I am honored to comment on Engseng Ho's provocative essay through the lens of my own research on inter-Asian connections and mobilities in and beyond Asia. The abstract for the panel, entitled “The Flow of Migration beyond the State,” stated that “much scholarship on Asia is framed by organizational schemes that engage in spatial relationships and contrasts” (e.g., cores and peripheries, uplands and lowlands, mainland and islands) and that the idea of the “nation as a bordered entity” cross-cuts and transforms such common binaries. The panel's abstract also stated that the panel's goal was to “interrogate these borders” and to “rethink these schemes” and forge new understandings about nations, regions, and Asia by addressing questions such as: What happens when we decenter the state? What concepts of society capture external relations and engagements? What concepts apart from class, status, race, and gender will help us get a better understanding of transregional phenomena?

In preparing my presidential address for publication, I debated between different options. On the one hand, I could do what I assume is most typically done—that is, take the oral presentation and re-present the material as a research-based journal article. On the other hand, I considered the extraordinary year of challenges, disruptions, traumas, fears, and insights that had preceded this presidential address. Nothing from that year could be considered normal, from a personal or professional point of view; therefore, another option would be to engage in a writing structure reflecting our departure from the normal. For the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the year of abnormality began with the canceled 2020 Annual Conference in Boston as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, continued with online teaching and meetings, and culminated in a virtual Annual Conference in 2021.

This article offers an explanation for disparities in the speed and level of political opposition to reform of the financial services sector in India. Focusing on the disparity of outcomes in reform of the insurance and the banking sector, the author suggests why some barriers to entry were present in India during the reform process. The author extends this argument to explain differing levels of political opposition to reform in the banking and insurance sectors. To provide empirical support for this theoretical construct, the author uses measures of market segmentation and market concentration to show how specific forms of state ownership helped promote divergent types of political opposition that built in India during the decision-making stage of reform and during the implementation of second-generation reforms. The experience of financial services reform in India offers important lessons for the new institutional economics literature on early transition elsewhere.