As previous chapters have argued, the two most significant bilateral relationships for guaranteeing Timor-Leste's sovereign independence are Australia and Indonesia. Timor-Leste's “post-colonial security dilemma” reflects its attempts as a new state to achieve and sustain “real” independence while grappling with its ongoing dependence upon other states in the international community. The emphasis on its bilateral relationship with Indonesia reflects dependence upon Indonesia's assistance in achieving socio-economic development and foreign affairs objectives, including gaining membership into ASEAN. It also highlights Timor-Leste's post-colonial insecurities arising from its limited military and defence capabilities and past experiences of resistance against Indonesian rule. As chapter seven outlined, the key military planning document, Forcas 2020, saw key external threats emerging from Indonesia in terms of boundary security and the perceived fragility of its democratization processes. Timor-Leste's foreign policy has recognized the need for a pragmatic realist orientation when it comes to its foreign policy towards Indonesia. Successive Timorese governments have privileged good relations with Indonesia ahead of international norms and values relating to transitional justice. This pragmatic realist approach sits in contrast with the “activist foreign policy” displayed in its negotiations with Australia over Timor Sea oil and gas detailed in the previous chapter.

Timor-Leste has sought to address security fears arising from its close proximity to Indonesia through a process of “international reconciliation”. Timor-Leste's national identity was largely formed through the independence movement, and was driven by an anticolonial nationalism, with Indonesia positioned as the “common enemy”. The movement from enemy to friend through the processes of political reconciliation required reorienting Indonesia's relationship with the East Timorese and vice versa following Timor-Leste's attainment of sovereignty. This entailed developing new relationships between Timorese and Indonesian political leaders, and recasting the relationship between the two states within Timor-Leste's foreign policy narrative. Timor-Leste has sought international reconciliation with Indonesia to benefit border security, trade relations and development projects across a range of sectors.

Timor-Leste's political reconciliation with Indonesia is most prevalent when examining issues of transitional justice. Since attaining sovereignty in 2002 Timor-Leste has been responsible for establishing legitimate democratic institutions that possess widespread public support and encourage socio-political order through respect for rule of law. Following the independence referendum, Timor-Leste faced a number of divergent challenges in implementing post-conflict, transitional justice mechanisms to promote democratization, rule of law and a human rights culture.

This book has argued that Timor-Leste's security interests have been shaped by conceptions of sovereignty, self-determination and independence that reflect its historical and ongoing struggle for recognition. In its international relations, Timor-Leste's leaders have progressively pursued a more confident and outward-looking foreign policy as it defines and asserts its place within the community of states. This book has employed the term “aspirational foreign policy” to encapsulate Timor-Leste's ambitious and expansive approach to bilateral and multilateral relations, its desire to transform into an upper-middle income country by 2030 and the narrative of fragile state exceptionalism. Its approach to international affairs is syncretic: realist and idealist orientations have been observed across a range of different issue areas that affect national security as perspectives on the international political environment oscillate between conflictual and cooperative. Timor-Leste's leaders abandoned pragmatism in the Timor Sea dispute in favour of an “activist” strategy, however, realism remains central to understanding the ways in which international normative principles of justice were sacrificed in favour of good relations with Indonesia. The theories of international relations provide useful tools for understanding how states work to secure the state, however, not one theory alone can help us understand the range of policy options, behaviours and interactions that a small state such as Timor-Leste draws upon in its international relations.

This complexity of how states perceive and address security threats is thrown into sharp relief when considering the future challenges of small states such as Timor-Leste in the Asia-Pacific region. This final chapter looks forward to the two most pressing security challenges for Timor-Leste in the twenty-first century: one that reflects conventional geopolitical thinking in International Relations, and the other that undermines it. The first section examines Timor-Leste's position in the Asia-Pacific region, currently the epicentre of great power competition between the United States and China. Power dynamics in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are relevant to Timor-Leste as it is located in the “transition zone” between these regions.

As a small new state, one of Timor-Leste's initial foreign policy priorities was to strategically position itself within the international community. The term “hedging” typically refers to ways small and medium states employ policies of balancing and engagement in their relations with powerful states. Hedging acts as an “insurance policy” as states “cultivate a middle position that forestalls or avoids having to choose one side… at the obvious expense of another”. In its engagements with multilateral regional and cultural associations, Timor-Leste has employed a form of “identity hedging” as it has diversified its relationships and sought to avoid dependence on any one state or bloc. Small states, such as Timor-Leste, use multilateral engagements as a way of maximizing their strategic options in international relations. According to declaratory policy, Timor-Leste considers its geographical position as “highly strategic” and views the protection of its natural resource wealth and security as dependent upon “maintaining good relationships with our neighbours and friends”. This chapter focuses on Timor-Leste's engagements with intergovernmental regional and cultural associations. Upon independence, Timor-Leste aspired to join as many multilateral organizations as possible.

