The Nordic Asia Podcast

China re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the Myanmar side of the border and the Myanmar immigration authorities refused to open the border for fear of COVID surge. This has continued to affect the livelihood of […]

How do farmers struggle for land and democracy in Myanmar’s hybrid political system? How might a feminist approach to this question look like and enable novel findings? In which ways can researchers make the most of ethnographic methods to understand ordinary people’s survival strategies? And do experiences from rural Myanmar reflect the wider changing landscape […]

Malaysia held its fifteenth general election on 19 November 2022 after it was called at short notice before the end of the last government’s term. What was this election all about? How to understand its results? Can we consider Malaysia to be experiencing a democratic transition? And what comparative lessons does this election offer for […]

Welcome to the third NIAS-Korea episode! In this episode, we invite Prof. Yoonkyung Lee to discuss social movements in South Korea. Since its founding, South Korea has had a longstanding social movement history. One cannot fully understand the country’s democratic history without discussing the dynamics of social movements. Yoonkyung explains the main actors of social […]

In this episode, we focus the use of religious myths, icons and deities in Hindu nationalist politics in India. More specifically, we discuss the political invocation of Lord Parshuram, a deity in the Hindu pantheon who has, in recent years, become more visible as a mobilizing political symbol for the Hindu nationalist movement. But who […]

Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade impact the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands? Annuska Derks and Jean-Francois Rousseau, co- editors with Sarah Turner of the book Fragrant Frontier Global Spice Entanglements […]

Have you ever come across a post in social media which says, “The claim is disputed by third-party fact checkers”? Or have you ever come across the term fact checker? Are fact checkers journalists? To discuss these questions and the perils of fact checking and journalism in India, Anumita Goswami a doctoral researcher from Tampere […]

Entitled People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown’s new book focuses upon the ways in which ethnic difference is writ through the banalities of everyday life: who one trusts, what one eats, where one shops, even what time one’s clocks are set to (Xinjiang being […]

What is the journalism culture in Vietnam? What role does Sweden play in the transformation of Vietnamese journalism? How has Swedish media aid fulfilled its political aim to contribute to the democratic development of media in Vietnam? Andreas Mattsson speaks about how two media aid projects from Sweden were used to intervene in the development of journalism […]

The brutal assassination of Prime Minister Abe in July this year shocked Japan and has produced large and unexpected consequences for the nation´s politics. In this episode, we examine the fallout of the assassination on Abe’s legacy, and on Japan: What are the consequences of Abe’s association with the Unification Church for the role of […]

What does the concept of ecological civilisation mean in practice? And how can we understand the relationship between grand visions, legal systems, green politics and development processes on the ground in contemporary China? In this episode we focus on China’s environmental ambitions and its increasingly central role in efforts towards global sustainability, as well as […]

What are the problems with Samuel Huntington’s views about civil-military relations? Why do military coups persist in countries such as Pakistan, and what might be done to reduce their likelihood? In a study drawing upon extensive interview research in Pakistan, Cornelia Baciu argues that international organisations can help create a framework of security governance which […]

How can we understand the processes through which political leaders, god-men, stars of all kinds, and big or small deities mingle together in the public sphere? And what are the consequences of deifying politicians, or opening politics to the gods? In this episode, we discuss South Asian politicians who are treated like gods, and gods […]

How is sexuality experienced in contemporary China? What are the connections and tensions between China and the West in producing knowledges of sexuality? Dr Weiyi Hu notes that most of the seminal writings on sexuality are produced in the West, and that the definition of sexuality is largely theorised by Western scholars. In a conversation […]

For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the U.S.–China relationship? For the global economy and international security? In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Maria Adele Carrai from […]

In March of 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine State, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode […]

What explains the uneven meatification of diets in three of Asia’s core ‘emerging economies’? How and why is meat consumption changing today, and what role have American fast-food chains played? To discuss these questions and more, Helene Ramnæs, coordinator for the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, is joined by Marius Korsnes, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and […]

