Managing Great Power Politics

This Open Access book explains ASEAN’s strategic role in managing great power politics in East Asia. Constructing a theory of institutional strategy, this book argues that the regional security institutions in Southeast Asia, ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have devised their own institutional strategies vis-à-vis the South China Sea and navigated the great-power politics since the 1990s. ASEAN proliferated new security institutions in the 1990s and 2000s that assumed a different functionality, a different geopolitical scope, and thus a different institutional strategy. In so doing, ASEAN formed a “strategic institutional web” that nurtured a quasi-division of labor among the institutions to maintain relative stability in the South China Sea. Unlike the conventional analysis on ASEAN, this study disaggregates “ASEAN” as a collective regional actor into specific individual institutions—ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, ASEAN Summit, ASEAN-China dialogues, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit, and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus—and explains how each of these institutions has devised and/or shifted its institutional strategy to curb great powers’ ambition in dominating the South China Sea while navigating great power competition. The book sheds light on the strategic potential and limitations of ASEAN and ASEAN-led security institutions, offers implications for the future role of ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific region, and provides an alternative understanding of the strategic utilities of regional security institutions

Managing Great Power Politics

This Open Access book explains ASEAN’s strategic role in managing great power politics in East Asia. Constructing a theory of institutional strategy, this book argues that the regional security institutions in Southeast Asia, ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have devised their own institutional strategies vis-à-vis the South China Sea and navigated the great-power politics since the 1990s. ASEAN proliferated new security institutions in the 1990s and 2000s that assumed a different functionality, a different geopolitical scope, and thus a different institutional strategy. In so doing, ASEAN formed a “strategic institutional web” that nurtured a quasi-division of labor among the institutions to maintain relative stability in the South China Sea. Unlike the conventional analysis on ASEAN, this study disaggregates “ASEAN” as a collective regional actor into specific individual institutions—ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, ASEAN Summit, ASEAN-China dialogues, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit, and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus—and explains how each of these institutions has devised and/or shifted its institutional strategy to curb great powers’ ambition in dominating the South China Sea while navigating great power competition. The book sheds light on the strategic potential and limitations of ASEAN and ASEAN-led security institutions, offers implications for the future role of ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific region, and provides an alternative understanding of the strategic utilities of regional security institutions

Dissipation-induced pure Gaussian state

This paper provides some necessary and sufficient conditions for a generalMarkovian Gaussian master equation to have a unique pure steady state. The conditions are described by simple matrix equations; thus the so-called environment engineering problem for pure-Gaussian-state preparation can be straightforwardly dealt with in the linear algebraic framework. In fact, based on one of those conditions, for an arbitrary given pure Gaussian state,we obtain a complete parametrization of the Gaussian master equation having that state as a unique steady state; this leads to a systematic procedure for engineering a desired dissipative system.We demonstrate some examples including Gaussian cluster states.Comment: 8 page

Image and Substance Failures in Regional Organisations: Causes, Consequences, Learning and Change?

States often pool their sovereignty, capacity and resources to provide regionally specific public goods, such as security or trade rules, and regional organisations play important roles in international relations as institutions that attempt to secure peace and contribute to achieving other similar global policy goals. We observe failures occurring in these arrangements and activities in two areas: substance and image. To analytically account for this, we distinguish four modes of substance and image change and link these to specific types of failure and (lack of) learning. To empirically ground and test our assumptions, we examine instances of image failure in ASEAN (political/security policy) and substantive policy failure in EU labour migration policy. In so doing, this article contributes to several different fields of study and concepts that have hitherto rarely engaged with one another: analyses of policy failure from public policy, and regional integration concerns from area studies and international relations. We conclude with suggestions for ways forward to further analyse and understand failures at the international and supranational levels

