The GlobAsia research group studies the issues of development and governance arising out of new global challenges and the ways Asian societies and economies adjust and respond to those. It is also concerned with the broader themes of Asian dynamics in shaping up these global economic and political transformations.

The processes of globalisation are characterised by interconnectedness, flows and circulations of capital, commodities, people, and knowledge ideas. These processes have integrated regional production and trading networks into global economy, thus, opening new threats and opportunities for economic, social and political developments. These intense circuits of interdependence suggest profound reordering of economic-social-political spaces that simultaneously produce inequality, exclusion and disconnections.

The globalization era is inextricably linked to the neoliberal faith in freedom of markets and trade, private property and individual entrepreneurship. This laissez-faire approach to global development and governance took concrete forms in what is known as the Washington Consensus reforms. While the first round of reforms were pegged around liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, the second round - the post-Washington consensus - augmented it with emphasis on corporate governance, institutional accountability and flexibility of labour together with provision of social safety nets and poverty reduction programmes. Though the post-Washington consensus is sympathetic to the affects of unequal growth in a free market setup, it has little to offer in terms of corrective remedial. Further, the role of the state, here, is reduced to promotion and facilitation of free markets rather than generation and coordination of economic transformation. The institutional therapy is mainly focused on improving market freedoms and efficiency based on an idealized one-size-fits-all version of Anglo-American model of capitalism. 

In recent years, however, the credibility of the neoliberal orthodoxy has been undermined, on one hand, by the 1990s financial crises that induced inequality and instability in Asian societies, and on other, by the recent global financial crises that have sparked debates about the need for state interventions. Moreover, the economic successes of countries (e.g. China and Vietnam) that have followed policies mostly counter to the neoliberal prescription suggest that there are multiple routes to development. In fact, the recent rise of China and India - the ‘Asian Drivers' - challenges the very blueprint of the West-centric global political economy. In short, there is good reason to move beyond neoliberalism.

The neoliberal route to development has also set in motion a range of contestations, resistances and global social movements within elite and subaltern groups alike. Such contestations have revealed the fragile nature of market-led developments that allow us to challenge the theoretical assumptions of neoliberalism as an encompassing, global hegemonic political-economic project. Rather than being totalising, uniform and inflexible, neoliberalism appears to be fairly fragmented, incomplete, unstable and even contradictory processes in which specific neoliberal elements are found in multiple configurations. A study of the limits of neoliberalism thus becomes an examination of the articulation between elements of neoliberalism and established practices and policies of development and governance. As elsewhere, neoliberalism in an Asian context will also appear in many varieties- there will be different responses, different outcomes and unevenness that can only be grasped in the specific context of occurrence.

The GlobAsia research group will study configurations of neoliberalism in relation to the following three research themes:

1. Global Dynamics, Domestic Institutions and Structural Economic Change.

In this research theme we question the neoliberal credo that globalisation in the form of trade and investment liberalisation provides a vehicle for sustained economic development in developing countries. Similarly, we problematise the belief that the role of the state can be confined to adjustment to global regimes of economic standardization and creation of local market-friendly institutions that protect property rights, enforce contracts and improve market efficiency.
However while globalisation may induce growing inequality and instability, processes of catching up in East-, Southeast- and South Asia have demonstra-ted that globalisation may also hold considerable rewards for those who know how to reap them. Hence to understand such cases of catching-up there is a need for studying on one hand the global and regional dynamics of trade, finance, technology, and on the other hand the interplay of these processes with local conditions and strategic efforts by public and private sectors.

The global dynamics are not structureless and agentless processes but are driven by powerful political-economic and geo-political forces. One major field of interest is the prevailing pattern of organisational decomposition and functional integration in global and regional production networks/chains. Here we study coordination patterns and power relations among firms, and seek to identify the role of transnational producers and buyers in these networks. Moreover, we examine how learning through inter-firm networks takes place, and how chain governance leads to upgrading, downgrading and marginalisation. The changing rise of new Asian Drivers (China and India) constitutes a second field of interest. China is already one of the "industrial workshops" of the world and its seemingly insatiable appetite for primary commodities and other imports are influencing world trade and world prices too. India is undergoing a strong process of economic transformation encompassing knowledge intensive industries such as software and business service. The Asian Drivers pose both challenges and opportunities for other developing countries in Asia - and elsewhere - just as they challenge the global economic dominance of USA and Europe.

