This paper draws upon fieldwork among a Muslim community in the Qinghai-Gansu borderland areas to explore how the desire of Muslims to achieve social mobility through education is blocked by the larger society which regards them as ‘familiar strangers’. This can be understood as a tension between their desire for full social citizenship in the form of rights to employment and education and the limited social and cultural capital they possess that prevents them from achieving the former. This tension is primarily caused by the party-state's ambivalence over the project of state nation building and minority rights. By focusing on Muslim narratives of their experiences in the cultural exclusion, this case study attempts to scrutinize how the cultural exclusion affects the engagement of ethnic minorities in education as well as the larger society, although it has been recognized that the experience of exclusion varies between minority groups.

One of the perennial controversies in the study of Japanese political economy has centred on the role of the government in the economy and in Japan's economic growth. The best-known model of Japanese political economy is the ‘capitalist developmental state’, which offers both a descriptive model of Japanese political economy and an explanation for Japan's postwar economic miracle in terms of bureaucracy-led intervention. As a descriptive model, the ‘capitalist developmental state’ both over-generalises and under-generalises key features of Japan's political economy. It over-generalises because it builds a model of Japanese political economy based on government-business relations in a number of large-scale, export-oriented manufacturing industries ignoring inefficient or ‘laggard’ sectors or admitting them only as system supports. The model under-generalises Japanese political economy because types and modes of bureaucratic intervention are consistent across different sectors of the economy, and in fact are more prevalent in weaker sectors, such as agriculture.

In this paper, we examine the micro-level implications of social capital for the development of democratic citizenship. By using a recent East Asia Barometer survey in Korea, we determine whether social networks and social trust, two key components of social capital, cultivate virtues of democracy among ordinary citizens. First, the analysis shows that the Korean people as a whole tend to be involved in small informal groups. Most of them stay away from formal associations. Second, the Korean people tend to differentiate trust-in-principle from trust-in-action. It turns out that a majority of the people display competence-based trust, if neither generalized nor particularized trust. Third, associational membership has no role in promoting support for democratic institutions and principles; it merely leads to more political activism. Fourth, social trust plays a role in promoting support for democracy. Yet it has little to do with political activism. It is concluded that in Korea, social involvement contributes to democratic citizenship behaviorally, whereas social trust contributes to it attitudinally.

This paper argues that international security studies can most profitably engage the issue of international terrorism by considering terrorist groups as transnational social movement organizations. It takes as its case Al Qaeda's role in Southeast Asia, focusing especially on the efforts of Al Qaeda leaders to align the demands and grievances of local Islamist movements and to spread a set of tactics and methods of political violence. In so doing, the paper builds on the often-neglected literature on the politics of terrorism while tying the argument to prevailing debates over social movements. The paper thus aims at clarifying the ways in which Southeast Asian organizations have adopted Al Qaeda's tactics and language but appear to be addressing primarily local or provincial concerns. This perspective also draws terrorism into current discussions of international security while maintaining a detailed focus on the interactions of individual agents and larger violent movements.

Existing explanations of international financial liberalization tend to understate the economic and political importance of related policies governing domestic financial markets. Further, these approaches often fail to specify fully the links between the international economy and domestic politics. Initial financial liberalization is often ‘domestic bank-centered’, i.e. it preserves a privileged position for weakly regulated domestic banks as the capital account is opened. On the other hand, there is much greater variation in later-stage financial policy developments, particularly following banking or currency crises. Adequate explanations should be able to explain, not just the initial pattern of financial liberalization, but also subsequent policy developments. This paper's main refinement is to explore the nature and implications of ‘dispersed’ interest group preferences. Initially more passive, poorly organized dispersed groups are viewed as the key link between the economic effects of crisis and variation in crisis-response policies. The explanatory value-added is explored through case studies of financial sector policy change in South Korea, Mexico, and Hungary.