In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

What motivated you to enter the field of women’s rights?

As a woman, working for women’s rights has always interested me. Both of my parents are lawyers and involved with nonprofits so we always end up talk about human rights issues at family gatherings.

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On May 20-21, President Obama and NATO allies will meet to discuss their ongoing strategy for transitioning responsibility for Afghanistan’s security to the Afghan National Army. These discussions will address the future of a country that has been at war for decades. Issues such as Taliban insurgency, transparent elections, women’s education, development aid, and anti-corruption, among many others, have all been topics on the table. But one vital component to Afghanistan’s reconstruction that has yet to receive much attention is the crucial role of natural resources.

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North Korea’s failed rocket launch accomplished the rarest of feats. The regime managed to simultaneously outrage the world and embarrass itself at the same time. Unfortunately, this increases the likelihood that Pyongyang will undertake a nuclear test…

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More than a week after the first incident, a well-publicized series of events rubbing China and the Philippines up against each other while at sea continues. Briefly stated, a Philippine patrol plane spotted Chinese fishing vessels at Scarborough Shoal and a Philippine vessel investigated and found that they had harvested protected species.

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In February, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court struck down a controversial clause of the Forestry Law which had enabled the national government to declare the boundaries of the state forest zone without a proper mapping process. The Ministry of Forestry controls a state forest zone of 133 million hectares…

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In late March, Ho Chi Minh City’s residents braced for heavy windfall and flooding as tropical storm Pakhar – the first storm of the season – headed for the nation’s economic hub. Many residents were caught off guard, as experts declared the storm “abnormally early.”

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Over the years, international development assistance in Asia, as in other parts of the world, has included a focus on law and justice as a means for addressing a range of development goals, including poverty reduction, economic growth, and the advancement of human rights. A variety of rationales have been used to try to explain how law and justice interventions contribute to these broader development objectives, including asserted links to peace and stability, state legitimacy, and citizen empowerment. Most recently, the World Development Report 2011 highlighted the role of justice in breaking the cycles of violence, conflict, and fragility that continue to undermine our collective development efforts.

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It is always exciting to be able to take a break from program implementation to think more deeply about the theories that underlie development practice on the ground. That is of course the whole point of a teaching sabbatical, and it is what we both enjoyed about the “Experts’ Roundtable on Local-Level Justice in Conflict-Affected and Fragile Regions.”…

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Giang has lived his whole life in the village of Phu Lang, a traditional ceramic handicraft village about 30km north of Hanoi. Giang’s entire family has been producing the same jars and pots that they and many other family businesses in the village have for decades. However, when we last met with Giang, he told [...]

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On Monday night, April 2, Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced to the nation that the country was on track to achieve its goal of high-income developed nation status by 2020. Unveiling the results of the first 2-year phase of the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) and Economic Transformation Programme (ETP), Najib proudly stated that the list of achievements has been “nothing short of astounding.”

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