As highlighted in chapter two, Timor-Leste's leaders have emphasized its cultural distinctiveness arising from centuries of migration and occupation, and its geographical location in the “transition zone” between Southeast Asia to the west and Oceania to the east. During his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, José Ramos-Horta argued that, “East Timor is at the crossroads of three major cultures: Melanesian, which binds us to our brothers and sisters of the South Pacific Region; Malay-Polynesian binding us to Southeast Asia; and the Latin Catholic influence, a legacy of almost 500 years of Portuguese colonisation.” He argued that Timor-Leste would retain close ties with Portugal and seek membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and South Pacific Forum “within days” of independence because Timorese leaders were conscious of the need to “co-exist” with its eastern and western neighbours. In a 2014 speech, Xanana Gusmão also emphasized the importance of Timor-Leste's geopolitical positioning in “creating bridges with Europe, Africa and Latin America”. This cultural distinctiveness is viewed by leaders as providing Timor-Leste opportunities to facilitate unique relationships between and across different states and regional associations. It also reflects the ways in which collective identity formation is not “organic” but a consequence of choices made by leaders as they interpret the best interests of the state.

The central contention of this book is that Timor-Leste's leaders promote an absolute external sovereignty concept that views selfdetermination and a lack of reliance upon other actors in the international community as central to effective statehood. As the previous chapter examined, the “security-development nexus” reflects the mutually-reinforcing relationship between conflict management, and economic and institutional development. According to José Ramos-Horta, Timor-Leste is “keenly aware of the link between security, stability and poverty reduction”. The capacities of state governments to deliver key services to citizens are “essential” for managing conflict, and internal security conditions influence the capacities of states to promote economic development. While the previous chapter highlighted the security dimensions of effective statehood, this chapter examines the use of foreign policy by Timorese governments to advance their economic ambitions to secure empirical sovereignty by consolidating their governmental capacities.

As a self-identified fragile state, Timor-Leste's ability to enact its vision of sovereignty relies upon its medium- and long-term development and resource allocation plans, and its economic relations with other actors in the global economy. Timor-Leste's leaders recognized during the independence movement that Timor-Leste's economic independence would rely upon the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, a body of water separating the coastlines of the island of Timor and Australia by less than 400 nautical miles. Since 2007, Timor-Leste has experienced high rates of economic growth and associated gains in socioeconomic development indicators due to joint oil and gas development with Australia. This has enabled Timor-Leste's political leaders to present the state as a fragile state “success story” (see chapter four). Timor- Leste's representatives, including Xanana Gusmão, promote these finite resources as the centrepiece of its ambitious economic plans. The 2011 Strategic Development Plan (SDP) articulated aspirations of turning Timor-Leste into an upper-middle income state by 2030. This goal forms an important part of its aspirational foreign policy.

Timor-Leste's biggest economic challenge has also constituted its biggest foreign policy challenge: since 2002, the issue of who “owns” the resources in the Timor Sea has complicated bilateral relations between Timor-Leste and Australia. Maritime resources are inherently tied up with Timor-Leste's economic viability and internal sovereign capabilities as oil revenues have provided over 90 per cent of government revenue, rendering the state as central to wealth production and the allocation of scarce economic resources.

This essay, through reading of books written in English, analyses the changing discourse of the Javanese religion in the last half century. The analysis starts with Clifford Geertz's book The Religion of Java that was first published in 1960, seven years after he started his fieldwork in Java. It was only after the publication of The Religion of Java that a discussion on the notion of religion in Java among scholars was sustained. The last book in this analysis to comprehensively deal with the topic is Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java by Merle C. Ricklefs, published in 2012, seven decades after Geertz began his study. There is a clear discursive genealogy linking these two books, with Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java providing a convenient ending to the analysis. In between, several books were analysed, most notably Robert Hefner's Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (1985), Andrew Beatty's The Variation of Javanese Religion: An Anthropological Account (1999), Denys Lombard's Nusa Jawa: Silang Budaya, especially volume two, published in Indonesia (1996), and Mark Hobart's Java, Indonesia and Islam (2011).