In explaining why certain latecomer countries succeed in catching up while others do not domestic institutions and local dynamics have to be taken into account, too. Of particular interest is the role of government policies and local institutions in industrial upgrading in developing countries. While the orthodox neoliberal approach highlights the creation of an enabling environment and commercial provision of basic services, we are concerned with industrial policies that promote dynamic activities, i.e. policies that promote upgrading and diversification of industries and services. Here the emphasis is as much upon "internal integration" between productive sectors and between investment and consumption as upon strategic world market integration. While the orthodox approaches use Western lenses on Asia and advocate a "getting institutions right" agenda that exports a particular institutional form ("good governance"), we look at how "institutions matter" in relation to creation of institutional capacity to accomplish certain tasks.

2. Labour Flexibility, Knowledge Development and State Regulation

In this research theme we are concerned with the interaction of regulatory interventions, strategies for labour flexibility and knowledge-intensive economic development in late-industrialising countries in Asia. Neoliberal strategies on privatisation, deregulation and marketisation have a strong impact on the overall economic agenda in the emerging economies in ASEAN, China and India. They become more and more predominant in line with their increasing integration in the global economy and especially with the new role of China and India as global economic players causing new patterns of divisions of labour regionally and globally. But they have not taken over the whole agenda in these economies. State regulation and planning still play a very important role. The research theme explores these Asian varieties of market economy and state regulation, examining different strategies for labour flexibility and modes of knowledge-intensive economic development. It focuses on different impacts on local labour markets such as division, segmentation and migration of labour, labour market regulation, organisation of labour processes, trade union patterns as well as on competence development and educational policies. 

The development of knowledge economies in Asia represents a shift in economic policies. In the past FDI from Western countries and Japan were based on a simple division of labour. TNCs placed the most labour-intensive processes in Asian countries. The so-called ‘tradability revolution in services' has changed this pattern. Traditional services are emigrating from the rich world, such as the outsourcing of back-office operations, but also R&D, design and other knowledge-intensive functions for industrial production are being ‘off-shored' to locations with the combination of low wages and high skills. Furthermore, the recent rise in intra-Asian investments has caused China, India and ASEAN countries to increasingly take a leading role in regional divisions of labour. The theme explores how more knowledge-intensive forms of production are expanding in the countries under investigation and how they cause new patterns of labour market segmentation and migration. However globalization is not just something externally forced upon countries. Therefore we investigate how governments and labour in different contexts strategically respond to the new challenges, and how varieties of labour market policies are formed.

Growing knowledge intensity and competition in Asian economies have increasingly been linked to the issue of having the right skills. That is, economic openness needs to be combined with strong skills- and knowledge-building institutions to avoid marginalization. Hence, we examine how governments, educational institutions and local Asian labour markets respond to the rising quest for organisational flexibility and high-skilled human resources? More specifically, we study how different economic actors (government agencies, business organizations, management, unions and individual workers) meet the challenges and form strategies to cope with the growing need for knowledge-intensive development in companies and public institutions?

3. Neoliberal Governance, Development and Conflict

In this research theme we explore neoliberalism as a concept that is significant to a wide range of transformations and conflicts in modern Asia. Globally, neoliberalism has become a buzzword, often tending to be fuzzy and boundless in conceptualisation, that characterises a variety of cultural, social and political-economic changes. Theoretically and empirically, in our different research projects, we show that neoliberalism is also in itself unstable on the one hand and causing instability on the other hand. At the same time, neoliberalism is often articulated together with other formations of a religious or ideological nature, that shapes markets and economic networks. Three keywords in this theme are culture, power and governing practices and ways in which these coalesce into concrete governmental regimes with their attendant patterns of inequality. Another significant aspect is government action in promoting the ‘freedom' of markets and the effects this has for modern Asian countries and populations. Closely related to this are powerful discourses of ‘rights' of individuals and groups to participate in markets beyond government regulation. In the current climate of the global financial crisis these aspects signify a high degree of actuality.

The emerging debates around neoliberalism invite us to revisit themes of development and conflict in a new framework where the focus has shifted to free market, economic growth and availability of capital and attendant opportunities in a globalised world. As market becomes the new engine of development, it not only reconfigures the landscape of social inequality but also calls to question the role of state in addressing those inequalities. Exploring this reconfigured landscape calls our attention to the ways in which different governance practices are shaping modes of political action - ranging from theoretical contestations of the market-driven rhetoric of development, everyday undeclared collective resistance to specific development policies, to maturation of local discontents into political violence. Thinking beyond the limiting binary of global/local, our research interests include the tensions arising out of political-economic transformation and social responses that are forcing open debates on the larger politics of development discourses and strategies. Our attention is also drawn towards the paradox of growth vis-à-vis development aid experienced by Asian countries where ‘self-reliance' attained through national growth diverts from and glosses over traditional areas of developmental intervention. The most recent example being India that claims economic growth as a sign of self-reliance even as it attempts to resolve challenges of, for instance, poverty accentuated by unequal distribution of economic growth. At the same time, internal impetus towards growth has opened up a fresh range of conflicts and challenges that are at once specific and common to a globalised world.

