Editorial Foreword Available to Purchase

The first article in this issue was delivered as a keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in 2023. With broad strokes and fine-grained attention to local realities, the economist Pasuk Phongpaichit weaves together a critical analysis of Asia's fragile political ecology in the context of climate change. Her primary concern is to show how social science research on local issues and questions of regional significance needs to engage with environmental science—and the natural sciences more broadly—to clearly demonstrate the interconnectedness of large-scale global problems of the present. A recalibration of method and theory is required to address these problems. The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by the “inhumanity” of both hot and cold wars and the promise and problems of postcolonial development. Either by pursuing the goals of modernity's promise or by critiquing the manifest problems associated with modernization,...