Superradiance around Rotating Dilatonic Black Hole

We consider a superradiance effect around rotating dilatonic black holes. We analyze two cases: one is an exact solution with the coupling constant $\alpha=\sqrt{3}$, which effective action is reduced from the 5-dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory, and the other is a slowly rotating dilatonic black holes with arbitrary coupling constant. We find that there exists a critical value ($\alpha \sim 1$), which is predicted from a superstring model, and the superradiant emission rate with coupling larger than the critical value becomes much higher than the Kerr-Newman case ($\alpha=0$) in the maximally charged limit. Consequently, 4-dimensional primordial black holes in higher dimensional unified theories are either rotating but almost neutral or charged but effectively non-rotating.Comment: 12 pages, Latex, three figures, WU-AP/43/9

A case of primary mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma of the prostate

We report a case of primary mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma of the prostate. A 67-year-old man presented with urinary obstruction and an elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level. A physical examination revealed mild prostate enlargement and no lymphadenopathy. A needle biopsy and immunohistochemical studies of the prostate were performed, which revealed marginal zone B-cell MALT-type lymphoma. A bone marrow aspiration and biopsy did not show involvement by lymphoma. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the abdomen and the pelvis revealed no lymphadenopathy or ascites. There was no involvement of other sites by lymphoma. The patient was diagnosed and staged as extranodal marginal zone B-cell MALT-type lymphoma of the prostate, low grade and stage I. The patient received external beam radiation therapy to the prostate with a total dose of 3600cGy in 22 fractions, and became free of disease within the following 15 months

Misplaced States and the Politics of Regional Identity:Towards a Theoretical Framework

Whilst there is no shortage of analyses on the politics of regions in International Relations, little attention has been paid to states who perceive that they do not properly fit in the regions they happen to be located in. These are the ‘misplaced states’: they stand out not so much because of material capacities but because they espouse an identity, manifested in different ways, in marked contrast to the states around them. This article asks what causes this process of a change in identity amongst misplaced states in different parts of the world. Comparing across regions, it analyses why and how states reconstruct their identities in order to enhance or deemphasise their degrees of regional conformity. By focusing on the ‘role-location process’ rooted in role theory, this article contributes to the literature by conceptualising the phenomenon of ‘misplacement.’ A state is misplaced when there is mismatch between its aspirations and others’ expectations for it. The article also details how and why misplacement occurs and studies its implications both for the states in question as well as for the politics of their geographical regions

Evaporation and Fate of Dilatonic Black Holes

We study both spherically symmetric and rotating black holes with dilaton coupling and discuss the evaporation of these black holes via Hawking's quantum radiation and their fates. We find that the dilaton coupling constant $\alpha$ drastically affects the emission rates, and therefore the fates of the black holes. When the charge is conserved, the emission rate from the non-rotating hole is drastically changed beyond $\alpha = 1$ (a superstring theory) and diverges in the extreme limit. In the rotating cases, we analyze the slowly rotating black hole solution with arbitrary $\alpha$ as well as three exact solutions, the Kerr--Newman ($\alpha = 0$), and Kaluza--Klein ($\alpha = \sqrt{3}$), and Sen black hole ($\alpha = 1$ and with axion field). Beyond the same critical value of $\alpha \sim 1$, the emission rate becomes very large near the maximally charged limit, while for $\alpha<1$ it remains finite. The black hole with $\alpha > 1$ may evolve into a naked singularity due to its large emission rate. We also consider the effects of a discharge process by investigating superradiance for the non-rotating dilatonic black hole.Comment: 33 pages, LaTex, 14 postscript figure files (appended as a uuencoded compressed tar file

Equivalence of black hole thermodynamics between a generalized theory of gravity and the Einstein theory

We analyze black hole thermodynamics in a generalized theory of gravity whose Lagrangian is an arbitrary function of the metric, the Ricci tensor and a scalar field. We can convert the theory into the Einstein frame via a "Legendre" transformation or a conformal transformation. We calculate thermodynamical variables both in the original frame and in the Einstein frame, following the Iyer--Wald definition which satisfies the first law of thermodynamics. We show that all thermodynamical variables defined in the original frame are the same as those in the Einstein frame, if the spacetimes in both frames are asymptotically flat, regular and possess event horizons with non-zero temperatures. This result may be useful to study whether the second law is still valid in the generalized theory of gravity.Comment: 14 pages, no figure