This Open Access book offers a comprehensive oral history of Japan’s development cooperation, based on nearly 300 interview narratives collected in Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Malaysia, Thailand, Costa Rica, Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Jordan, Brazil, Cambodia, and Japan. Unlike most books on development cooperation, which are written from the perspective of aid providers, this book gives voice to local actors – referred to as ‘counterparts’ – in aid recipient countries. In an era of geopolitica...

This book classifies and assesses the real and perceived risks associated with both the Covid-19 pandemic and government responses to it in seven African countries — DR Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe — based on large scale quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted in 2022–2024. It also elucidates the people’s resilience in overcoming the risks within their political, social, and cultural context.Although research on COVID-19 has been condu...

By 2100, more than 80 per cent of the world’s population is expected to live in Afrasia (Africa and Asia). This book draws lessons from history, provides a new cognitive map of the world, and discusses multiple challenges global citizens will face in the age of Afrasia, an emerging macro-region.The centre of gravity of the world is shifting. Whether the world can manage a soft landing into sustainable equilibrium depends on the nature of the dialogue people in Africa and Asia will ...

This book – through a collection of case studies covering Southern and East Africa, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia – offers insights into the nature of social exchanges between Africa and Asia. In the age of the ‘Rise of the South’, it documents the entanglements and the lived experiences of African and Asian people on the move. Divided into three parts, the authors look at Asians in Africa, Africans in Asia, and the ‘connected histories’ that the two share, which illu...

This book reveals how the idea of human security, combined with other human-centric norms, has been embraced, criticized, modified and diffused in East Asia (ASEAN Plus Three). Once we zoom in to the regional space of East Asia, we can see a kaleidoscopic diversity of human security stakeholders and their values. Asian stakeholders are willing to engage in the cultural interpretation and contextualization of human security, underlining the importance of human dignity in addition to freedom...

This book takes up a wide variety of human security challenges beyond the dimension of human conflict, and looks at both natural and human disasters that the East Asian region faces or is attempting to resolve. While discussing various human security issues, the case studies offer practical lessons to address serious human security challenges in the framework of the ASEAN Plus Three and beyond. Against the backdrop of multifaceted globalization and parochial reactions thereto, this book is...

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this edited volume revisits the framework of human security and development. It examines the protection-empowerment nexus as applied to various vulnerable groups and populations affected by the pandemic.While the conventional human security literature has focused on top-down protection, this book offers new perspectives on human security by exploring bottom-up empowerment from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It also encourages r...