The Japanese, and other Asians, are increasingly taking over some of the roles previously played by Europeans in the Pacific Islands. This book considers the role of the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, focusing especially on a joint venture between the Japanese multinational Maruha Corporation and the Solomon Islands' government.

This collection identifies the challenges facing area studies as an organized intellectual project in this era of globalization, focusing in particular on conceptual issues and implications for pedagogical practice in Asia and the Pacific. The crisis in area studies is widely acknowledged; various prescriptions for solutions have been forthcoming, but few have also pursued practical applications of critical ideas for both teachers and students. Remaking Area Studies not only makes the case for more culturally sensitive and empowering forms of area studies, but indicates how these ideas can be translated into effective student-centered learning practices through the establishment of interactive regional learning communities. This pathbreaking work features original contributions from leading theorists of globalization and critics of area studies as practiced in the U.S. Essays in the first part of the book problematize the accepted categories of traditional area-making practices. Taken together, they provide an alternative conceptual framework for area studies that informs the subsequent contributions on pedagogical practices. To incorporate critical perspectives from the "areas studied," chapters examine the development of area studies programs in Japan and the Pacific Islands. Not surprisingly, given the lessons learned from critical examinations of area studies in the U.S., there are competing, state, institutional, and intellectual perspectives involved in each of these contexts that need to be taken into account before embarking on an interactive and collaborative area studies across Pacific Asia. Finally, area studies practitioners reflect on their experiences developing and teaching interactive, web-based courses linking classrooms in six universities located in Hawai‘i, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand, and Fiji. These collaborative on-line teaching and learning initiatives were designed specifically to address some of the conceptual and theoretical concerns associated with the production and dissemination of contemporary area studies knowledge. Multiauthored chapters draw useful lessons for international collaborative learning in an era of globalization, both in terms of their successes and occasional failures. Uniquely combining theoretical, institutional, and practical perspectives across the Asia Pacific region, Remaking Area Studies contributes to a rethinking and reinvigorating of regional approaches to knowledge formation in higher education. Contributors: Conrado Balabat, Lonny Carlile, T. C. Chang, Hezekiah A. Concepcion, Arif Dirlik, Jeremy Eades, Gerard Finin, Jon Goss, Peter Hempenstall, Lily Kong, Lisa Law, Martin W. Lewis, Robert Nicole, Neil Smith, Teresia Teaiwa, Ricardo Trimillos, Christine Yano, Terence Wesley-Smith.

A UN report recently found that the Asia Pacific is the world’s most disaster-prone region. Indeed, considering that the region accounts for more than half of the total number of disasters in the world, building capacity and resilience to mitigate the devastating impact of disasters is a pressing task for local actors. This book takes a regional, multidisciplinary and multi-actor approach to improve understandings of how various actors respond to natural and human-induced disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. It examines the ideas and activities of four different categories of agents: civil society; military and state institutions; local cultural knowledge and the media; and economic initiatives, and these themes are approached from various academic disciplines, ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to economics, human geography and political science. The contributors draw their findings from a variety of countries in the region, including China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar and Samoa, and importantly, focus on the interconnection between vulnerability and resilience. In turn, the book highlights how the nature and magnitude of disasters are influenced by social conditions, and aims to contribute to policies that prioritize development opportunities to enhance resilience. Further, it explores the complicated and multifaceted role of agency in building resilience, and presents a comparative framework for analysis and key findings from the Asia-Pacific region. The focus of this book on recent and ongoing disasters makes it a topical and timely contribution to the growing field of disaster management, and as such it will appeal to students and scholars of environmental studies, development studies and Asian politics.

This collection explores the importance of regionalization and globalization to the world economy, particularly questioning whether the world economy is characterized by increasing regionalization, rather than globalization. International contributors explore the processes in the Pacific area, the Americas, Africa and Europe and make an important contribution to current debates in development economics.

Originally published in 1998. This collection of outstanding essays explores the importance of regionalization and globalization to the world economy. International contributions explore the process of regionalization in the Pacific Area, The Americas, Africa and Europe, and question whether the world economy is characterized by increasing regionalization, rather than globalization. The book is an excellent contribution to debate on development economics. It investigates how the processes of globalization and regionalization, driven by liberalization of trade and capital markets, weaken nationally established monopolies and protected industries and it looks at the challenge to Third World nations and the countries of the former socialist bloc.

The focus of this book is to examine the growing impact of globalization on education policy and development in the Asia Pacific region. It analyses the reaction of selected societies and the strategies that their governments have adopted in response to the tidal wave of marketization, corporization, commercialization and privatization. Particular attention is paid to educational restructuring in the context of globalization.

Cross-border regions are newly emerging social spaces stretching across national borders. Globalization makes national borders more permeable and leads to a rearrangement of economic and political interactions. This is particularly pronounced within supra-regional blocs featuring specific internal border regimes. The ensuing opportunities are increasingly seized to create border-spanning discourses and institutions. This is illustrated in the book by a range of experts analyzing cross-border regions in Europe, America, East Asia and Africa.