The Nordic Asia Podcast

South Korean presidential election ended and the conservative party candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol won the election. How will he balance the relationships between Korea and the US and China?The current progressive Moon Jae-in administration has pursued strategic ambiguity in foreign policy, trying to maintain a strong alliance relationship with the US while pursuing an economic partnership with China. During the campaign, Yoon promised that he will reverse the Moon’s foreign policy and pursue strategic clarity, emphasizing security concerns in the Korean Peninsula. In this episode, Dr. Sungmin Cho shares his expertise on South and North Korea’s relations with China, North Korea’s newly posed threats this year, and the security dynamics surrounding the Korean Peninsula.Dr. Sungmin Cho is a professor of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, an academic institute of the US Department of Defense, based in Hawaii. His area of expertise covers China-Korean Peninsula relations, North Korea’s nuclear program, and the US alliance in East Asia. Dr. Cho has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, including World Politics, The China Journal, Asian Security, Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, and Korea Observer. His commentaries also appeared in Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, The Diplomat, and Defense One, among others. Prior to the academic career, Dr.Cho served in the Korean Army as an intelligence officer for three years, including seven-month deployment to Iraq. He received his PhD in Government from Georgetown University, his Master’s degree in International Relations from Peking University, and his B.A. in Political Science from Korea University.Disclaimer: Views expressed in the podcast belong to the commentator.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken the ground of global politics, and one of the key questions has been China’s position in the situation. In this episode, Dr. Matti Puranen analyses China’s international relations and strategic position in the context of the Ukraine crisis and China’s relationship with Russia. The newfound Western unity in response to the situation may also complicate China’s relations with Finland. According to Dr. Puranen, Finland’s traditionally good relationship with China has already shown some signs of cooling in recent years. We also discuss the implications of the current situation for Taiwan and China’s overall visions regarding the existing international order.Read Dr. Puranen’s article “Sino-Russian Relations Already Bear Signs of a Military Alliance” (with Juha Kukkola) in the National Interest and his articles “Finland’s China Shift” (with Jukka Aukia) and “China-Finland: Beijing’s ‘Model Relationship’ in Europe?” in The Diplomat.Matti Puranen is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Warfare of the Finnish National Defense University. His research focuses on strategy and international relations, particularly China and Chinese strategic thought.Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Timor-Leste is choosing a president. What is the significance of the 2022 presidential elections in Timor-Leste? Has Asia’s youngest and newest country become a prisoner of its short but turbulent political past? How do young people view the older generation of former freedom fighters who continue to dominate the political order? What has the atmosphere been like on the ground during the election campaign?In the first of a short series of Timor-Leste-focused Nordic Asia Podcasts, Amber Woortman, a master’s student in political science at the University of Copenhagen, talks to NIAS Director Duncan McCargo from Dili about her observations and her conversations with candidates and voters in Timor-Leste over the past couple of weeks. This is a rare opportunity to hear about an election that has received very little mainstream international media coverage.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastAbout NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Cocktail umbrellas and refugee camps, serene Buddhist monasteries and soldiers in combat fatigues – Sri Lanka is a country of paradoxes. When the country became independent in 1948 it was a strong candidate to prove that the transition from colonialism to democratic sovereignty could indeed be successful. Today, after 30 years of civil war and with conflicts yet to be resolved, the country is on the brink of qualifying as a failed state. With the exception of a short interlude from 2015 to 2019 political power has since 2005 been in the hands of the Rajapaksa family. In this period, Sri Lanka has gone through a process of militarization and ethnocratization, and has redefined its international relationships, building strong ties with China. Particularly since Gotabaya Rajapaksa was installed as President in 2019, governance increasingly rests on patronage and personal associations. In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Professor Øivind Fuglerud from the University of Oslo, to analyze and discuss Sri Lanka’s democratic backslide.Øivind Fuglerud is a professor at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, and also the keeper of the ethnographic collection from Pakistan, India, Bangaladesh and Sri Lanka at the museum.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

