International Institute for Asian Studies

This article revisits the climate-conflict-displacement nexus by analyzing the Syrian Civil War as a case of climate-exacerbated state collapse. Rejecting linear causality, it asks: how does climate-induced stress contribute to armed conflict and forced migration, and how might these dynamics be understood through ecocide? Drawing on international relations, legal studies, and environmental studies, we develop a framework positioning environmental refugeedom and ecocide as concepts revealing international legal categories’ insufficiencies. Examining Syria, we show how drought, environmental mismanagement, and authoritarian governance intensified grievances, fueling conflict and mass displacement. Rather than presenting climate change as a singular cause, we argue for its role as a threat multiplier within authoritarian rule, developmental failure, and global inequality structures. The article contributes by proposing expanded conceptual vocabulary to capture environmental collapse’s political violence. It calls for rethinking state responsibility, legal protection frameworks, and human rights paradigms under planetary crisis—especially in authoritarian regimes facing ecological breakdown.

Divorce can trigger a sense of life disorientation and difficulties in fulfilling the role of a single parent. Using the Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) approach, which emphasizes practical solutions and self-empowerment, counselors assist clients in recognizing their strengths, planning concrete steps to improve their lives, and accepting destiny with patience and sincerity in accordance with Islamic teachings. This study aims to examine the application of SFBT in Islamic counseling as an effort to address the psychological crisis experienced by young mothers after divorce. A case study method was employed, involving five counseling sessions. Data were collected through interviews, observations, and counseling notes, and were analyzed thematically. The findings indicate that the application of SFBT in Islamic counseling is effective in helping clients cope with psychological crises, focus on solutions, and enhance emotional well-being and their role as mothers. In conclusion, the SFBT approach in Islamic counseling can empower young divorced mothers to overcome life challenges and improve the quality of their personal and family life. The contribution of this study lies in integrating the modern psychotherapeutic approach of SFBT with Islamic spiritual values, demonstrating its effectiveness in the cultural and religious context of Indonesian society. These findings provide new insights for practitioners of Islamic counseling and psychotherapy regarding the importance of integrating strength-based and faith-oriented approaches in supporting clients through life crises. Furthermore, this research enriches the literature on Islamic counseling with a practical approach relevant for guiding women after divorce.

This article analyzes the philosophical views on the concepts of time and space as contemplated by Ibn Arabi. The main goal is to examine the essence of time from Ibn Arabi’s sufistical perspective, its role as a means of connection with the Divine, and its relationship with the movement of the universe. The article discusses the interconnection between the concepts of time and space, as well as the link between time and quantity. Ibn Arabi defines the relative and dialectical characteristics of time by explaining its continuity, circular movement, and the movement in existence. Additionally, the value of time in sufism, its inseparable significance in human life, and the necessity of understanding the immeasurable nature of time are highlighted.

This paper examines the comparative analysis of photovoltaic (PV) energy policies and data from Spain, Germany, and Brazil, focusing on understanding the factors influencing PV deployment and efficiency in these countries. This study identifies critical policy recommendations to enhance PV capacity, generation, and efficiency based on a comprehensive review of policy measures and statistical data from 2000 to 2022. These recommendations include prioritising legal stability and transition periods in policy implementation, addressing regional inequalities in PV deployment, and promoting the association of PV with other energy industries and sectors. Additionally, the study suggests the need for a strategic industrial policy to encourage domestic PV manufacturing, considering the potential benefits for economic development and employment.

This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls’ agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women’s emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South.

The volume collects a series of contributions that help reconstruct the recent history of the Nath tradition, highlighting important moments of self.reinterpretation in the sampradaya’s interaction with different social milieus. The leitmotif tying together the selection of articles is the authors’ explorations of the overlap between religious authority and political power. For example, in which ways do the Naths’ hagiographical claim of possessing yogic charisma (often construed as supernatural powers, siddhis) translate into mundane expressions of socio-political power? And how does it morph into the authority to reinterpret and recreate particular traditions? The articles approach different aspects of the recent history of the Nath sampradaya, spanning from stories of yogis guiding kings in the petty principalities of the eighteenth century to gurus who sought prominence in the transnational environments of the twentieth century; examining some Nath lineages and institutions under the British Raj, in the history of Nepal, and in contemporary India.

This chapter undertakes a thorough examination of the EFTA negotiations as they got underway in June 1959 and continued until the initialling of the Stockholm Convention five months later. Despite the Convention appearing to have been negotiated relatively swiftly, this chapter highlights the recurrence of disagreements that had earlier marred the FTA ranging from tariffs to the place of fish and agriculture within an otherwise industrial trading zone. What it likewise shows, however, is that these talks ultimately proved more constructive than the earlier FTA episode. That this was the case was due to greater flexibility and learning on the part of the British, who were more willing than before to offer side-payments to their smaller neighbours in a bid to ensure that EFTA got off the ground. The concessions won by smaller countries would dramatically change the overall shape and character of the organisation but would in the process avoid a repeat of the FTA debacle.

After months of what, in effect, were pre-negotiations, formal negotiations on creating an FTA finally got underway in October 1957, chaired by Reginald Maudling, the British paymaster general. But support for these beginning had really only been unanimous thanks to the absence of a French government. Soon enough, it became clear that the new administration of Félix Gaillard would not accept the British FTA proposal as it stood. This chapter is therefore concerned with the evolution of French policy, detailing attempts by London to stiffen German resolve in the face of mounting French disinterest in the FTA and how yet another change of power in Paris—the return of General Charles de Gaulle later in 1958—risked undermining all these efforts. The second half of the chapter, in turn, explains how the position of the non-Six also placed in peril the potential success of the talks. So too did the hardening stance of the United States, which feared the FTA would extend the area of discrimination against its exports. The chapter, therefore, offers a much more international picture of the months leading to the collapse of the FTA, which in the event was finally vetoed by de Gaulle in November 1958.

Among committed readers of romantic fiction in Malaysia, constructed ideals of intimacy are mobilised as a matter of personal moral enterprise and a panacea for emotional asymmetry between the sexes. Yet, such ideals are as much an outcome of collective meaning-making as an individual one. As this article will show, the affective rewards of mediated romance are relational and have a distributive, contagious, transformative as well as spatial effect crossing spaces both ‘private’ and ‘public’, work and leisure, personal and community. I argue that aspirations for marital success and personal self-actualisation motivate a range of affective creative labour for sustaining ethical relationships with the self, significant others, family, and community in what I call the counterpublics of care, which refer to social assemblages committed to the revaluation of intimacy, emotion work, and love.