The ability of a small elite of highly educated, upper-class Asian women to obtain the highest political positions in their country is unmatched elsewhere in the world and deserves study. But there is a marked lack of relevant research as well as of comprehensive and user-friendly texts. Aiming to fill the gap is this timely and important study of the various obstacles and opportunities for women's political participation and representation in Asia.

Why study the nexus of gender, politics, and democracy in Asia? What kind of democracy and political participation can we conceptualize and identify for this heterogeneous region? In the increasingly visible Asian context, which concepts, contexts, discourses, and practices do we need to reflect upon most in order to understand the complex relationship between gender and democratic processes? The contributions in this book engage with precisely these crucial questions, and do so by drawing on a variety of case studies covering India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodia. In the process, they scrutinize women's roles, strategies, practices, and discourses on political participation and gender-inclusive political reform in various arenas of political engagement. The book's essays range from studies of political actors and institutions, public policy and gender mainstreaming, political theory and citizenship discourses, to the study of various women's movements. (Series: Politikwissenschaftliche Perspektiven - Vol. 15)

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Women and Politics, held at Islamabad during 24-25 November 2005.

Combining data from nearly 100 interviews with national parliamentarians from ten Asian countries, the contributors to this book analyze and evaluate the advancement of gender equality in Asia. As of the year 2022, no country in Asia has gender parity in its parliament. Meanwhile, the proportion of national-level women parliamentarians in Asia averages a mere 20%. What is more important than simple descriptive representation, however, is whether outcomes for women are improving. Rather than focusing on numerical representation, the chapters in this book focus on the substantive representation of women. In other words, what do women and men parliamentarians do to advance women’s well-being and gender equality? Using semi-structured interviews, the author of each chapter examines these efforts in the context of a specific Asian country. The case studies include Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Timor-Leste. The book is an essential resource for scholars and students of Asian politics and the politics of gender.

"This book demonstrates the great diversity in gender politics and women’s strategies to negotiate and change gender relations individually or collectively. A comprehensive volume of gender politics in China, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia, it examines multiple aspects of gender politics in Asia (dress, healing, religious ordination, NGO activism, etc.), bringing interdisciplinary approaches of inquiry based on in-depth empirical data."--pub. desc.

A combination of economic transformation, political transitions and changes in media have substantially, if incrementally, altered the terrain for political participation globally, particularly in Asia, home to several of the most dramatic such shifts over the past two decades. This book explores political participation in Asia and how democracy and authoritarianism function under neoliberal economic relations. It examines changes that coincide seemingly perversely with a participation explosion: with mass street protests and ‘occupations’, energetic online contention, movements of students and workers, mobilization for and against democracy and more. Organized thematically in three parts – political participation in a ‘post-democratic’ context, changes in the scope and character of political space and the policing of that space – this book analyzes economic, regime and media shifts and how they function in tandem and both within and across states. Closely integrated, comparative and theoretically driven, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the fields of civil society, contentious politics or social movements, democratization, political economy/development, media and communications, political geography, sociology, comparative politics and Asian politics.