Individual projects

Morten Koch Andersen
Mobilisation and Social Navigation in Student Politics at Dhaka University, Bangladesh. (PhD project)
This project opens the politics of violence and youth mobilisation in Bangladesh and how this mobilisation informs governance, politics and authority. State formation, state authority and development (definition of and control over) have been at the centre of political contest, governance and social life since independence in 1971, recently accentuated by a military backed coup d'état in 2007. A main argument is that state formation and authority are informed by violent encounters between state and youth that accentuates governance, political legitimacy and citizenship. The project centres on the youth in student politics at the universities as sites of incubation for political leaders and state bureaucracy. The aim is to explore the interplay between the youth's efforts to manage livelihood and navigate for life chances within the organisations, and the organisations efforts to mobilise and guide youth to advance political projects of state formation, nationality and development.

Keywords: violence, youth mobilisation, politics and governance

Johan Fischer
On the halal frontier: Consuming Malays in London (post-doc project)
In my post-doc research project I explore modern forms of halal understanding and practice among Malay Muslims in London. This project takes as its point of departure research I have conducted on the interfaces between the state, consumption, Islamic revivalism and the marketplace in Malaysia. Halal is no longer an expression of esoteric forms of production, trade and consumption. It is part of a huge and expanding globalised market.

Keywords: state, markets, consumption, Islamic revivalism, halal

Daniel Fleming and Henrik Søborg
Labour markets and human resource development strategies in Malaysia and Singapore
Our research field is comparative analysis of Asian labour markets, industrial relations, training and education in economies in transition from labour intensive to more knowledge intensive forms of industrialisation, especially focussing on HRD strategies of foreign and domestic companies and related government incentives in Malaysia and Singapore for training and education in the private sector. The methodology used is company case studies in a comprehensive comparative analysis - comparison of policy set-up in Malaysia and Singapore, of foreign and domestic companies, of the different individual company cases and their strategies. Both countries follow a privatisation strategy but with several exceptions to neoliberal market policies.

As the discussion on neoliberalism and alternatives to neoliberalism strongly influences labour market policies and educational strategies in Malaysia and Singapore, this discussion is also influencing our case studies, including the specific type of company HR strategy. In both countries the state is strongly involved in industrial upgrading and not withdrawing from influencing labour markets and human resource development. It has successfully built up partnership arrangement with leading national and multinational companies within training and education. We are studying these partnership arrangements as alternatives to the neoliberal marketisation strategy. In the current debate on ways out of the financial crisis the Singaporean model of combining state and market has attracted renewed attention.

Keywords: labour market, human resource development strategies, public-private partnership, market regulation

Ravinder Kaur
Branding India
This project concerns the problems of transforming national identities into global brands in a neoliberal context - with India as the site of exploration. It takes its point of departure in the 1991 economic liberalisation in India, and asks how the governmental representations of a global Indian identity have led to internal reconfigurations in terms of national belonging and exclusion. The neoliberal moment in India's postcolonial history is reflected in the formation of new global spaces in the public sphere as well as a transnational trajectory of its constituents.

Keywords: neoliberalism, global branding, national identity, transnational trajectory, India

Peter Kragelund
Chinese Drivers for African Development (post-doc project)
This post doc project concerns China's renewed political and economic global interests. It looks specifically at Chinese companies' investments in three key sectors of the Zambian economy and seeks to further our understanding of the impacts of these investments for the domestic private sector in Zambia. Thereby, it touches upon issues of upgrading, national and global regulation, the room for national investment policies, and the role of foreign entrepreneurs in national politics. Moreover, it seeks to unravel the often interwoven vectors of Chinese engagement with African economies.

Keywords: China in Africa, policy space, private sector development, Western and Southern Africa.

