In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

On December 16 in Bangkok, The Asia Foundation released the results of its first in-person public perception survey conducted in Thailand’s three southern border provinces. Since 2004, the provinces of Yala, Narathiwas, and Pattani have been the locus of an indigenous separatist movement and communal conflict that has shaken a tradition of peaceful coexistence between [...]

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The Asia Foundation’s first survey of the population of southern Thailand, released December 16 in Bangkok, gives us rare insight into the conflict, from the perspective of those most affected by it. Since the re-emergence of violent conflict almost seven years ago, the region has been notoriously difficult to understand, in large part due to [...]

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On December 9, The Asia Foundation’s Mongolia office released its 10th Corruption Benchmarking Survey (CBS), the only tool that measures both public perceptions of institutional corruption, and the impact of petty corruption on the day-to-day life of Mongolian households. Through random, face-to-face interviews, a sample of 1,000 adults were asked about bribe requests, frequency, and [...]

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Don’t tell her she can’t be a doctor, a scientist, a journalist, a pilot, an urban planner, or a stock broker. Tell her she can. So says a stunning new video produced by The Asia Foundation. Watch it right now on our Facebook page. For every “like” the video gets on Facebook through the end [...]

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In 2009, American political scientist and Indiana University Professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on collective action and cooperation: how people work together successfully without regulation by central authorities or privatization. Her 45 years of work extends from studying police departments [...]

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Although a violent insurgency in Thailand’s three southern border provinces has claimed over 4,000 lives since 2004, very little is known about the views and experience of members of the majority Muslim and Pattani-Malay-speaking community who live in a complex conflict environment 700 miles south of Bangkok. Until now, their voices have been relatively unheard [...]

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Mongolia, a vast but sparsely-populated country, established centers of urban administration and governance only over the past 60 years or so. Until the mid-1940s, Buddhist monasteries and residences of nobility were the only truly fixed settlements, and virtually all citizens lived in portable structures while herding sheep, horses, and other cattle on the country’s open [...]

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The Malaysian state of Sabah on the northern point of Borneo, though resource-rich, has the highest poverty rate in the country. Official figures claim 16 percent, but unofficial sources put the poverty rate as high as 24 percent. Interestingly, the face of the poor in Sabah is quite unlike that of the rest of Malaysia. [...]

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While most of the news from Korea focuses on the division between South and North, there has always been another sharp division – that between the political right and left in the South. So deep has been the distrust between the two camps that polls showed that some one-third of the South Korean public did [...]

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China’s response to North Korea’s artillery shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last week has been relatively rapid compared to the slowness of its response to the sinking last March (it took three weeks for the Chinese government to express its condolences in response to the sinking of the Cheonan). But, as underscored in Sunday’s [...]

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