What is the oral tradition of Chinese storytelling about and what is the connection to the great Chinese novels? How to translate a Chinese classic such as the famed and defamed “Jin Ping Mei”? And how to handle the dilemma of steering one’s boat between enormous amounts of scholarship on the novel without drowning, and […]

Can spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lies at the heart of the research project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise” that we focus on in this episode. Also known as TRANSSUSTAIN, the project builds on the observation that scholars, activists, […]

Leisure or Political Tool? How did Chinese tourism grow from almost non-existent to being the largest outbound travel source market in the world over a couple of decades? Is the word “weaponization” a fair description of how Beijing uses tourism strategically in their foreign policy? And will the Chinese tourists ever travel internationally again after […]

Nepal’s recent local elections, held in May 2022 in 753 urban and rural municipalities, produced a number of surprises. Most prominent in national headlines was the victory of independent candidate and former rap musician Balen Shah in the race for mayor of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. But is the success of Shah and several other independent […]

Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different ‘other’ that […]

Between March and May of this year, large parts of India and Pakistan were hit by a severe heat wave that claimed at least 90 lives and seriously impacted people’s livelihoods and the environment. What made this heat wave so different and possibly worse than previous ones? Who was particularly at risk? And where does […]

What is the potential of podcasts to disseminate research based insights? How can a podcast function as a networking and pedagogical tool? And what is so intriguing about a Nordic podcast on Asia? Born during the pandemic to keep alive the vibrant research community on Asia in the Nordics, the Nordic Asia Podcast began as […]

How green is green energy really? And what role does Asia, more specifically China play in the transition to green energy? On the 7th of July, International Energy Agency came out with a press release warning the world to diversify the solar panel supply chain, which as of now is dominated by China. In this […]

Is a Chinese invasion on Taiwan a storm on the horizon when the West is busy with the Ukrainian war? Will Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan in August, the first by a Speaker of the US House of Representatives since 1997, escalate tensions between China and Taiwan? Joining us Julie Chen to talk about […]

With the upcoming G20 summit this November, all eyes should be on Indonesia – the fourth largest country in the world and current holder of G20 presidency. How has Indonesia reacted so far to the war in Ukraine? Why are so many Indonesians sympathetic to Russia, despite Indonesia’s historical tendency to favour the underdog in […]

Why does Japanese immigration policy have such a bad name? What are the historical origins of tight immigration policies? Where have these policies left immigrants of Korean descent, many of whom lost their Japanese nationality in the wake of the Pacific War? Are Koreans in Japan still torn between competing loyalties to North and South […]

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports? In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an […]

As COVID-19 disrupted maritime trade with China, the world was again reminded of the importance of shipping in global commerce. The roots of Nordic maritime trade relations with Asia go back centuries, and this history reveals interesting details about early Finnish interaction with China. For example, the Swedish East India Company’s 18th century trade voyages produced […]

Why should we view the anti-China protests that began in Hong Kong in 2019 through a comparative lens? How do earlier episodes in Hong Kong’s history help us make sense of what has happened? How far can we make useful parallels with other protest movements in places like Thailand and Myanmar? And is a distinct […]

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has dramatically affected international politics, and the effects are also felt in East Asia. We have heard a lot about China’s position regarding the war, but the situation has also affected security and defense calculations in Japan, one of the key allies of the West in Asia. How did Japan react […]

What is the relationship between Spirit Possession Rituals and Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia? How has modernity transformed Spirit Possession cults in the 21st century and what has led to the efflorescence of possession rituals across Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in recent decades? Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson joined Terese Gagnon […]

What is artificial intelligence (AI) with Chinese characteristics? Why is the Chinese Government labelling AI as a matter of security? How has AI been empowering China’s authoritarian governance? Jinghan Zeng, Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University, talks about his latest book Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Chinese Characteristics: National Strategy, Security and Authoritarian Governance (Palgrave, 2022) […]

The prolonged farmers’ protests that unfolded in India in 2020-2021 undoubtedly represents the most significant and successful farmers’ movement in the country in recent decades. Often referred to as the farm law movement, protesting farmers demanded the withdrawal of three new laws that would have considerably liberalised agricultural production and trade. Their demands were met […]

