Title first published in 2003. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and October 12, 2002 in the United States and on Bali, we may be witnessing the most sweeping shift in US foreign policy since the beginning of the cold war. America is again committed to leading the world in a battle against a global enemy. The US relationship with Indonesia - the country with the world’s largest Islamic population - could prove to be of decisive importance for the success of its new global mission. Timo Kivimäki’s analysis of the dynamics and background of the US-Indonesian relationship will be essential reading for all concerned with American Foreign Policy, Asian studies, peace studies and conflict resolution and negotiation.

General study of Malaysia - covers historical and geographical aspects, the demographic aspects and social structures, living conditions, education, cultural factors, religion, the government, political leadership, the economic structure, the industrial structure, agriculture, labour relations, national income and budget, trade, international relations, banking, the administration of justice, the armed forces, etc. Bibliography pp. 583 to 614, map and references.

China's alliance with Indonesia in the mid-sixties appeared to be a spectacular achievement of diplomatic strategy, yet it became a major foreign policy disaster for China. To explore this turn-about, Professor Mozingo offers a persuasive analysis of the competing forces that shaped Beijing's policy towards Jakarta and the factors that ultimately led to its downfall. He explains how and why Chinese policy in Indonesia shifted dramatically from hostility to peaceful coexistence and back again to hostility. "Although considerations of global strategy predominantly influenced the design and execution of that policy," he writes, "the decisive factor affecting the outcome of the Sino-Indonesian relationship consistently proved to be the domestic political processes in Indonesia, over which Beijing had little or no control." In the end, China was unable to resolve the contradiction between considerations of realpolitik and of its own revolutionary ethos. He argues that this same contradiction is responsible for the highly ambivalent attitude that Beijing has displayed in its relations with other non-communist Arfo-Asian countries since 1949. Through this informed analysis of the Sino-Indonesian relationship, now brought back to life as a member of Equinox Publishing's Classic Indonesia series, Professor Mozingo has clarified the larger pattern of China's evolving diplomatic strategy in the Third World before the Cultural Revolution. DAVID MOZINGO is Professor of Government and Director, International Relations of East Asia Project, at Cornell University. A graduate of the University of California, Loa Angeles, he received his MA and PhD degrees there. He was formerly a staff member of the Rand Corporation, and Director, China-Japan Program, at Cornell University.

The annual number of battle deaths from interstate and intra-state conflicts in East Asia has declined by 95% since 1979. During the past three decades, East Asia has been more peaceful than Europe, the Americas or any continent, in terms of battle deaths per capita. When generating theories on peace and war, studies almost never look at the experiences of East Asia. Yet the region by focusing on a commitment to development, is a social reality that is less paranoid, less militaristic and more cooperative. Since 1979 there has been a commonly accepted rule to keep domestic issues domestic so that external military interference, that often caused the majority of battle deaths, was not needed. Thus the emergence of the long peace of East Asia is historically specific, and cannot be generalized by studying objective, material conditions independent of common perceptions and common interpretations. This does not mean that the East Asian experience is not relevant for other regions in the world, but that generalizations should not be attempted to be drawn from the material conditions, but rather from the lived experience and socially constructed realities of East Asia. Since East Asia is a spectacular case of pacification, and since it has not contributed much to our theories of peace and conflict, The Long Peace of East Asia is an important book for studies on peace and war.

Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation. Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based on decades of colonial rule, as well as the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. Arc of Containment demonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.