International politics heavily influence human movement. Wars and crises in particular are often the direct causes of mass human movement such as repatriation, expatriation and forced migration. More generally in recent times, the broad international politico-economic structure, such as the Cold War, American hegemony, and economic inequity, have stimulated the more constant flow of humans in an even larger scale.
In (East) Asia, it is often pointed out that the Cold War is not yet over.
The United States, the only remaining superpower which survived the confrontation,
would prefer to emphasise that there are still many who flee from the communist
regime in North Korea. North Korean refugees may be compared to those who
escaped from mainland China a few decades earlier, on which the historian
Dr. Chi-Kwan
Mark will focus. At the same time, the current United States administration
is intensifying its ‘war against terror’ by trying to control general cross-border
human movement insisting that they endanger national security.
Just as the Cold
War was an ideological war in which propaganda played a central role, the
'war on terror' after 9/11 abounds with discourse that
is strongly
politicised. Dr. Nobue Suzuki, an anthropologist, will enlighten us by
analysing in what way cross-border marriages have been 'represented' by
the governments
of the United States and its allies, taking a close look at the issue of
Filipina entertainers in Japan.