ASEAN's rise as the cornerstone of regional diplomacy and security in the 1990s may have seemed improbable, but it was crucial. Today, a shifting regional geopolitical landscape challenges ASEAN’s relevance. Great power competition and waning global political commitment to multilateral arrangements threaten its role as East Asia’s 'steering committee'. This edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly explores how ASEAN can maintain its centrality, calling for proactive leadership and stronger regional cooperation.

This book explores the human past in West New Guinea (otherwise known as Indonesian Papua, West Papua, or Irian Jaya). The western part of New Guinea and its surrounding islands were critical for the early peopling of the Pacific region over 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and into Asia, seafaring through the islands of Wallacea as far as New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands.

The slower growth of the Chinese economy in the aftermath of the pandemic has prompted the Chinese Government to adopt measures to boost domestic consumption and deepen structural reform, with the effectiveness of such policies beginning to be felt. However, China still faces challenges that will affect its growth dynamics down the track.

This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from tiger hunts in sixteenth-century India to the rise of organic foods across the Anglosphere by the late 1970s. Along the way, readers will encounter the ways that Cantonese migrants interpreted the environments of Aotearoa New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and the influence of environmentalism in the US trade union movement during the 1960s.

Human Ecology Review 28(1) features a Special Section from a collection of researchers in Nigeria, reflecting on the political and cultural influences on, and responses to, the unique social and environmental devastation of the oil-producing Niger Delta region. Across five articles and the introductory piece, the scholars address social and environmental justice and policy (Eni et al.); and examine the attempts to restore and clean up the landscape (I. Nwoma and Anyika).

A new Chinese government textbook for university students, An Introduction to the Community of the Zhonghua Race (中华民族共同体概论), promotes President Xi Jinping's vision for governing the country’s diverse population. This approach shifts away from celebrating cultural differences—what the anthropologist Susan McCarthy once termed ‘communist multiculturalism’—and towards a Han-dominant identity, a form of racial nationalism inspired by sociologist Fei Xiaotong’s concept of ‘multiple origins, single body’ (多元一体).

This is a study of a collection of oral compositions of the Rotenese of eastern Indonesia. Recited in semantic parallelism, these compositions require a strict pairing of all words to produce correspondingly ordered verses. These narrative verses create an elevated discourse—a ‘scriptural voice’—intended to reveal the origins of Rotenese cultural life. The translations and exegeses of these origin narratives offer a work of world-class poetic imagination that recounts a dynastic contest between the Sun and Moon and Lords of the Ocean Sea and its epic consequences.

Enabling Learning: Language Teaching for Australian Universities illuminates efforts by tertiary language educators to facilitate the learning of languages at the university level. The educators’ endeavours recounted in this volume address a range of specific aspects of the language learning experience or language teaching within tertiary education institutions.