Blog

Gendered Globalisation and Social Change by Nira Yuval-Davis

The social change affecting gender relations in society as a result of globalisation is paradoxical. On the one hand, as a result of globalisation women are allowed entry to roles and arenas of society in which they were not allowed in many societies before and thus the distance between the ways masculinity and femininity are […]

Foreign companies and local workers in China by Merete Lie and Ragnhild Lund

Over the past twenty years the authors have studied how Norwegian companies have transferred production to Asia. Their focus is on the micro-level of globalization processes and their ambition is to bring ordinary people into studies of globalization by showing how Norwegian companies in Asia function as meeting places for global and local actors.����� During […]

Sino-Icelandic relations in times of intense globalization – Mutual respect and benefits for all? By Lilja Hjartardóttir

Sino-Icelandic relations are a recent and undertheorised phenomenon compared with Sino-Nordic relations that were already established early in the 20th century. Once business relations took hold in the 1990s Icelanders moved quickly into the immense Chinese market. While trade relations have maintained their priority status in the execution of foreign policy, participation in the international […]

International NGO Projects and Women’s Development in Yunnan by Shen Haimei, Yunnan University, China

  Shen Haimei, PhD, Professor, Ethnology/Anthropology Research Institute, Yunnan University, China. Secretary-general of the Feminist Anthropology Board, the Ethnology/Anthropology Committee of China. Author of two books: Research on the Life of Yunnan Women in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Kunming: Yunnan Education Press, 2001). Middle Ground?Gender, Ethnicity and Identity in Southwest China. (Beijing: Advanced Education […]

From Thailand to Svalbard: migration on the margins by An-Magritt Jensen

Halfway between the European mainland and the North Pole, a group of islands, Svalbard, has become a Thai diaspora in miniature. Longyearbyen, the only place with permanent settlement, is a tiny city with only 2,000 inhabitants. Norwegians are in the majority and make up 85 per cent of the population. But among the 30 other […]

The contradictory impact of globalization and migration on gender equality by Professor Birte Siim

The challenges from globalization and migrationGlobalization is contested, and the meanings of globalization need to be discussed within different contexts. Trans-nationalism challenges established research paradigms connected to the nation states.  One of the challenges of gender research is arguably to focus on diversities among women within and between nation states, for example between women in […]

Chinese Migrant Women Workers in a Dormitory Labour System by Pun Ngai

Under the Chinese dormitory labour regime the lives of women migrant workers are shaped by the international division of labour. The dormitory labour system is a gendered form of labour use to fuel global production in new industrialized regions, especially in South China. The system also forms the basis for the development of class consciousness […]

Gendering globalization by Cecilia Milwertz, Birte Siim and Zhao Jie

The current global financial situation bluntly and brutally brings home the fact that the global and local are closely connected in times of opportunity as well as crisis. The articles in this issue of Asia Insights are about intra-action between Asia, particularly China, and the Nordic countries. Intra-action is the word feminist theorist Karen Barad uses about phenomena that mutually integrate to affect each other, as opposed to interaction between separate entities. The articles emphasize that we can no longer only study Asia as a far-away entity.

The Challenges to Food Security in Asia: Solutions for the Future? by Asiful Basar

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Worried Japanese Businesses Lash Out against Climate Deal

Alexandru Luta
Research Assistant
International Politics of Natural Resources and the Environment Research Programme
Finnish Institute of International Affairs

On Tuesday, March 17, 2009, a full-page newspaper advertisement, run in reportedly all of Japan’s dailies, sent shockwaves through the country’s green community. The advertisement’s message, co-sponsored by the Nippon Keidanren (English: the Japan Business Association) and 27 other business and industry federations, asks of the newspapers’ readership if they will not think about “the costs we all have to bear”.