What enabled the 2022 electoral victory of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of a dictator that the historic People Power Revolution ousted 36 years ago? To what extent did the campaign of Bongbong Marcos’ main rival, Leni Robredo, represent a progressive alternative? Do the election results reflect a larger phenomenon of “illiberal turn” across electoral […]

Disparaged as “Japanese devils” and “half-breed,” some children with Chinese mothers and Japanese fathers born during the Second Sino-Japanese war long looked to Japan as their true homeland. Learn about this largely unseen group of individuals, just a few of the countless children born of war who have dealt with extreme social and political adversities […]

The People’s Republic of China has undergone tumultuous and varied sociocultural developments over the course of its history. In this episode, Dr. Suvi Rautio talks about some of the ways in which people and communities have dealt with the resulting change (or lack of it) based on her ethnographic research. Dr. Rautio is currently working […]

The anti-feminist movement in South Korea is gaining global attention. The story has been covered by many western mainstream news outlets including the New York Times, CNN, and BBC. Is this trend a new trend in South Korea? Where does this anti-feminist idea come from? In this episode, we invite Prof. Ju Hui Judy Han […]

How has digital nationalism manifested amid the Covid-19 pandemic in China? How does anti-American sentiment in China feed into the disinformation campaigns in regard to the war on Ukraine? What lessons can we draw from Asian countries’ handling of the public health crisis? Florian Schneider, Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Modern China at Leiden University, […]

Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond NIAS Press in conversation with Peter A. Jackson and Benjamin Baumann How does queer life fit into Buddhism and ritual? What role do gay men and trans women play in the practice of spirit mediumship and how do queer spirit mediums mediate between Thailand’s religious fields? How […]

Does the rise of China mean that studying Japan is inexorably declining? Many students become interested in Japan because of popular culture, such manga and video games: is this a good or a bad thing? In an era of Google Translate and nifty smartphone apps, do people still need to spend years and years learning […]

What can textiles tell us about histories of genocide and the lived experiences of prisoners? In this episode, Dr. Magali-An Berthon discusses the treatment of prisoners at S-21 and how clothes played a role into their imprisonment and dehumanization. She retraces the formation of the textile collection at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, starting with […]

A Conversation with a Malaysian Youth Climate Advocate In the past few years, youth-led groups such as the Fridays for Future school strike movement have changed the face of climate activism globally. In this interview, Malaysian youth climate advocate Farhana Shukor talks about her experience working on climate change issues in her native country as […]

Jose Ramos-Horta topped the first round of polling in the 2022 Timor-Leste presidential elections, securing 46.56 per cent of the popular vote on 19 March. Here he speaks to Amber Woortman in a special interview for the Nordic Asia Podcast. During the 24 years he spent in exile, José Ramos-Horta was a strong advocate for […]

The Russian war in Ukraine has placed India in a difficult situation: how to retain the historically good relationship with Russia, without jeopardizing the increasingly important strategic partnership with the USA? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Ravinder Kaur, Henrik Chetan Aspengren and Sunniva Engh to analyze the diplomatic tightrope that India […]

What is “binary nationalism” and what has it got to do with free-style skiing? The explosive popularity of Eileen Gu’s is an excellent case for understanding the common Chinese mindset. In this conversation, Professor Julie Yu-Wen Chen is joined by Professor Jiang Chang to discuss the wide popularity of freestyle skier Eileen Gu during and […]

Messages from the IPCC Report for Southeast Asia “An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are […]

Bangladesh has turned into a hybrid regime with an increasingly authoritarian culture that silences critics and oppositions in many brutal ways. How does the increasing authoritarianism of a surveillance state affect people, including society’s outsiders such as rap musicians and homosexuals? How does the edifice of government survive and sustain itself despite the criticism from […]

The Foreign Policy of Yoon Seok-youl, the Incoming President of South Korea South Korean presidential election ended and the conservative party candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol won the election. How will he balance the relationships between Korea and the US and China? The current progressive Moon Jae-in administration has pursued strategic ambiguity in foreign policy, trying to maintain a […]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the ground of global politics, and one of the key questions has been China’s position in the situation. In this episode, Dr. Matti Puranen analyses China’s international relations and strategic position in the context of the Ukraine crisis and China’s relationship with Russia. The newfound Western unity in response […]

