How can crisis, breakdown, violence, and collapse be explained in the social sciences? This paper engages with this broad question by studying an extraordinary episode of mass tension and anxiety in postwar Sri Lanka caused by a mystery male predator known as the “grease devil.” Reports of widespread attacks on women in mid-2011 by this shadowy, ubiquitous, and powerful being led to heightened levels of vigilance and fear across large parts of rural and peri-urban Sri Lanka. It had a particularly strong impact on the formerly war-torn northeastern part of the island, where it led to violent confrontations between affected communities and the police and military. Drawing on primary research and by engaging with a range of literatures across the historical and social science literature, this paper attempts to reconstruct and understand the grease devil crisis. In doing so, it identifies and evaluates the different ways in which the crisis could be explained and the extent to which these approaches produce analytically relevant insights.

In the last three decades, a number of Asian thinkers supportive of, or opposed to, authoritarian rule have developed culture-based theories of democracy that challenge, or buttress, a liberal, “Western” understanding of democratic rule. The most famous expression was the “Asian values” discourse of government-linked intellectuals in Singapore and Malaysia, but there has also been a “political Confucianist” critique of “Western democracy” in China as well as claims that only “Thai-style democracy” is appropriate in Thailand. Less well known is a pro-democratic stance in Asia rooted in the region's major religious traditions. These apparently contradictory discourses have been dialectically related in the post–Cold War era: authoritarian rulers reacted to universalist claims about democracy with assertions of cultural particularism which, in turn, triggered a reaction by Asian democrats who pointed to the liberal character of world religions practiced in the region. While the civilizational critique of “Western” democracy (the origins of which can be traced to Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan) has contributed to democratic decline in the region, there has also been push back by offering an interpretation based on East Asia's major religious traditions to show that “Asian values” are not incompatible with democracy.

Since independence, India has had electoral quotas for Scheduled Castes (SCs, Dalits, “untouchables”). These quotas have been praised for empowering members of a deprived community, but have also been criticized for bringing to power SC politicians who are mere tools in the hands of the upper castes. Tracing the history of these quotas through four critical junctures, I show how a British attempt to strengthen their own control of India eventually resulted in one of the world's most extensive quota systems for minorities. The quota system was in the end a compromise between several political goals, and was not strongly supported by anyone. Also, while the quotas were designed to integrate SC politicians into mainstream politics, there was a subtle and gradual shift in the debate about them, to being about development for the SC community as such. This created a disjuncture between the design of the quota system and the expectation of what it would achieve. The case of quotas in India illustrates how policy choices often result from long path-dependent processes, how policy makers struggle with trade-offs when trying to design institutions, and also the power of expectations in shaping the perceptions of the outcomes of those institutions.

Naiza Khan's The Manora Archive (2007–), the product of her long-term engagement with a small island in Karachi's harbor, is exemplary of both Pakistan's vibrant contemporary art and its burgeoning discourse of urban space. Dominated by a naval base and port rejuvenation project, nearly all of Manora's civilian population was bought out by investors in 2006 for a now-abandoned real estate development. Khan has recorded the island's abandoned architecture in photographs and video, documenting its descent into ruins. Her visual archive, which also includes drawings, prints, and paintings based on the photographs, presents Manora's ruins as metonymic of Karachi's colonial and postcolonial histories. This article makes two interlocking claims: first, that Khan's artistic work supplements scholarship on the relationship between violence and urban development by highlighting issues of temporality and bodily experience, and, second, that her work productively exploits the tension between the documentary mode and more traditional artistic media.

Amid the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry finds its authority over the forested areas (kawasan hutan) under pressure and continues to pursue strategies to legally maintain the areas within its jurisdiction. Combining insights from legal studies with political economy, this article applies the concept of “political forests” to contemporary contestations and the development of “rule of law” in relation to Indonesia's forested areas. Establishing legal certainty and “rule of law” are widely asserted to be important but never fully achieved. Two cases demonstrate this: the first focuses on the negotiated resolution of overlapping permits in the kawasan hutan between the center and the region in Central Kalimantan Province. The second examines the maneuvers of the Ministry of Forestry to (re)assert its authority over kawasan hutan by classifying palm oil as a tree crop. The article concludes that the widespread quest for certainty and rule of law is quixotic because it ignores the realities of political economy, including social conflict, beneath the veneer of law.

This article rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century. Through an extended case study of the imperial mosque in Allahabad, which was periodically subject to British intervention over some sixty years, it traces vicissitudes in attitudes towards history, religion, and the social existence of Muslims in India generally and Allahabad in particular. The article argues for the need to look beyond the narrative of Britain's relationship with architecture as artefact or heritage—a relationship that took on institutional form in the 1860s—to the comparatively less familiar story of the Company State's prolonged and serious interest in the built environment, and specifically religious buildings, as part of the political economy of its rule. It demonstrates that such an interest was simultaneously a logical outcome of and a tension within the legitimating discourses that the Company State fashioned during the last half-century of its rule in India.