The above-mentioned books are viewed as landmarks of Western scholarly discourse concerning Javanese religion, spanning the eras from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Certainly there are many other books and journal articles — as shown in the list of references — that could be quoted to support the arguments in this chapter. The chapter is chronologically structured by locating Indonesia's political development in three periods: during the Cold War (1950–70), during and after the New Order (1970–2000), and during the War on Terror (2001–13).

“Asian Studies”, whether broadly defined as the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge about Asia or narrowly limited to the specific field of study named as such, has constantly been framed by a changing geopolitical context. The term “geopolitics”, borrowed from the study of international relations, denotes a perspective of considering power relations as embedded in the spatial structure (size, distance, adjacency) of geographical territories. By “framing”, we refer to the process by which a configuration of contextual factors (economic, political, cultural, historical or organizational) leads to an inclination towards a particular pattern of knowledge.

This point is illustrated by considering the colonial roots of Oriental or Asiatic scholarship, the war-driven migration of Asian scholars and the dispersion of their expertise, and Cold War American investment in both social sciences in East Asia and in “Asian Studies” at home. The rising scholarly interest in Japan, China and India following their growing political-economic significance in recent decades, as well as the emergence of various “alternative discourses” and “inter-Asia dialogues” as attempts at intellectual decolonization, provide further examples.

This framing effect is at least partially mediated by various institutions involved in the social process of knowledge production — such as foundations, professional associations, publishers, journals, research institutes, cultural societies, governments and multinational entities. These institutions operate in ways that reflect their roles, agendas and power relations within the geopolitical context, and leave their imprints, through funding and agenda setting, on their associated scholarly networks and subsequently the intellectual landscape of human knowledge about Asia.

While institutions often can be seen as mechanisms by which geopolitical priorities help to frame Asian Studies, it is important to recognize that institutions and their associated networks can also be centres of opposition to the prevailing foreign policies and their geopolitical underpinnings.

Investigating these themes further invites critical examination of the power structure underlying this knowledge: Who has written about Asia — for what and for whom? Where has Asian knowledge been disseminated and consumed? Which (institutional, societal-structural, national) interests and biases have been brought into knowledge production? Which topics have been emphasized or excluded? Even the term “Asia” as an epistemological unit is subject to question, in part for its historical roots in being associated with European perspectives for more than two millennia.

Oriental Studies, generally speaking, is understood as knowledge of Asian cultures, languages and people. Asian Studies, too, is concerned with Asian people, culture, history, and, predominantly, politics. Conceptually, Oriental Studies developed over a long period beginning in the late sixteenth century. The heyday of Oriental Studies was the colonial period, when a number of Eurocentric scholars set forth to interpret the mind and manners of the people living in the East. However, due to overindulgence in cultural relativism and occidental high-handedness in interpreting the Orient, Oriental Studies (in general) and orientalists (in particular) were severely criticized. A shift from traditional Oriental Studies to contemporary Asian Studies started happening after World War II, more precisely during the Cold War. Twentieth century Euro-American scholars realized that Asia was never a monolithic oriental entity. On the contrary, the continent is characterized by sharp regional differences, plural cultures and heterogeneity.

Eurocentric scholars divided the globe in two: East–West, Orient– Occident, civilized–uncivilized — and religiously maintained the difference between “us” and “them”. They viewed the Orientals or the Asiatics as “exotic beings”, the specimens of which were to be scrutinized by the “civilized” West. Europeans came, saw and conquered much of the Orient, and felt it necessary to study the mind and manners of the Orientals, not simply to satiate their thirst for knowledge (episteme) but also to hone practical intelligence (phronesis) to administer their colonies. In the process, “Oriental Studies” continued for over three centuries, till it was remodelled and rechristened as Asian Studies, beginning in America in the mid-twentieth century. In essence, Europe led in the creation of Oriental Studies while America pioneered Asian Studies.

Americans joined the league of orientalists in the nineteenth century with the formation of the American Oriental Society in 1842. Since America had no colonies at that time in the Orient, initially the approach of the American orientalists was humanistic. The North American orientalists were engaged in basic research in the languages and literatures of Asia. Traditionally, such research included philology, literary criticism, textual criticism, palaeography, archaeology and the history of oriental civilizations. However, American interest in the Orient took a sharp turn, both qualitatively and quantitatively, during and after World War II.

The present edited volume, Framing Asian Studies: Geopolitics and Institutions, co-edited by Albert Tzeng, William L. Richter and Ekaterina Koldunova, derives from a conference entitled “Framing Asian Studies, Geopolitics, Institutions and Networks” that was organized by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in collaboration with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), in Leiden, in November 2013.