East Timor is choosing a president. What is the significance of the 2022 presidential elections in Timor Leste? Has Asia’s youngest and newest country become a prisoner of its short but turbulent political past? How do young people view the older generation of former freedom fighters who continue to dominate the political order? What has […]

Cocktail umbrellas and refugee camps, serene Buddhist monasteries and soldiers in combat fatigues – Sri Lanka is a country of paradoxes. When the country became independent in 1948 it was a strong candidate to prove that the transition from colonialism to democratic sovereignty could indeed be successful. Today, after 30 years of civil war and […]

The past few months have been election season in India. Although these are state elections, many view them as a key midterm evaluation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government. What are the takeaway messages from these recently concluded assembly elections? In this episode, we zoom in on the elections in the five […]

Southeastern Myanmar (Burma). The Myanmar military has carried out arial attacks on villages: targeting schools, libraries, and villagers’ agricultural fields. In the past year, roughly one hundred thousand civilians have been displaced in the Southeast alone. Many have attempted to seek refuge in neighboring Thailand but have not been accepted as refugees. In addition to […]

Why did Restart Thailand, a 2020 student-led pro-democracy movement, sport a red Communist-style logo with a hammer and sickle? Why did a Thai BNK48 singer wear a swastika t-shirt for the band’s 2019 concert rehearsal? And why did the latest Thai junta produce a video of two boys applauding a portrait of Adolf Hitler to […]

Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian History, Department of History, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA . His book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan was publisehd by Cambridge University Press in 2021 and it won the 2021 Memory Studies Association’s First Book Award.  […]

India has been caught in a question for almost a decade now: is it a secular democracy or is it a Hindu nation? The struggles over this question goes from the parliament to the streets, from Facebook to living rooms, from the metropolis to the margins. The Indian Prime minister and his party routinely invoke […]

Deepening Autocratization, Dynamic Dictatorships, and China Authoritarian regimes have often been discussed in contrast to democratic governments and defined in terms of what they lack–namely, democratic features. Dr. Elina Sinkkonen highlights the need for a new method of conceptualizing authoritarian regimes on their own terms, by including variables like personalization, centralization, and state control over […]

 What role does the Islamophobic conspiracy theory of “love jihad” play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft—the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology—in India today? In this podcast, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Alf Gunvald Nilsen unpack this question on the basis of a recent article published in the journal Religions. The idea of love […]

Mobile Communication and Politics in China How has digital communication technologies impacted the dynamics of political contention in China? What is the role of mobile technology in the country with the world’s largest number of mobile and internet users? Why is there little domestic resistance about surveillance and technology-related privacy risks in China during the […]

Why has Myanmar experienced so many massive street protests recent years? How can we go about studying these sorts of mass demonstrations? What kinds of roles do bystanders perform in these protest movements? Have the protests since February 2021 been significantly different from earlier movements such as those of 1988 or 2007? And how are […]

Ever tried to cross the road in Hanoi? There’s no point in waiting for a gap. Close your eyes and start walking: the traffic will magically weave around you. While Vietnamese cities were once dominated by bicycles and pedestrians, the growth in motorized mobility over the past decades have been astounding. The speed with which […]

Environmental protection and climate actions has embedded in China’s foreign policy and the Chinese government has recently pledged to make the Belt and Road Initiative “open, green, and clean”. How far is this an agenda designed primarily for international consumption? How do domestic interest groups respond to China’s environmental foreign relations? To what extent can […]

Since the 1980s, pictures by the late Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda have been used to adorn and confer ‘local’ flavour on a variety of public settings in Goa. Today, Miranda’s work is a familiar sight to travelers in Goa. While some of the pictures selected for display – including by the government in spaces that […]

Does ‘citizenship’ exist in a socialist or communist context? If it does, what would this mean in the case of Vietnam? To what extent do the Vietnamese state and Vietnamese citizens perceive citizenship differently? And how are those differences negotiated? Why does the wave of recent popular protests in neighbouring countries concern the Vietnamese government? […]

