Monthly Archives: January 2026

About the Patient Named Taiwan: The Rise of Doctors in Party Politics

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Kim, J., & Liu, S. (2025). About the Patient Named Taiwan: The Rise of Doctors in Party Politics. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2025.2488904

Doctors are not typically known for engaging in party politics. However, in Taiwan, many doctors have assumed prominent roles within the Democratic Progressive Party, including Dr Lai Ching-te who became president in May 2024. This article examines the factors contributing to the rise of doctors in Taiwan’s party politics since democratisation, particularly in the Democratic Progressive Party. Although the existing literature focuses on regime transitions and capital convertibility in elite circulation, this study proposes an alternative explanation: the symbiotic relationship between the Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan and the Democratic Progressive Party. Utilising extensive archival data from Taiwan, the article argues that this alliance, which combined an influential medical association with a weak political party, facilitated the emergence of doctor-politicians during Taiwan’s democratisation. The findings suggest that professional associations can serve as political vehicles, transforming individual efforts into collective action by participating in policymaking and mobilising resources for social movements and electoral politics. Furthermore, the case of doctor-politicians in Taiwan offers valuable insights into professional mobilisation, demonstrating how scientific expertise can be harnessed to wield moral authority and establish political coalitions within and beyond professional boundaries.

Globalization, populism, and climate skepticism: untangling varieties and pathways

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Kim, J., Henry, E. A., Carter, J., & Soysal, Y. N. (2025). Globalization, populism, and climate skepticism: untangling varieties and pathways. Environmental Sociology, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2025.2536342

Drawing upon cross-national data collected by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) across 26 nations and over 28,000 individuals, this study explores the association between climate skepticism and populism, both in general, and amidst varying degrees of neoliberal globalization. Distinguishing between populism’s ideological varieties and pathways of influence, we find that right-wing and valence forms of populism are linked to greater skepticism, and left-wing populism to lower skepticism. Crucially, the impact of populism occurs both at the country level and at the individual level, indicating support for theories anticipating both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of populist influence. We also find that the link between populism and climate skepticism depends on the level of globalization – albeit in diverse and sometimes unexpected ways, reflecting the pathway and ideology in question. These insights advance ongoing debates arguing that populism is neither inherently exclusionary or right-wing, and its diverse forms warrant further exploration. Future research can expand data collection on populism’s ideological variations and investigate how populist dynamics intersect with globalization, particularly its neoliberal variant, to shape climate attitudes.

Book Review: In Our Interest

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Jiang, A. (2025). Book Review: In Our Interest. International Migration Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183251370704

This book is an empirical milestone and an optimistic roadmap. The core contribution is showing public opinion as malleable rather than fatally fixed. Kustov shifts the idea of immigration attitudes from an “on-or-off” stance into a register of activation and context (e.g., Sana 2021). That challenges both liberal idealists (Kymlicka 2007) and cynical restrictionists (Goodhart 2017). The public, it turns out, does not categorically reject immigration; they support it conditionally, since institutional signals can shape public preference. By shifting from diagnosis to remedy, he models a pragmatic path through this political deadlock.

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Through the Prism of Community Development: Decolonization and the Cold War Politics of Agrarian Modernization in East Pakistan

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Hussain, M. (2025). Through the Prism of Community Development: Decolonization and the Cold War Politics of Agrarian Modernization in East Pakistan. Social Science History, 49(4), 883–907. doi:10.1017/ssh.2025.21

With the Cold War’s epicenter shifting from Europe to the Third World, the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy concerns of containing the Soviet bloc were tied to questions of socioeconomic development. Besides “trade and aid,” the appeal of this shift rested on the apparent complementarity between ideas of rural modernization and the practices of agrarian democracy. “Community development” referred to a series of projects initiated by the Ford Foundation and postcolonial governments toward this cultural-political end. This article examines the contested meanings, practices, and outcomes of such a project in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Drawing on the project’s archives and published sources, it addresses how and why a disjuncture between the political-societal aspirations of decolonization and the hardening Manicheanism of Cold War competition came to characterize the contested trajectory of this project. As its proponents and detractors negotiated competing expectations, inter-regional tensions, and geostrategic interests, this disjuncture gave way to a developmental ideology envisioned around the technocratic nodes of population control and food production. Consequently, the supposed complementarity between “agrarian democracy” and modernization was relegated to the margins of developmental thinking, even as growing rural unrest and Cold War realpolitik propelled its need for legitimizing new claims on political power. The prism of community development enables a novel analysis of the conjunctural dynamics of mid-twentieth-century decolonization and the contingencies of Cold War politics of agrarian modernization.

Privilege or marginalization: how Chinese youth from divergent class backgrounds make sense of racism in the U.S. and Australia

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Guo, W., & Liu, Q. T. (2025). Privilege or marginalization: how Chinese youth from divergent class backgrounds make sense of racism in the U.S. and Australia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2519807

This study examines how Chinese youth in the U.S. and Australia perceive and respond to racism as temporary migrants, focusing on the influence of pre-migration class positions and host-country contexts. Based on interviews with sixty Chinese students in the U.S. and forty-five working holiday makers in Australia, we find that U.S.-based students, primarily from urban, upper-middle-class backgrounds, experience status shock as they encounter systemic racial hierarchies and institutional barriers, fostering heightened sensitivity to racism and strong racial consciousness. Conversely, working holiday makers, largely from rural or economically disadvantaged areas, experience status uplift and a sense of empowerment. Viewing multiculturalism and mobility opportunities in Australia as an improvement over class-based discrimination in China, they tend to normalize or downplay racism. These contrasting responses are further shaped by each country’s immigration policies and labor markets. This study advances racialization research through a comparative, intersectional approach to Chinese diasporas.