Dr Albert Tzeng, the 2013/14 recipient of a joint fellowship between IIAS and ISEAS, was the main architect of the event in both its intellectual and organizational “framing”. Albert's research on the history of Sociology as an academic institutional discipline in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore served as inspiration for a discussion that he, with our encouragement, wanted to broaden in its geographical reach, its intellectual and disciplinary ranges, and in its institutional and political configurations.

The IIAS–ISEAS Fellowship Programme was an innovative undertaking developed by the two institutes. The selected beneficiaries of the programme were asked to spend six months in the Dutch/ European academic setting of IIAS, and six months in the Singaporean/ Asian environment of ISEAS. The programme was unfortunately shortlived. It produced only three fellowships, with Albert as the second incumbent. He was preceded by Dr Elizabeth Chandra (2012/13), and followed by Dr Lee Yong Woo (2014/15).

Given the topic of the book, I should say something about this short-lived experiment of a joint fellowship programme and the spirit behind its creation in 2012. As we planned it with our colleagues from ISEAS, the joint fellowship aimed at reconfiguring the “area studies” paradigm — and the inherent danger of an imbalanced approach or “gaze”’ that characterizes it — to create a new mechanism in which “Eastern” and “Western” academic milieus, as agents and “ecologies” of knowledge production, are placed on equal footing so as to enable truly culturally cross-connected research projects.

When IIAS and ISEAS launched the initiative, the idea was to use Leiden and Singapore as convenient hubs in their respective regions. By interacting with peer colleagues in two different cultural and intellectual environments, the fellows tested the limits of their own research methodologies in a self-reflexive fashion generally not experienced in classical programmes.

The IIAS–ISEAS joint fellowship experiment was terminated too early to yield its potential for the development of a new model of interconnected and decentred scholarship beyond or above borders.

“What constitutes Asia?” is a question central to the field of Asian Studies. A geographical term that is attached to a seemingly stable, objectively defined, landmass, “Asia” is in reality a socially constructed concept that has constantly been reshaped or appropriated with changing emphasis. This study considers the question of how Asia and South Asia are portrayed (represented, framed, constructed) by the maps on the covers of books and scholarly journals and by map logos of professional associations. It asks how each region (South Asia and Asia generally) is defined, which features are emphasized or marginalized, and what sorts of distortions are evident. An old adage admonishes us not to judge a book by its cover, but the covers of books and journals are designed to attract readers, to allude to content and to connect with existing perceptions. It is worthwhile to explore what these map illustrations reveal.

Examples of such portrayal may be seen in the two scholarly books that initially prompted this inquiry. Both showed South Asia, but the maps were truncated, distorted or otherwise modified. The cover of C. Raja Mohan's Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy (2003) shows a map of India in vivid orange. Border areas are sufficiently blurred so that one cannot read the names of any other countries except India and Nepal. The map on the cover of Baldev Raj Nayar and T.V. Paul's India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status (2003) appears to be looking eastward at India on a globe. India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar (Burma) are labelled, as are the visible Indian states, but the map is truncated at top and bottom so that three northern states (Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir) and three southern states (Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu) are not visible or labelled. Pakistani territory is shown but not labelled as such.

There may be various reasons for such distortions, including having an “eye-catching” book cover, but there also appear to be geopolitical considerations. The former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir has been a source of conflict between India and Pakistan since the two countries became independent in 1947. India regards all as an integral part of the Indian Union. Pakistan regards the entire state to be disputed territory.

Taiwan Studies is a relatively new field of research which challenges the conventional model of area studies. Taiwan Studies started off as an emancipatory project in Taiwan itself and has since spread to the regional and global sphere. The notion of Taiwan that is constructed through academic discourse remains a contested subject and is influenced by power configurations.

Taiwan Studies as a new field of academic research has evolved at a time when area studies in general have experienced a serious crisis of legitimacy. They have been challenged due to their roots in the colonialist tradition, their frequent political complicity with U.S. policy during the Cold War and a growing awareness of the contingency of boundary drawing and calls for more universalist knowledge in the age of globalization (Palat 2000).

