Michael Barr explores the complex and covert networks of power at work in one of the world's most prosperous countries - the city-state of Singapore. He argues that the contemporary networks of power are a deliberate project initiated and managed by Lee Kuan Yew - former prime minister and Singapore's 'founding father' - designed to empower himself and his family. Barr identifies the crucial institutions of power - including the country's sovereign wealth funds, and the government-linked companies - together with five critical features that form the key to understanding the nature of the networks. He provides an assessment of possible shifts of power within the elite in the wake of Lee Kuan Yew's son, Lee Hsien Loong, assuming power, and considers the possibility of a more fundamental democratic shift in Singapore's political system.

This book rejects the notion that the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis was further evidence that ultimately capitalism can only develop within liberal social and political institutions.

War, famine, poverty, organized crime, environmental catastrophes, refugees, epidemics and pandemics, modern slavery – all these affect people in the non-Western world to an increasingly disproportionate extent. It is also where wealthy governments wield economic leverage and military force to renegotiate existing norms of international relations. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to overestimate the importance and urgency of comprehending the mechanisms and motivations driving these phenomena. This book is the outcome of a decade-long effort to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of what motivates non-Western governments’ decisions to cooperate/not cooperate regionally. It starts by acknowledging the Western-centrism of prevailing international relations theories, abandoning deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the nature and roles of states, and redefining state weakness. The inquiry continues by elaborating this new concept and applying it to Southeast Asian polities while positing that it creates governments vulnerable to internal and external threats, in line with Joel S. Migdal’s well-known findings on the topic. A set of regional cooperation strategies is then inferred, based on the survival needs of insecure governing elites and its empirical validity is tested against the experience of regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The second part of the book provides an in-depth examination of how Southeast Asian governments’ shared security needs and interests shaped the emergence of the identified regional cooperation pattern and its evolution over 50 years of cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Overall, this book is a call to international relations scholars to do our part in understanding non-Western experiences and making a substantive contribution to addressing humanity’s most intractable security threats.

"Singapore ... is a repressive place where the government severely restricts what can be said, published, performed, read, or watched. Those who criticize the government or the judiciary, or publicly discuss race and religion, frequently find themselves facing criminal investigations and charges, or civil defamation suits and crippling damages. Public demonstrations and other peaceful assemblies are severely limited, and failue to comply with detailed restrictions on what can be said and who can participate in public gatherings often leads to arrest. [This report] documents the Singaporean government's use of its overbroad criminal laws, oppressive regulatory restrictions, access to funding, and civil lawsuits to control and limit critical speech or peaceful protest. It provides an in-depth analysis of the laws and regulations used to suppress speech and assembly, including the Public Order Act, the Sedition Act, the Broadcasting Act, various Penal Code provisions, and laws on criminal contempt, and examines how those provisions have been used against peaceful activists. ... Human Rights Watch calls on Singapore's government to drop all pending charges and investigations against those being prosecuted for the exercise of their freedom of expression or their right to participate in peaceful assemblies, and amend or repeal relevant laws to bring them into line with international human rights standards."--Back cover.

In 1997, the World Bank announced a strategy to help its borrowers combat corruption, despite earlier claims that work of this kin violated the Bank's non-political mandate. Despite many attempts to reshape corruption as an economic issue rather than a political one, the non-political mandate has never been satisfactorily addressed. Heather Marquette argues that the Bank should focus in its strengths and avoid the more controversial components of its anti-corruption programme, which threaten its credibility.