This article revisits the criticisms of “diaspora” by Wang Gungwu, Ien Ang, and Shu-mei Shih, and urges a return to the concept with an attention to temporality. Focusing on the story of Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957)—an Edinburgh-educated baba Chinese who led a Confucian revival in Singapore in the 1890s, clashed with May Fourth writer Lu Xun in China in the 1920s, and has been celebrated since the 1990s—this article argues that diaspora is less a collection of communities than a series of moments in which reconnections with a putative homeland take place. By considering how “diaspora moments” emerge and create actors, scholars may ask why and for whom essential ties become useful, and how the history of mass emigration foregrounds a contingent Chinese identity. Temporally inflected, diaspora is a process to reckon with a world in flux, hence a useful paradigm for analysis.

Indonesia stands out as one of the most successful cases of democratic transformation in Asia, a continent that has been, with several notable exceptions, generally resistant to democratic change over the last three decades. Taking its cue from other Asian democracies, this article considers the degree to which economic modernization and ethnic factors might account for Indonesia's relative democratic success. With regard to both, it is proposed that a key factor has been the failure of Indonesia's political cleavage structure to express social conflicts that might undermine democracy. Instead, Indonesia's democratic model has been based on an inclusionary elite settlement in which powerful political and economic actors have gained a stake in the system, largely through access to patronage. This settlement has consolidated Indonesian democracy, but it has also generated costs that have been borne by relatively disempowered groups, reflected in continuing economic and gender inequality.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of overseas Chinese businessmen created a private international remittance network linking the southeastern littoral zone of the Qing empire with the colonies of mainland and archipelagic Southeast Asia. Holding together this transnational network were Qiaopiju remittance firms that succeeded in controlling the remittance trade not by relying on traditional forms of economic organization or behavior, but by pioneering a unique combination of capitalist profit-making strategies, culturalist customer services, and flexible interfirm relations. The organizational structure and business practices of Qiaopiju allowed them to successfully adapt to and negotiate with the emerging regulatory regimes of the nation-state, colonial, and capitalist world systems in order to dominate the international remittance industry for more than a century.

Based on a neo-Confucian vision that the monarch's mandate relied on listening to his people's grievances, the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) empowered subjects regardless of gender or status to address grievances to the sovereign that had not been rectified in lower courts. Contrary to the preconceived notion that women of the Chosŏn were silent subjects outside their domestic boundary, their petitioning activity shows that women, irrespective of their status, had the same legal capacity as their male counterparts to appeal grievances at local and capital levels. This article focuses on women's petitions and their linguistic practices to show how their petitioning activity complicated the gender dynamics of Confucian society. While the gender hierarchy was reinforced through women's narrative strategy as they appropriated the discourse of domesticity, I posit that women as legal agents were regendering legal identity by constructing a sense of personhood via their petitioning practice. Through articulating their gendered narratives, women struggled to defend not only themselves and their own sense of morality but also their entire family.

From the invention of imperial authority along the North-West Frontier of British India, subjects were divided between the “civilized” inhabitants populating the cultivated plains and the “wild tribes” living in the hills. The problem of governing this latter group, the “independent tribes,” proved a vexed one for the British Raj. The mechanism developed by imperial administrators to manage the frontier inhabitants was the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), first promulgated in 1872 and still in effect today. The FCR was designed to exclude the Frontier's inhabitants from the colonial judiciary, and more broadly the colonial sphere, encapsulating them in their own colonially sanctioned “tradition.” Exploring the use of the FCR as an instrument of governance from its first inception into the twentieth century, this article argues that it was key to shaping the nature of frontier rule, which in turn shaped the very nature of the colonial state itself.

Mainstream Chinese discussions of “democracy” have long betrayed a decidedly populist understanding of the concept. Xi Jinping draws freely on this tradition in formulating his China Dream. Xi's efforts are part of the Chinese Communist Party's “re-Orientation” of official propaganda to showcase the glories of the ancient civilization that it claims to represent and rejuvenate. The idea of “democracy” (minzhu 民主)—understood in populist rather than institutional terms—plays an important role in the process. This populist interpretation of “democracy” seeks to elide the fundamental contradiction between Enlightenment values and illiberal politics. Whether it will prove persuasive to contemporary Chinese intellectuals remains to be seen.

