"On 17 April 2020, eleven soldiers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) were killed during a battle with 40 fighters of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in Patikul town, in the Sulu region of Mindanao, southern Philippines. The ASG had apparently ambushed the troops during the latter's operations aimed at tracking down two senior ASG figures, Radullan Sahiron and Hatib Sawadjaan-the leader of the Philippine branch of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) global terror network. The firefight between the pro-ISIS ASG and the AFP forces was apparently the bloodiest in months. This encounter occurred in the midst of the worldwide novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak that had not spared the southern Philippines as well. A government spokesperson acknowledged the strain on the armed forces, who were on "the forefront as the government's arm to prevent the spread of the dreaded disease on the one hand", while simultaneously engaged in "battling this terrorist Abu Sayyaf Group""--

Examines key implications for democratization, cyber security, e-government, technical coordination and Internet policy and regulation.

Written by an established expert on Thailand, this is one of the first books to fully investigate the Thai media’s role during the Thaksin government’s first term. Incorporating political economy and media theory, the book provides a unique insight into globalization in Southeast Asia, analyzing the role of communications and media in regional cultural politics. Examining the period from the mid 1990s, Lewis makes a sustained comparison between Thailand and its neighbouring countries in relation to the media, business, politics and popular culture. Covering issues including business development, tourism, the Thai movie industry and the war on terror, the book argues that globalization as it relates to media, can be patterned on Thai experiences.

Seoul is a colossus both in its physical presence and the demand it places on any intellectual effort to understand it. How did it come to be? How can a city this immense work? Underlying its spectacle and incongruities is a city that might be described as ill at ease with its own past. The bitter rifts of Japanese colonization persist, as does the troubled aftermath of the Korean War and its divisions; the economic “Miracle on the Han” that followed is crosscut by memories of the violent dictatorship that drove it. In Seoul, author Ross King interrogates this contested history and its physical remnants, tacking between the city’s historiography and architecture, with attention to monuments, streets, and other urban spaces. The book’s structuring device is the dichotomy of erasure and memory as necessary preconditions for reinvention. King traces this phenomenon from the old dynasties to the Japanese regime and wartime destruction; he then follows the equally destructive reinvention of Korea under dictatorship to the brilliant city of the present with its extraordinary explosion of creativity and ideas—the post-1991 Hallyu, the Korean Wave. The final chapter returns to questions of forgetting and memory, but now as “conditions of possibility” for what would seem to underlie the present trajectory of this extraordinary city and culture. Seoul can be read, King suggests, in the context of the hybrid ideas that have characterized Korean cultural history. It may be their present eruption that accounts for the city of contradictions that confronts the contemporary observer and that most extraordinary of Korean phenomena: the rise of an alternative, virtual world, eclipsing both city and nation. Has the very idea of Korea been reinvented even as the weakly defined nation-state slips away?

The Routledge Handbook of Asian Law is a cutting-edge and comprehensive resource which surveys the interdisciplinary field of Asian Law. Written by an international team of experts, the chapters within cover issues as diverse as family law and Islamic courts, decentralisation and the revival of traditional forms of law, discourses on the rule of law, human rights, corporate governance and environmental protection The volume is divided into five parts covering: Asia in Law, and the Humanities and Social Sciences; The Political Economy of Law in Asia - Law in the Context of Asian Development; Asian traditions and their transformations; Law, the environment, and access to land and natural resources; People in Asia and their rights. Offering an overview of the full spectrum of Law in Asia, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, lawyers, graduate and undergraduate students studying this ever-evolving field.

Between Consolidation and Crisis focuses on five countries in Southeast Asia to examine how their elections have been conducted in the past two years, their domestic implications, and how the elections have differed from one another and from elections in other parts of Asia. Case studies on Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand provide an overall understanding of the impact of elections on the consolidation or crisis of new democratic and semi-democratic polities in the region of Southeast Asia.

Previously published as a special issue of Social Semiotics, this book grapples with such questions as: What does it mean to be a citizen in contemporary societies? What role do mass media play in the making of citizenship? Drawing on ground-breaking work from scholars around the world known for their contributions to the study of media and politics, this volume covers a range of practices of mediated citizenship, with chapters studying the mourning after the deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and notions of authenticity in letters written to British Conservative politician Boris Johnson. The authors explore discourses of nationalism in the English and Scottish Press, and examine struggles over definitions of the public in Australian public service broadcasting and the US Medicare debate. Emerging possibilities for mediated citizenship are assessed in three studies of online activism and participation in the US and China. The book builds on conventional understandings of citizenship and the public sphere, calling attention to the need for understanding affective attachments to politics. Finally, it demonstrates that we cannot fully understand citizenship without looking at the concrete workings of power in and through mediated discourse.