Browsing by Subject "Southeast Asia"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Distribution, range connectivity, and trends of bear populations in Southeast Asia
    (2017-06) Scotson, Lorraine
    Sun bears and Asiatic black bears co-occur in Southeast Asia with wide areas of overlapping range. Both species are in decline, and are vulnerable to extinction due mainly to habitat loss and illegal hunting. Efforts to conserve bears in Southeast Asia are hampered by a lack of basic knowledge of distribution, population trends and habitat configuration. To advance the scientific understanding of sun bears and Asiatic back bears in this region I investigated fine and broad scale patterns of distribution. In Lao PDR, I gathered data on bear occurrence using bear sign transects walked in multiple forest blocks throughout the country. To model the country-wide relative abundance of bears and habitat quality, I related bear sign to environmental factors associated with bear occurrence. Within global sun bear range, I gathered camera trap records of sun bear detections from seven sun bear range countries. To generate quantitative measures of sun bear population trends, I related sun bear detection rates to tree cover and estimated related changes in country and global-level sun bear populations based on tree cover loss. To evaluate the global extent of sun bear range connectivity, I used the modelled relationship between sun bears and tree cover to create a habitat suitability index, and I identified areas of fractured range that have created unnatural subpopulations that are at risk from isolation. In Lao PDR, bears selected for areas of high elevation, rugged terrain, and areas of high tree density far from roads. My model-based estimates of sun bear global population trends predicted that over a 30-year period, sun bear populations in mainland southeast Asia have potentially declined by close to 20%, and insular sun bear populations have declined by ~50%. I identified seven potential sun bear subpopulations; two that are fully isolated with no potential for inter-subpopulation movement, and in the other five, inter and intra-subpopulation habitat fragmentation occurs in a continuum of severity. My findings advance the understanding of patterns in bear distribution and trends in southeast Asia, identify research priorities, and lay a framework for future monitoring efforts at country and region-level scales. I conclude with recommendations on how to better manage camera trap data for secondary research and sharing.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Helping Youth Succeed: Bicultural Parenting for Southeast Asian Families
    (University of Minnesota Extension, 1999) Detzner, Daniel; Xiong, Blong; Eliason, Patricia A.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia
    (2016-12) Yngvesson, Dag
    In Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia, I deploy extensive archival, ethnographic, and participatory research on Indonesian mass media as a critical intervention in the study of cinema. Examining Indonesian cinema from independence in 1949 until the present, I focus in particular on complicating understandings of how Western technologies, techniques and ideas have functioned as catalysts or determinants for the development of both nationalism and national cinemas worldwide. I examine local cinematic canons that bear the imprint of centuries of engagement with various transnational networks and forces. In the view that emerges, the pervasive politics of left-right alignment specific to the Cold War appear radically shifted – not simply, however, to a place “between” the binary poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, or within the triad of classical, oppositional, and Third cinemas that articulate their struggle as an epic of superpowers. Instead, following many of the Indonesian cineastes and critics I study, I endeavor to open the reading, viewing, present to an older domain of aesthetics and commodity exchange in which the linear arrangement of events leading to and from the rise of capitalism in Europe is made to coincide with other probable causes of the modern. In this regard, I engage in particular with the discourses and modes of address of Javanese wayang – the conceptual-textual center of shadow play and a critical platform for Indonesian art, politics and historiography, whose narratives and screens are always positioned to “coincide” with the present state of affairs. Far from buried or brushed aside in contemporary geopolitics, I argue that the methods and perspectives underpinning media like wayang continue to act as filters that critically influence the circulation and absorption of aesthetic and political ideas. The lineage of cinema’s development in Indonesia thus defined a form and sphere of influence neither here nor there, then nor now in the broadest terms of film theory and practice.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Regional Identities and Dynamic Normative Orders in the Global South: A Comparative Study
    (2015-09) Coe, Brooke
    Because of the insecurities of postcoloniality, we expect states in the global South to be ‘jealous’ of their sovereignty and to resist intrusions into domestic political and security matters. I find, contrary to this conventional understanding, that non-interference has eroded in the South in significant ways over time—especially since the ‘second wave’ of regionalism beginning in the 1980s—but that this erosion has been uneven. Regional organizations in Africa and Latin America have been empowered to monitor state practices and respond to intrastate conflicts and political crises intrusively, while Southeast Asian states have largely maintained their prohibition against such interference. What accounts for this variation? Through historical comparative analysis, I find that regional identity discourses—pan-Americanism and pan-Africanism—present a challenge to strict sovereignty norms and have contributed to the erosion of the norm of non-interference over time in Latin America and Africa. Pan-Asianism was not important to the establishment of ASEAN, an organization founded on anti-communism at the height of the Cold War. Pan-Americanism’s liberal commitments to representative democracy and human rights—espoused by independence leaders and carried forth by Latin American jurists and diplomats—became embedded in inter-American institutions and practices at an early stage and developed over time into intrusive democracy and human rights promotion regimes. Pan-Africanism’s distinct transnationalism—which originated in the diaspora and emphasizes solidarity among African people rather than among states—has provided critics of non-interference with discursive tools to promote the idea of a regional responsibility to protect human rights and human security. In Southeast Asia, non-interference has been much less contested over the decades, despite persistent domestic conflicts. I furthermore identify two proximate factors—regional democratic density and economic performance—that have contributed to more sharply divergent regional normative trajectories beginning in the late 20th century. The third wave of democratization brought Latin America’s average democracy level to an unprecedented high by the late 1980s, reinvigorating intrusive liberal multilateralism. In Africa, the economic crisis of the 1980s rendered states materially and socially vulnerable, more concerned about Africa’s image vis-à-vis investors and the international community. In order to improve this image, and to create the conditions for economic growth, African states empowered their regional institutions manage domestic governance and security problems. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia was less affected by democratization and experienced unprecedented and unparalleled economic growth in the 1980s, growth that bestowed ‘performance legitimacy’ upon Southeast Asian states and their regional organization, ASEAN.