The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi‘ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its entanglement with state regulation of religion. An advertising campaign by a Shi‘ite media center illustrates that such religious activism with global ramifications can only be understood if one also takes its intersection with state-sponsored regimes of religious diversity into account. Media practices of Indian Muslims as a vulnerable minority are especially responsive to normative discourses and images of religious diversity, and mobilize alternative strands of Indian secularism in order to counteract the fragility of their citizenship.

The essays in this symposium are longing for completion. A heavy Indian shadow hangs over them. Asian democracy is the overall theme of the symposium, but India, Asia's biggest “democratic behemoth,” to use Edward Aspinall's phrase, is more or less missing. Why is a discussion of Indian democracy necessary for this symposium? What would it add to the arguments made here and the themes discussed?

Revisiting the political and social history of Seoul, Korea, in 1945, this article assesses responses to Japanese defeat and the end of empire in the context of American military occupation. The arrival of the Americans forced Japanese and Koreans alike to rethink their positions in the world. Drawing on past colonial practices, Japanese residents used the immediate post-surrender moment to ponder their future prospects, recording those thoughts in a number of public and private sources. They negotiated the passage from a colonial to a post-imperial society, I argue, by embracing a consciousness of a defeated people while disregarding criticisms of colonial rule. This investigation seeks to interpret the immediate post-World War II moment in Seoul less as a founding moment of the Cold War and more as an important transition in the history of decolonization.

This article examines the development of the Chinese discourse on consumption and standards of living from the early twentieth century to the implementation of the New Life Movement in the mid-1930s. During this period, the idea that China's economy was characterized by scarcity rather than growth—and thus was experiencing a different level of development from the industrialized West—caused Chinese intellectuals and officials to question the wisdom of adopting Western-style consumerist habits and “extravagant” standard of living. In this context, they struggled to find a balance between a supposedly universal model of economic modernization and China's particular nation-building and developmental needs. This early twentieth-century debate illustrates how nationalist and developmental perspectives hindered the adoption of liberal models of consumerist economy, marking the beginning of China's uneasy relationship with a free-market economy as well as a growing tension between urban consumerist trends and central planning. It also helped bring about new forms of frugal modernity that were to culminate in the New Life Movement.

It is hard to argue against the view that liberalism and empire have historically shared the same terrain of political ideas. If Raymond Williams is correct, then there is indeed an older set of implications attached to the words “liberal” and “liberalism” dating back to uses of the word “liberty,” commonly known in Shakespearean England, especially as expressed in “liberties of the subject,” that is, to a far more limited construction of the word “liberty” than its modern usage would allow (Williams 1976, 180). Liberty in this instance was the recognition of certain rights granted to subjects of a sovereign authority. In this brief essay on how historians and political theorists in recent years have debated the tortuous relationship between the ideas of empire and liberty in British India, I would like to pause on this constricted and negative definition of liberty rather than its widest possible connotation in terms of human freedom and reflect on how the British Empire in India provided a critical arena for the exercise of sovereign power in the name of both freedom and responsibility. It might be worth stressing that the term “liberal” itself, with its various connotations ranging from licentious to the humane, predates the narrower body of ideas typically attributed to political liberalism, and moreover, that liberalism by far precedes imperialism as a coherent doctrine.

A common conceptualization of development as a binary relationship between trustees and target groups is inadequate. This article proposes the metaphor of development as an entangled cultural knot, constituted by multiple power relations. It uses this concept to analyze a recent slaughter renunciation movement, in which some leading Tibetan Nyingma masters from Larung Gar have suggested that Tibetan herders give up selling their livestock to the slaughter market for religious reasons. The movement reflects an alternative form of development articulated by several leading Tibetan Buddhist teachers, particularly Khenpo Tsultrim Lodroe, yet it goes against the state project of developing the yak meat industry. This movement has been criticized not only by state officials, but also by secular Tibetan intellectuals, as well as by herders. This article argues that the complex relationships among Tibetan Nyingma teachers, state officials, Tibetan secularists, and herders; their shared and competing interests; and the apparently contradictory positions they take on various issues require a much more sophisticated conceptual tool than the simple dichotomous conceptualization of development.

Among more than 100,000 prisoners captured by United Nations forces in the Korean War, there was just one Japanese prisoner of war (POW). Matsushita Kazutoshi, Prisoner Number 600,001, had served in the Japanese army in China, both Nationalist and Communist armies in the Chinese Civil War, and in the Chinese People's Volunteers in North Korea, and was to end his military career in the ranks of the South Korean army. Using his forgotten story as a prism, this article explores neglected transborder dimensions of the Korean War. It argues the need to pay closer attention to the historical continuities linking the Asia-Pacific War and Chinese Civil War to the Korean War; it reconsiders the nature of Japan's connections to the conflict in Korea and reconceptualizes the UN POW camps as sites of ongoing Chinese and Korean civil wars.