Why a critical geopolitics cannot be Confucian

Asian Studie

Over Hills and Valleys Too: China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Caribbean

Asian Studie

Global China's business frontier: Chinese enterprises and the reach of the state

Asian Studie

The empire strikes back? China's new racial sovereignty

Asian Studie

A Caribbean perspective on China–Caribbean relations: global IR, dependency and the postcolonial condition

The field of global international relations remains to a great extent aspirational and focussed on the critique of Western-centric perspectives or the appraisal of non-Western theories within their specific geographical and historical contexts. In this essay, we go a step further and transpose a set of Caribbean-based theories that gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s to apply it to the study of China’s contemporary relations with the Caribbean Community, drawing broader implications for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Caribbean’s tradition of critical and radical thought raises important questions about continuing epistemic dependency, structural impediments to development in small and highly open states, and a number of unresolved issues relating to the postcolonial condition in former plantation societies. Drawing upon these insights, we contend that the expectations placed on the emerging ‘South–South’ link with China are easily overstated, given China’s elitist business-centric approach to development, the eschewing of participatory approaches in Sino–Caribbean ventures and the passive incorporation of the Caribbean into China’s global vision.Asian Studie

Politics after national development: Explaining the populist rise under late capitalism

Asian Studie

Capital, conflict and convergence: a political understanding of neoliberalism and its relationship to capitalist transformation

Asian Studie

Magnetorheology of hybrid colloids obtained by spin-coating and classical rheometry

Hybrid colloids composed of micron-sized ferromagnetic (carbonyl iron) and diamagnetic (silica) particles suspended in cyclohexanone, behave as, non-Newtonian, magnetorheological fluids. We measure and compare the magnetic field-dependent viscosity of hybrid diluted colloids using spin-coating and conventional magnetorheometry. We extend a previously developed model for simple colloids to this kind of hybrid colloids. As in the previous model, the viscosity of the colloidal suspension under applied fields can be derived from the surface coverage of the dry spin-coated deposits for each type of particles, and from the viscosity of the colloid at zero field. Also, our results allow us to obtain the evaporation rate of the solvent as a function of the rotation speed. Finally, we also measure the viscosity of the same suspension with a torsional parallel plate magnetorheometer under uniaxial DC magnetic fields aligned in the velocity gradient direction of a steady shearing flow. The experimental results under different conditions and the effect of each component on the magnetorheological properties of the resulting colloid are discussed. Standard spin-coating technique can be used both to characterize smart materials - complex fluids as well as to fabricate films with arbitrary solvents by tuning their viscosity by means of external fields

Optical multi-trapping by Kinoform m-Bonacci lenses

[EN] Optical manipulation is interfacing disciplines in the micro and nanoscale, from molecular biology to quantum computation. Versatile solutions for increasingly more sophisticated technological applications require multiple traps with which to maneuver dynamically several particles in three dimensions. The axial direction is usually overlooked due to difficulties in observing particles away from an objective-lens focal plane, a normal element in optical tweezers, and in managing interparticle distances along the trapping beam propagating direction, where strong radiation pressure and shadowing effects compromise the simultaneous and stable confinement of the particles. Here, aperiodic kinoform diffractive lens based on the m-Bonacci sequence are proposed as a newtrapping strategy. This lens provides split first-order diffractive foci whose separation depends on the generalized m-golden ratio. We show the extended manipulation capabilities of a laser tweezers system generated by these lens, in which concomitant trapping of particles in different focal planes takes place. Positioning particles in the axial direction with computer-controlled distances allows dynamic three-dimensional all-optical lattices, useful in a variety of microscale and nanoscale applications. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing AgreementMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovacion (PID2019-107391RB-I00); Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2019/048); Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (PAID-01-20-25).Muñoz-Pérez, FM.; Ferrando, V.; Furlan, WD.; Monsoriu Serra, JA.; Arias-Gonzalez, JR. (2022). Optical multi-trapping by Kinoform m-Bonacci lenses. Optics Express. 30(19):34378-34384. https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.4656723437834384301