The past few months have been election season in India. Although these are state elections, many view them as a key midterm evaluation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government. What are the takeaway messages from these recently concluded assembly elections?In this episode, we zoom in on the elections in the five Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur, and Punjab. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by a panel of experts on Indian democracy and politics: Arild Ruud, Guro Samuelsen, Edward Moon-Little, Rahul Ranjan and Shreya Sinha, who analyze the results from all five states, the BJP’s impressive performance, and the many localized surprises that these elections threw up. We also reflect on the implications of the outcome for national politics as the next general election scheduled for 2024 inches ever closer.Guro Samuelsen is postdoctoral fellow at MF School of theology, Religion and Society, where she is part of the ‘Mythopolitics in South Asia’ project.Arild Engelsen Ruud is professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo.Edward Moon-Little candidate in social anthropology at Cambridge and a fellow at the Highland Institute.Rahul Ranjan is postdoctoral fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University, where he is part of the ‘Riverine Rights’ project.Shreya Sinha is lecturer in international development at University of Reading.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Southeastern Myanmar (Burma). The Myanmar military has carried out arial attacks on villages: targeting schools, libraries, and villagers’ agricultural fields. In the past year, roughly one hundred thousand civilians have been displaced in the Southeast alone. Many have attempted to seek refuge in neighboring Thailand but have not been accepted as refugees. In addition to this ongoing emergency of forced migration, there are currently an additional hundred thousand refugees from Myanmar living in nine refugee camps in Thailand, which have existed for over thirty years. In early 2022, for the first time in years, there were protests in the camps over lack of rights and demanding decreased restrictions for refugees. In this podcast Terese Gagnon speaks with Hayso Thako about the experiences of refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border and what they can tell us about approaches to humanitarianism and development more broadly.Read this co-authored article about the refugee situation on the Thai-Myanmar border by Hayso and Terese here. Hayso is a PhD candidate at Department of Peacebuilding, Payap University, Thailand. He has been working with the refugee community and community-based organizations along the Thai-Burma border for the last 20 years. He is currently the Education and Livelihood Coordinator of the Karen Refugee Committee, the chair of Refugee Affairs at Karen Peace Support Network and a leading advocate for the Karen Student Network Group. He is also one of the founding members of the relatively new Asian Pacific Network of Refugees. His research interests include refugee and IDPs, ethnic education and border issues in Thailand and Burma.

Why did Restart Thailand, a 2020 student-led pro-democracy movement, sport a red Communist-style logo with a hammer and sickle? Why did a Thai BNK48 singer wear a swastika t-shirt for the band’s 2019 concert rehearsal? And why did the latest Thai junta produce a video of two boys applauding a portrait of Adolf Hitler to promote Thai values? Verita Sriratana, an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Chulalongkorn University, discusses this deeply troubling Thai infatuation with Nazi and Communist symbolism with Petra Alderman (prev. Desatova), an Associate Researcher at NIAS.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian History, Department of History, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA . His book “The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021 and it won the 2021 Memory Studies Association’s First Book Award.In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang his award-winning book. Yang’s book covers one of the least understood forced migrations in modern East Asia—the human exodus from China to Taiwan following the Nationalist collapse and Chinese Communist victory in 1949. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs, the book tells a very different story from conventional historiographies the Chinese civil war, Chinese revolution, and Cold War Taiwan. Underscoring the displaced population’s trauma of living in exile and their poignant “homecomings” four decades later, Yang presents a multiple-event trajectory of repeated traumatization with the recurring search for home, belonging, and identity. By portraying the Chinese civil war exiles in Taiwan both as traumatized subjects of displacement and overbearing colonizers to the local peoples, Yang’s work challenges the established notions of trauma, memory production, diaspora, and reconciliation. It speaks to the importance of subject position, boundary-crossing empathic unsettlements, and ethical responsibility of researching, narrating, and representing historical trauma.Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

India has been caught in a question for almost a decade now: is it a secular democracy or is it a Hindu nation? The struggles over this question goes from the parliament to the streets, from Facebook to living rooms, from the metropolis to the margins.The Indian Prime minister and his party routinely invoke Hindu deities in political campaigns. Hindu nationalist forces have been transforming and coopting traditional religious practices to upper caste Hinduism in indigenous and oppressed caste communities for several decades. Activists trying to stop this process of cooption claim that Hindu myths —with all the deities and their stories of good and evil—form the moral core of the supremacy of upper caste Hindus. They deconstruct these myths through social media campaigns to question the chastity of Hindu goddesses, the moral uprightness of Hindu gods, and the purity of Hindu scriptures. They demand that we reexamine the role of religious myths in contemporary politics.In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Moumita Sen, Silje L. Einarsen, The’ang Theron and Guro W. Samuelsen to discuss the ongoing narrative construction and mythological contestations of the current Hindu nationalist regime.The project Mythopolitics in South Asia, led by Moumita Sen at the MF School of Theology, Religion and Society, studies how the Hindu nationalist party and its oppositional forces use popular mythic Hindu narratives in electoral politics and social movements in contemporary India.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Authoritarian regimes have often been discussed in contrast to democratic governments and defined in terms of what they lack--namely, democratic features. Dr. Elina Sinkkonen highlights the need for a new method of conceptualizing authoritarian regimes on their own terms, by including variables like personalization, centralization, and state control over economic assets. Focusing on these factors allows for better quantification and understanding of how governments and regimes change. Dr. Sinkkonen discusses the example of Xi Jinping's China and explains the degrees to which technological innovations and the COVID pandemic have affected the CCP leadership.Elina Sinkkonen is a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and a specialist in authoritarian governance.Satoko Naito is a docent at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.Read Dr. Sinkkonen's article "Dynamic dictators: improving the research agenda on autocratization and authoritarian resilience" in Democratization, mentioned in the episode (open access) here.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast