Research Activities
Research Projects
The Rescaling of Statehood : Sociological studies of globalization in Southeast Asia（2021_2_40_015）
Outline
Since the 1950s to 1980s, most Southeast Asian countries adopted development strategies to balance between economic growth and regional development under the policy guidance of international agencies and from the experiences of Europe and the U.S. However, as the influence of global capitalism and neoliberalism emerged, Southeast Asian countries began to switch their regional development policies and urban policies into a more-competitive form in order to attract global capital investment and to increase economic efficiency (Park, Hill, and Saito 2012). In the EU and the U.S., where this trend was conspicuous since the 1980s, the "Rescaling of Statehood" emerged as a new theory for analyzing the processes of governance in new spaces in the fields of sociology, political geography, and political economy after globalization (Brenner 2004, 2009, and 2019). A new periodical journal, Territory, Politics, Governance, has also been started to focus on this issue.
In the process of "rescaling," a change in monopolistic authority by the state has been observed, and international or regional organizations or global capital/local sub-national governments have emerged as new actors toward reorganizing urban spaces and development projects. In recent years, the role of the state in the development of spaces has again been evaluated due to growing discontent and repulsion toward the trends of unequal development in a globalized world (Brenner, Marcuse, and Mayer 2012; Struzaker and Nurse 2020).
In this research project, the members try to introduce this theory into Japan by editing a new theoretical textbook. In this trial, we pick up the case studies of Southeast Asian countries, where the phenomena of "rescaling" and space distribution can often be observed by contrasting the neoliberal policies and state capitalist policies in this region. We also aim to add a new approach for comparative studies in the field of area studies of Southeast Asia by applying a new theory to this issue.
Period
April 2021 - March 2022
Leader of the Research Project
Publications
Published by External Publisher (Japanese)