local and global cuisines and ingredients. When Chinese from Southeast Asia moved on to other parts of the world, they brought these variants of Chinese food with them, completing a cycle of culinary reproduction, localization andinvention, and globalization. the process does not end there, for the new context offers yet another set of ingredients and culinary traditions, and the "embedding and fusing of foods" continues, creating additional hybrid forms. Written by scholars whose deep familiarity with Chinese cuisine is both personal and academic, Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond is a book that anyone who has been fortunate enough to encounter Southeast Asian food will savour, and it provides a window on this world for those who have yet to discover it.