Contrary to this trend, Taiwan Studies has emerged as a new academic field in the United States and Europe very recently, since the late 1980s, and has expanded since then. It differs from traditional area studies, which were often set up by hegemonic powers seeking to gain knowledge and control over their colonial territories or partitioning the world into regions according to the geopolitical settings of the Cold War. It could be argued that the debate on area studies has had limited impact. The revival of area studies in the United States with regard to the Middle East, the Arab region and Central Asia demonstrates how acute security concerns make specialized regional expertise appear immediately relevant again. The contested claim of sovereignty over Taiwan creates a potential security risk in East Asia, which could spread to the United States as Taiwan's key ally. While the status quo is already built on weak foundations — essentially the fiction that the Chinese Civil War has never ended — recent developments in Taiwan have complicated the situation even more. A growing sense of Taiwan identity on the island has gradually undermined the one-China principle upon which the alleged stability of the status quo rests. It is therefore not surprising that Taiwan's domestic developments have received particular attention from outside it.

This, however, does not explain why Taiwan has been taken out of the larger context of China Studies and developed as a distinct field. Converging perspectives on Taiwan as a distinct region cannot easily be explained by hegemonic power interests.

The turbulence of internal conflicts, the takeover by the Khmer Rouge (1975–79) and the Vietnamese intervention (1979–89) attracted international media attention to the Kingdom of Cambodia. The United States and France stand out among the nations that became entangled in the geopolitics surrounding Cambodian affairs in these years. Their political perspectives also dominated media debates, referred to here as “mediatizations” because of the non-fact-based nature of these discourses that express a partisan view. The dynamics of the media's “agenda-setting” and “framing” of Cambodian issues have distinct qualities, which will be examined in this chapter (Lippman 1922). These dynamics are understood as the selective influencing of perceptions in the representation of Cambodian issues in the French and American press, thus the mediatization of practices outside of the country. Descriptions, examples and case studies will show how the social construction and evolution of these media frames are related to geopolitical relations and scholarly traditions. The findings contribute to the understanding of how and why the period of the Khmer Rouge is labelled as “genocide” while not actually fitting the conditions that define this category. The labelling as genocide, nevertheless, evolved into a discourse adopted by, among others, the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University and has been attached to the international perception of Cambodian society ever since.

A study of the geopolitical dimension of the mediatization of Cambodian affairs is relevant, as few analyses have been conducted on the distinct character of the framing of issues in the decades following the traumatic events of the Khmer Rouge. The dynamics and their relation to geopolitical as well as national trends and traditions have not been studied as an integrated Cambodian history. While both France and the United States have produced their fair share of “leftist”, socialistinspired, and “rightist”, conservative-inspired, reporting, they have their basis in different traditions. As documented in, among others, Clymer (2007), Edwards (2007), Gunn and Lee (1991) and Wijers (2013), France's relations can be characterized as founded in a paternalist discourse on Cambodia as a former colony with a rich cultural heritage and a “sweet-natured and innocent” population. In contrast, the United States rather seemed to perceive Cambodia as a pawn in Cold War politics and a supportive neighbour to a former U.S. foe, Vietnam.

Asian Studies as a constituent of area studies has constantly been framed by the discourse of a nation-state both as an object of study and as the subject generating demand for such knowledge. In particular, it holds true to nation-state debate in area studies which questions methodology, as well as the organizational principles of area studies based on the concept of the nation-state. However, the predominantly outward orientation of Western Asian Studies, preoccupied with postcolonial discourse, has given less attention to frameworks and strategies of engagement with Asia from the perspective of non-colonial nations in Europe or of those deprived of statehood and sovereignty through occupation, as was the case with the Baltic states in 1940. What is specific about engagement with Asia in these stateless countries is that, instead of producing knowledge in the service of the state, the local academies and in particular the cultural activists set out to appropriate orientalist knowledge for the construction of national identity aimed at resisting the colonial regime.

Lithuania is a clear example of a European nation which, since the late eighteenth century, more than once experienced the loss and regaining of statehood. The epoch of more than six centuries of early statehood, which began in the early thirteenth century, ended with the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (also known as the Commonwealth of Two Nations) by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795. Established in 1569, the commonwealth was a confederal state where Lithuania and Poland maintained their statehood. The collapse of Lithuania's political life was the result of its losing its status as an active state in the region — a position it had held since the early eighteenth century. The Third Partition marked the beginning of a stateless period under Russian rule which lasted for over a hundred years. After the abolition of the Russian monarchy and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution, the Lithuanian Council, or Taryba, proclaimed the declaration of independence on 16 February 1918. The period of interwar independence lasted until the de facto Soviet annexation of Lithuania in 1940, although the loss of political status as a state had already been determined on the eve of WWII when the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, on 23 August 1939. The pact included secret protocols whereby Moscow and Berlin divided their spheres of interest within the region.