Building on the author’s 2012 book, Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought, this new book presents a comprehensive overview of Lee Kuan Yew’s strategic thought over the course of his entire life. It analyses the factors underlying Lee Kuan Yew’s thinking, discusses his own writings and speeches, and shows how his thinking on foreign policy, security and international relations evolved. It also appraises writing about Lee Kuan Yew and memorialisation of him, assessing how views of his legacy have changed and continue to change.

"Building on the author's 2012 book, Lee Kuan Yew's Strategic Thought, this new book presents a comprehensive overview of Lee Kuan Yew's strategic thought over the course of his entire life. It charts the development of Singapore over the last seven decades, showing how Lee Kuan Yew steered Singapore to prosperity and success through changing times and how he had an enormous impact on the development of Singapore and of Southeast Asia more generally. It analyses the factors underlying Lee Kuan Yew's thinking, discusses his own writings and speeches, and shows how his thinking on foreign policy, security and international relations evolved. It also appraises writing about Lee Kuan Yew and the memorialisation of him, assessing how views of his legacy have changed and continue to change"--

Lee Kuan Yew, as the founding father of independent Singapore, has had an enormous impact on the development of Singapore and of Southeast Asia more generally. Even in his 80s he is a key figure who continues to exert considerable influence from behind the scenes. This book presents a comprehensive overview of Lee Kuan Yew's strategic thought. It charts the development of Singapore over the last six decades, showing how Lee Kuan Yew has steered Singapore to prosperity and success through changing times. It analyses the factors underlying Lee Kuan Yew's thinking, discusses his own writings and speeches, and shows how his thinking on foreign policy, security and international relations has evolved over time.

Singapore has faced many pandemics over the centuries, from plague, smallpox and cholera to influenza and novel coronaviruses. By examining how different governments responded, this book considers what we can learn from their experiences. Public health strategies in the city-state were often affected by issues of ethnicity and class, as well as failure to take heed of key learnings from previous outbreaks. Pandemics are a recurrent and normal feature of the human experience. Alongside medical innovation and evidence-based policymaking, the study of history is also crucial in preparing for future pandemics.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, who served as prime minister for more than five years in the 1980s, was one of Japan’s leading postwar politicians. This book is a biography of him, but by interweaving international politics and media appraisals of him, it also serves as an examination of Japan’s postwar politics. Nakasone was an innovative conservative who actively criticized the conservative mainstream, and this book reveals from both domestic and foreign policy perspectives how the Liberal Democratic Party governed. The Nakasone government served not only as the final phase of the Cold War era of LDP factional politics but also as the starting point for the general mainstream faction system that followed. With the lengthy passage of time since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Japan’s 1955 party system, there is a need to reassess Nakasone, showing that there was much more to him than the popular picture of him as a far-right hawk who loudly advocated for Japan to engage in autonomous self-defense and as an opportunist leader of a small faction, and to place the era in which Nakasone lived its proper historical context.

This book examines key aspects of the Asia Pacific War (1931–1945), that was initially waged between Japan and China, before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor drew in the U.S.-led allied forces from 1941 to 1945. Part I of the book examines three interlocking components, the origins of the war; its impact on combatants and civilians; and its short-term legacy, including the huge changes that took place in the postwar governance of Japan. Part II explores the ongoing impact and legacy of the war for those in postwar Japan, and later generations, particularly through the examination of the ambiguity of state-led reconciliation with Japan’s neighbors, the growth of dynamic civil reconciliation efforts, and the prominent role of the arts in peace movements. Through a people-centered approach it filters historical events through the lens of the war’s impact on individuals, who found themselves players within a larger frame of the social history of Japan and caught up in the international power dynamics of the nuclear age. Featuring studies of contemporary peace activism, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Modern Asian and U.S. History, as well as those interested in postwar memory and reconciliation.

Nationalism and Decolonisation in Singapore analyses Singapore’s decolonisation movement between 1953 and 1963 and provides a framework to understand the deepest and most important unresolved conflicts in Singaporean society. This book demonstrates how these conflicts stem from four unresolved schisms dating from the decolonisation period: race, class, language, and the meaning of self-determination. The author argues that these schisms drove the events of decolonisation, the creation of Malaysia, and Singapore’s separation and continue to actively shape Singapore today. Using contemporary English- and Chinese-language sources from a wide array of perspectives, as well as numerous declassified official documents, this book provides a new approach to the most formative period of Singapore history. It explains in detail the different ideologies, institutions, and conflicts which shaped Singaporean politics and society during decolonisation. In particular, the book focuses on the leaders of the main groups which most heavily influenced Singapore’s anti-colonial nationalism – the Chinesespeaking, the working class, and left-wing intellectuals. It looks at Singapore in the context of global movements of nationalism, socialism, and decolonisation and provides a framework which can offer insight into similar attempts by postcolonial governments to construct new nation-states from plural societies. A novel study of Singapore’s independence struggle that incorporates and analyses multiple linguistic, socioeconomic, and political viewpoints, the book will be of interest to researchers of Southeast Asian history and politics and those interested in decolonisation, nationalism, identity, and the politics of race, class, and language.