Laurids S. Lauridsen
Globalisation, Governance and Economic Transformation
The project deals with the link between processes of globalisation, forms of governance and economic transformation with a particular emphasis on industrial transformation. While most scholars agree that governance and institutions matters for processes of economic/industrial transformation, there is no agreement concerning the specific nature of governance and the specific nature growth- (and welfare-) enhancing strategies. The present research project challenges the prevailing neoliberal post-Washington approach with its emphasis on "good governance" and "an enabling business environment" and "private sector development". The project instead seeks to study the content, potential and feasibility of an alternative heterodox approach with emphasis on "developmental governance" and "strategic intervention". A major field of study is also how different global actors advance different strategies of governance and economic transformation, and how processes of globalisation and global actors impact upon the "policy space". Geographically, the emphasis is on emerging economies in East- and Southeast Asia.

Keywords:  the limits of neoliberalism, developmental state, industrial transformation, policy space, East-and Southeast Asia

Jakob Lindahl
Linking up to East Asian production networks. Regional production networks and its impact on industrial udgrading in Vietnam. (PhD project)
This PhD project deals with regional value chains from East Asia to Vietnam. It aims to explore their impact on upgrading on respectively intra-firm, inter-firm and extra-firm levels in the Vietnamese footwear and seafood industry. The global value chain approach provides a framework for studying industrial restructuring in East Asia and Vietnam's position in the industry, and thus the country's prospects for upgrading in both private and state-owned enterprises are analysed. The project focuses on differences - and also reasons for upgrading failures and successes - between ethnic Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. The empirical methodology is mainly qualitative, and explores upgrading in investment receiving enterprises in respectively Hanoi, Hai Phong, Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta.

Keywords: global value chains, industrial upgrading, footwear, seafood, Vietnam

Birger Linde
Transformation and Crisis in the World Economy
The ongoing financial crisis interacts with a broader downturn in the global economy. My research investigates the historical background and the actual development of the crisis, with a special view on the long-range economic and political transformations elicited or reinforced by the economic turbulence. Points of special focus: a) The threatened position of the US as economic and political superpower; b) The rise of Asia and China; c) The changing relations between mature western high-income civilisations    and rising, commodity rich emerging powers.

Keywords: financial crisis, US hegemony, China

Mette Kjær Petersen
Educating innovative graduates for the Chinese economy? Higher education reform in China (PhD project)
The Chinese government is seeking to transform the economy from "Made in China" to "Designed in China" through the principle of ‘Revitalizing China through science and education'. That is, higher education has come to play a direct role in China's development process. In the mid-1990s the government launched a comprehensive higher education reform that should build "quality education" and educate "specialized talents with innovative spirit and practical capability". The research project is an institutional study of how a country in rapid transformation translate the globally articulated neoliberal idea that ‘innovative competence development is a fundamental lever for becoming a competitive knowledge economy' into a national development strategy. It also studies how local actors in a business university renegotiate the strategy and construct the drivers and barriers that shape the process of changing the institutional conditions for educating innovative and practical graduates.

Keywords:  higher education reform, knowledge economy, institutions, local actors, China

Mallarika Sinha Roy
Political Violence, Youth Politics, and Globalisation in India (post-doc project)
Liberalisation of Indian economy since early 1990s provides contemporary Indian youth a chance to benefit from a successful collaboration between globalised economy and productive labour. The uneven structure of economic growth, however, leaves a large section of poor youth vulnerable to the present form of globalisation and confrontations between global capital and local labour markets often gravitate towards political violence. This study concerns the interfaces of globalisation, political violence and emerging youth politics; documents the ways in which local power relations reconfigure and consolidate; explores youth as a political force, and as distinctive social and cultural experiences in the wake of globalisation.

Keywords: globalisation, governance, development, youth, violence, South Asian politics, India

Jesper Zeuthen
Rural Urban Unification in Chengdu, China? (PhD project)
My PhD thesis is based on fieldwork at peri-urban and rural localities in the vicinity of Chengdu, China. At all localities various forms of volunteer, semi-forced and forced displacement takes place. These displacement schemes are all presented as parts of the highly profiled rural-urban unification policy aimed at minimizing the gap between rural and urban China. Through a study of the ways relations between local state organizations and various types of citizens are expressed during the various processes of dislocation ranging from labour migration to individuals being moved for giving room to a damn project, I investigate how the significance of the rural-urban boundary both as a marker between civilized and uncivilized, powerfull and powerless and rich and poor changes its significance. Labour migration and other types of interaction across the rural-urban boundary have for long made rural organizations less rural, yet being rural has for long remained a valid and widely accepted excuse for treating rural individuals as second rate citizens. With reconfiguration of what being rural means organizing inequality along the rural-urban boundary seems increasingly difficult. I argue that hardship and laziness are emerging as more important parameters for legitimizing inequality.

Keywords: dislocation, state, boundaries, labour migration, China

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