Taekyoon Kim

The Rohingya, described by the United Nations (UN) as ‘the most persecuted minority in the world’ (United Nations, 2017), have faced systemic discrimination and violence in Myanmar for decades. The...

Even though international legislation recognises the eradication of gender- based violence as a crucial target for the promotion of human rights and the achievement of the sustainable development of the world, violence against women has received little intellectual attention and scholarly intervention from academia. In the African region, where diverse sociocultural and institutional gender discriminative factors often mean unequal power relations between women and men, the prevalence of gender-based violence is particularly critical. This article examines the institutional implications of violence against women by comparing South Africa and Botswana, two countries that adopted democratic systems after gaining independence from the United Kingdom. It highlights the importance of the Constitutions of both countries and the representation of woman in politics. The divergence between the two states’ legal and political approaches to gender equality and human rights underscores the role of gender-specific institutions in the prevalence of violence against women. This article also uncovers the limitations of existing strategies and proposes a better understanding of inequality within gender relations and its reflection within the frame of institutions to find a way to resolve violence against women and achieve gender justice.

Instead of criminalizing the opium economy or seeing it as a natural occurrence, opium production must be acknowledged as a basis for political and economic exchanges, which either unites or divides relevant stakeholders. This study employs an analytical framework called embedded governance to analyze opium production in Shan State, Myanmar in a new light. An alternative reading reveals a tripartite interdependency between the central government, ethnic armed groups and rural poppy growers; and marks a significant contribution to existing research which is largely focused on the elite-bargaining between armed actors and the government. We demonstrate that the opium economy delivers basic services and higher income for rural households, expands business conglomerates and civil society, and provides incentives for ceasefire negotiations. Nevertheless, the opium economy is also a basis for land-grabbing, forced taxation and public health crisis arising from drug addiction.

This essay is undertaken to analyze South Korea’s successful strategies in tracing promptly and dealing properly with the corona pandemic. The “K-Quarantine” model can be identified as a combined total package of state-society synergy, equipped with a series of critical factors, such as institutionalized learning effects from MERS, the government leadership inherited from Korea’s development state in the past, civic engagements with voluntary and transparent channels, high level of medical and ICT technology, and mixed accountability between coercive governance and adaptive governance. The Korean model, despite its successful achievements, can neither be exported nor imitated by the Global South, since it is uniquely home-grown within Korea’s specific contexts and domestic multi-stakeholders involved in mixed accountability.

Welfare politics can be largely assessed by the following three kinds of political prisms: bureaucratic politics, partisan politics, and social politics. Bureaucratic and partisan politics which accounted for the evolution of welfare states in East Asia are not adequate to illuminate the difference in recent welfare reforms between Korea and Japan after a significant political transition. Social politics is construed as a triangular relationship between civic advocacy groups, trade unions, and political leaders. The relative strength and weakness of civic advocacy groups in Korea and Japan, respectively, provide an analytical niche capable of explaining cross-national variations in welfare politics. The original version of the power resources model thus needs to be complemented by incorporating the role of civil society mobilisation in welfare politics. The core of new power resources in our comparative analysis is alliance-building led by non-parliamentary social forces, which cannot be easily measured by quantifiable strength of labour movements and affiliated political parties.

This study explores how Japanese development non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) had altered their patterns of advocacy and accountability after changes in political structure that occurred in the 2000s when the Democratic Party of Japan created the two‐party system and the Liberal Democratic Party took power again. After the 1990s, a unique feature of development NGOs actively performing advocacy and accountability within the ODA domain, while also eagerly reaching political authorities by forming networks, was found. Behind their efforts were the appearance and expansion of the Democratic Party of Japan through its systematic and political ties. As concluding remarks, the active participation of civil society not only represents the level of internal resources mobilized within the civil society network, but is also an indicator on how supportive the policy space at the bottom is towards civil society.