The biomedical industry, which includes biopharmaceuticals, genomics and stem cell therapies, and medical devices, is among the fastest growing worldwide. While it has been an economic development target of many national governments, Asia is currently on track to reach the epicenter of this growth. What accounts for the rapid and sustained economic growth of biomedicals in Asia? To answer this question, Kathryn Ibata-Arens integrates global and national data with original fieldwork to present a conceptual framework that considers how national governments have managed key factors, like innovative capacity, government policy, and firm-level strategies. Taking China, India, Japan, and Singapore in turn, she compares each country's underlying competitive advantages. What emerges is an argument that countries pursuing networked technonationalism (NTN) effectively upgrade their capacity for innovation and encourage entrepreneurial activity in targeted industries. In contrast to countries that engage in classic technonationalism—like Japan's developmental state approach—networked technonationalists are global minded to outside markets, while remaining nationalistic within the domestic economy. By bringing together aggregate data at the global and national level with original fieldwork and drawing on rich cases, Ibata-Arens telegraphs implications for innovation policy and entrepreneurship strategy in Asia—and beyond.

Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Comparative Perspectives is a collection of essays from a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives that explore the contentious issue of nationalism in historical and contemporary settings. They adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of nationalism and its permutations and modes of expression. The unspoken context of these essays is the trends subsumed under the processes of globalization. Though the world may be becoming more integrated economically, these essays suggest social, cultural, and political forces, historically rooted, keep the nation and national identity alive and well. The comparative perspectives offered by the essays appear in two ways: one set is the explicit comparisons of nations made by several authors within their essays and between the essays themselves when the authors focus on developments within a single nation. A second, and indeed more thought-provoking set of comparisons come from the way the essays address nationalism in disparate scholarly approaches that include visual culture, history, sociology, and literature. Moreover, while traditional themes in the study of nationalism are not ignored, these essays expand the discussion with case studies of nationalism in Turkey, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Even when nationalism is considered in those areas that have been the central focus of nationalism studies (Western Europe and the USA), the authors bring unique voices to the conversation as in the use of portraiture as a vehicle of nationalism in Cold War America or children’s literature shaping a Swedish American identity or in the idea of a covenant as a source of Dutch nationalism or the role of minority languages in West European societies. Section One of this volume contains essays that examine the terrain of the national imaginary through language, monuments, and visual culture. Several of the essays in this traverse the cultural sites of representation and commemoration of the nation, looking carefully at the “politics of memory” in places, material objects, and texts. Section Two provides more individual case studies of nations, though many of these essays engage significant regional and international tensions especially in a post Cold War world that has often influenced the internal dynamics of nation-building. Section Three moves the focus away from the nation to immigrant communities, especially those in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Diasporas throughout the world have challenged many theories about the nation, as crossing borders becomes the norm rather the exception.

In the turbulence and uncertainty of the post-Cold War world, Japan has confronted serious challenges while attempting to contribute to the international political economy. Japan, often characterized as a nation incapable of demonstrating global leadership, has stepped up its diplomatic activism with Official Development Assistance. Whereas bilateral foreign aid policy has received much attention in recent years, multilateral aid has been relatively neglected. Yet it is in international financial institutions that Japan has been forging an activist global diplomacy. Dennis Yasutomo provides the first look at Japan's emerging activism in its multilateral diplomacy. He analyzes, from a comparative perspective, Japanese policies toward three of the flagship multilateral development banks: the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Through the prism of Japan's behavior toward international organizations, developing nations, and the former Soviet Union, this study will introduce the reader to a major stepping stone in understanding Japan's twenty-first-century diplomacy.

In the book Chinese Policy and Presence in the Arctic, Koivurova and Kopra (eds.) offer a comprehensive account of China's diplomatic, economic, environmental, scientific and strategic presence in the Arctic region and its influence on the future of the region

This report published by ISPI and the Brookings Institution analyzes the challenges to international order posed by the ongoing race for technological superiority. From artificial intelligence and quantum computing to hypersonic weapons and new forms of cyber and electronic warfare, advances in technology have threatened to make the international security environment more unpredictable and volatile – yet the international community remains unprepared to assess and manage that risk. What is needed is a mature understanding of how technology has emerged as a key enabler of sovereignty in the XXI century, how the ongoing race for technological supremacy is disrupting the balance of power globally, and what the attendant strategic and security implications of those transformations will be. This report is an effort to that end.