Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia

This book presents the first cross-regional analysis of post-transitional justice periods and the conditions that influence states’ behaviors. Specifically, the book examines why states that adopt and ostensibly implement transitional justice norms as policies—criminal prosecutions, reparations policies, and truth commissions—fail to follow through with their recommendations. Applying these perspectives to a comparative study of states from Latin America and East Asia—namely, Peru, Uruguay, and South Korea—which accepted and implemented transitional justice norms but took different trajectories of behavior after the implementation of policies, this book contributes to understanding the relationship of norm influence on states and why states change in compliance after norm adoption. The book explores the conditions that contribute or limit the continued respect for transitional justice norms, emphasizing the political interests and transnational advocacy networks’ roles in affecting states’ policies of addressing past abuses.

This book is an ethnographic study of migrants, refugees and ‘temporary’ people in Malaysia,  incorporating narratives, personal stories, and observations of everyday life in Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown, Penang. Rather than focusing on specific migrant communities or refugee ‘camps’, the book takes subaltern cosmopolitanism as its central lens to look at how different and diverse communities of non-citizen ‘pendatang’ (aliens) co-habit, work and live together in Malaysia. Urban centers in Malaysia offer the space for informality that allow stateless and undocumented people to seek out opportunities, while also finding ways to assimilate or even ‘disappear’ into the fabric of society. The book focuses on the notion of ‘contaminations’, rather than migration or migrants, to underscore one of the most important findings of the ethnographic study – that migrant life in Malaysia is critically integral, embedded and interwoven into the everyday life in the city - shaping and affecting all aspects of daily life from production and supply chains, food service networks, cultural and religious practices, waste and recycling work, to more intimate and private contexts such as romantic relationships, family life and sex-work. Hybridity, inter-mixing and bastardization are part and parcel of everyday urbanism in KL and Penang – these ‘contaminating elements’ challenge and disrupt categories of the ‘national’ and categories such as insider/outsider, national purity, and politically constructed divisions between ethnic and racial groups. The book thus relies upon detailed ethnographic narratives curated over a decade of study, offering students interested in fieldwork research insights into the types of engagements and commitments necessary for helping build the complex, uneasy and destabilizing knowledge that characterizes critical ethnography. 

This book introduces six key influential feminist activists from Japan’s contemporary feminist movement and examines Japanese women’s experience of and contribution to the international #MeToo movement. Set against a backdrop of pervasive sexual inequality in Japanese society—on a scale that makes Japan an outlier in Asia as well as the rest of the advanced democratic world—this book offers a snapshot of Japan’s contemporary feminist movement and the issues it faces, including, primarily, sexual violence and harassment of women and girls. The six feminist activists interviewed to create this snapshot all work toward eradicating sexual violence against women and girls—they are: Kitahara Minori (instigator of the Flower Demo and public commentator), Yamamoto Jun (activist for sex crime law amendments), Nitō Yumeno (advocate for sexually exploited girls), Tsunoda Yukiko (feminist lawyer), Mitsui Mariko (former politician and current activist), and Yang-Ching-Ja (comfort women activist).

Sexual harassment in Japanese politics examines a problem that violates women’s human rights and prevents a flourishing democracy. Japan fares badly in international gender equality indices, especially for female political representation. The scarcity of women in politics reflects the status of women and also exacerbates it. Based on interviews with female politicians around the country from all levels of government, this book sheds light on the sexist and sometimes dangerous environments in Japanese legislative assemblies. These environments reflect and recreate broader sexual inequalities in Japanese society and are a hothouse for sexual harassment. Like many places around the world, workplace sexual harassment laws and regulations in Japan often fail to protect women from being harassed. Even more, in the ‘workplace’ of the legislative council, such regulations are typically absent. This book discusses what this means for women in politics in the context of a broader culture whereby victims of sexual violence are largely silenced. 

 

This book offers perspectives from the ground on human rights and peace in Timor-Leste. By highlighting the local voices, this book draws on their experience and expertise in engaging with questions concerning the nexus between human rights, peace and development. It posits that these concepts no longer mean absence of conflict, and argues that sustainable peace must be built from rights frameworks to protect the locals’ interests in the processes. Acknowledging the lack of autonomy on local actors in peace-making contexts, the book emphasizes the urgent need to facilitate the creation of political and social structures that can support and offer contextual rights and dignity for the Timorese community.

This book provides a space for victims’ testimonies and memories, engages with their experiences, reflects upon the redress movement, and evaluates policies related to Korean comfort women as victims and survivors from the international, domestic, and bilateral realms. Collectively, this edited volume aims to further diversify the scholarship on comfort women, contribute to the existing literature on social movements related to comfort women and other related studies, and, in doing so, challenge the politicization of comfort women. With this objective, the book presents scholarship from interdisciplinary fields that revisit the meaning of victims’ testimonies, memories, and remembrance, social movement efforts on comfort women, and the related role of government, governance, and society by reflecting on the truths about the historical past. In so doing, it initiates new conversations among political scientists, sociologists, historians, and cultural and literary scholars. What do victims’ testimonies reveal about new ways of imagining historical memory of Korean comfort women? How are memories of comfort women and their experiences remembered in social movements, literature, and cultural practices? Where is the place of comfort women’s experiences in politics, diplomacy, and global affairs? These are some of the questions that guide the contributions to this edited volume, which seek to establish new ways of solidarity with comfort women.

This edited volume fills a gap in current research on asylum seekers and refugees. By focusing on two East Asian countries, Japan and Taiwan, this volume offers material for comparison and reflection on an area of the world in which this theme is still relatively underdeveloped. By approaching the theme through the different perspectives of human rights, social construction through media representation and public opinion, and lived experiences, the book offers a multifaceted and sophisticated analysis of the phenomenon. The main aim of this collection is to expand current scholarship on refugee studies and offer policy recommendations on the timely topic of refugee and asylum seekers in East Asia.

This is an open access book.