Anti-vaccination movements pose an increasing threat to global public health, but what of vaccine hesitancy? Join us for a discussion on the effects of vaccine hesitancy in Japan during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. University of Turku’s Centre for East Asian Studies University Teacher Dr. Yoko Demelius and University Lecturer Dr. Kamila Szczepanska discuss historical, cultural, […]

When did the Cold War in East Asia really begin? According to ADI-NIAS researcher Kuan-Jen Chen, the answer is 1945 – if we view the Cold War through a maritime lens. In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, KJ explains how he is using Japanese and Taiwanese sources to gain a more nuanced perspective on […]

Why did so many of South Korea’s senior citizens take to the streets between 2016 and 2019? What motivated their participation in rallies? And what do these rallies tell us about the state of South Korea’s democracy? Korea Foundation and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies postdoctoral researcher Myunghee Lee discusses these and other questions with […]

Although autocratic forms of rule have a longer history in postcolonial South Asia, the slide towards autocratization has arguably accelerated in recent years, albeit unevenly. In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Sten Widmalm to discuss his new edited book, The Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in South Asia. Widmalm offers a comprehensive analysis […]

Several high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault have helped the #MeToo movement in China continue to make impacts on a society that is highly controlled and surveilled. Most recently, tennis star Peng Shuai’s saga has accused former top Chinese Communist Party leader, Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Although Peng did not say that she […]

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, […]

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Europe and other parts of the globe in spring of 2020, the Chinese government started reporting donations of Personal Protective Equipment as well as other medical supplies to areas experiencing severe shortage. Listen to Dr. Lauri Paltemaa and Dr. Hermann Aubié discuss their research on the exact nature of […]

What does a cup of coffee tell us about Thailand’s intricate power relations? Where does the country’s monarchy come into this? And why does it matter? Prominent political scientist and NIAS director Duncan McCargo joins Petra Desatova to revisit his famous ‘network monarchy’ concept and explain why Thailand should not be seen as a ‘Deep […]

What is digital vigilantism? How do Chinese citizens seek justice online? How does digital vigilantism reflect contemporary Chinese technological and socio-political development? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Qian Huang, lecturer and PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, explains the growing phenomenon of online collective […]

In his new book In Search of New Social Democracy: Insights from the South – Implications for the North (Zed-Bloomsbury), Olle Törnquist has returned to findings from fifty years of research on democracy and social rights movements in especially Indonesia, India and the Philippines, to address the major puzzle of our time: why the vision about development […]

NIAS Press 2021 Who are the Wa of Myanmar and how, in three decades, have they built a force that is now the largest non-state military actor in Asia-Pacific? How does China’s economic, political, and military support for the Wa factor into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative? What role might the Wa play in […]

How is childhood experienced in the slums of Bangkok and how does it relate to socio-political processes in Thailand? What role do mothers play in the leadership of the slums? And how can we understand recent mass protests in Thailand through the lens of children’s activism? Giuseppe Bolotta gives insights into his recently published book Belittled […]

At the start of 2021, a widespread belief held that India had escaped the Covid-19 pandemic relatively unscathed – this was evidenced, the story went, in the country’s comparatively low death rates. Narendra Modi boasted to the World Economic Forum in January 2021, “that the country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing […]

Why do Southeast Asia specialists get tired of explaining that the politics of the region cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game of Chinese-US great power rivalries? How do relatively small Southeast Asian states negotiate their relations with these major powers in an increasingly antagonistic environment? And why has the idea of the Indo-Pacific become […]

How can one approach religion as both an academic researcher and a spiritual practitioner? Join us for this wide ranging talk with Dr. Albion Butters, historian of religion and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism. The first half of the conversation focuses on the Finnish Oriental Society (Suomen Itämainen Seura) and academic publishing through the digital […]

What is the impact of Internet technology communication in China? How do Chinese people view “privacy” differently from the western perspective? How is the newly passed China’s Personal Information Protection Law going to impact people’s lives? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Elaine Yuan, an […]

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