Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Political Science

This study identifies that after 1997 financial crisis Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore experienced different shifts in their structure of provision of social security benefits. The shifts vary on two important dimensions of social security provisions: the benefit level and the political control of the state over the private sector. In Indonesia there was a shift that eroded benefit level and strengthened the state's political control over the private sector. In the Philippines there was a shift that improved benefit level and weakened state control over the private sector. Meanwhile in Singapore the shift improved benefit level yet at the expense of deeper penetration of state control over the private sector. What explains the variation in the shifts in the dimensions of social security provisions in Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore after crisis? Such variation cannot be explained with the usual explanatory variables: fiscal constraints at the national level, the ranking of economies in the global competition, or the intervention of international financial institutions. This economic context after financial crisis only affect the degree of dramaticness of change proposed for the social security reform. Once the reform proposal is advanced, however, it was domestic politics that matter more. The output is influenced by a compromise-building among employers, workers, state leaders and bureaucrats. More specifically, the reform outputs differ by the variation of the expectations of employers and workers on the conduciveness of the overall economy and the degree of relative intensity of symbiosis between bureaucrats of social security agencies and state leaders (low or relatively less political in leadership and management and high or relatively highly political in leadership and management). This study demonstrates the critical importance of social security reform to market governance. Beyond earlier study of market governance, which identifies the pre (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: William Liddle (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science, General

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2021, Arts and Sciences: Political Science

This dissertation examines China's and India's military modernization since 1980 demonstrated by advancements in major weapons systems. It examines the impact of four key variables on military modernization—two demand-side variables, i.e. the security threat environment and the obsolescence of existing military forces, and two supply-side variables, i.e. military industrial capacity and the availability of foreign suppliers. This study argues that in periods when most of the explanatory variables, as determined by several indicators, are measured high, particularly security factors and military obsolescence, military modernization is highest. Moreover, the security threat environment plays a larger role in influencing military modernization in both states than previously understood. Additionally, China's rapid advancement ahead of India, despite disadvantages, may be a result of alternative means of procurement and development, to include not only aggressive means of technology transfer through co-option, coercion, and industrial espionage.

Committee: Dinshaw Mistry Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Richard Harknett Ph.D. (Committee Member); Thomas Moore Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

Taking an interdisciplinary approach that attends to the tryst between British postcolonialism and US neoliberalism in South Asia in the post-World War II era, this dissertation examines how the US state became a disciplinary biopolitical model for the postcolonial South Asian security state on the one hand, and a premise to forge new forms of identities, memories, belonging, and rights for South Asian subjects on the other hand. Through an examination of a broad archive, I make three major claims. First, I argue that while hegemonic memory discourses look for verifiable truths and empirical evidence, writers and artists from postcolonial South Asia propose alternative mnemonic accounts to decenter such hegemonic official and national archives. Second, I analyze how writers and artists delineate ways for South Asian subjects to articulate rights through mnemonic forms of citizenship, thus unsettling the mainstream discourse of human rights that places emphasis on subjects' material claims (or a lack of them) to space. In particular, memory is channeled to reterritorialize notions of “home”—a focal point of Western human rights—thereby allowing the homeless and stateless to claim historical and political subjectivities in postcolonial terrains that have officially disowned them. Third, I examine how the postwar USA has provided tools for the postcolonial South Asian state to galvanize securitization as a governing rationality as well as tools for oppressed subjects to resist from below. Through a reading of Salman Rushdie's 'Shalimar the Clown' (2005) and 'The Golden House' (2017), the first chapter probes how Rushdie's media-saturated literary memory protests neoliberal metamorphoses that take effect through militarization, hyper-securitization, surveillance, and displacement. The second chapter uses Rohinton Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' (1995) and Shyam Selvadurai's 'The Hungry Ghosts' (2013) as touchstones to illustrate queer memory assemblages that contest collu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nalin Jayasena (Committee Chair); Anita Mannur (Committee Member); Yu-Fang Cho (Committee Member); Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (Committee Member); Jana Braziel (Other) Subjects: Asian American Studies; Asian Literature; Comparative Literature; Literature