Kenneth Paul Tan – författare

Contemporary Singapore is simultaneously a small postcolonial multicultural nation state and a cosmopolitan global city. To manage fundamental contradictions, the state takes the lead in authoring the national narrative. This is partly an internal process of nation building, but it is also achieved through more commercially motivated and outward facing efforts at nation and city branding. Both sets of processes contribute to Singapore's capacity to influence foreign affairs, if only for national self-preservation. For a small state with resource limitations, this is mainly through the exercise of smart power, or the ability to strategically combine soft and hard power resources.

This book provides a detailed analysis of how governance in Singapore has evolved since independence to become what it is today, and what its prospects might be in a post-Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) future. First, it discusses the question of political leadership, electoral dominance, and legislative monopoly in Singapore’s one-party dominant system and the system’s durability. Second, it tracks developments in Singapore’s public administration, critically analysing the formation and transformation of meritocracy and pragmatism, two key components of the state ideology. Third, it discusses developments within civil society, focusing in particular on issues related to patriarchy and feminism, hetero-normativity and gay activism, immigration and migrant worker exploitation, and the contest over history and national narratives in academia, the media, and the arts. Fourth, it discusses the People's Action Party (PAP) government’s efforts to connect with the public, including its national public engagement exercises that can be interpreted as a subtler approach to social and political control. In increasingly complex conditions, the state struggles to maintain its hegemony while securing a pre-eminent position in the global economic order. Tan demonstrates how trends in these four areas converge in ways that signal plausible futures for a post-LKY Singapore.

This book provides a detailed analysis of how governance in Singapore has evolved since independence to become what it is today, and what its prospects might be in a post-Lee Kuan Yew future. Firstly, it discusses the question of political leadership, electoral dominance and legislative monopoly in Singapore’s one-party dominant system and the system’s durability. Secondly, it tracks developments in Singapore’s public administration, critically analysing the formation and transformation of meritocracy and pragmatism, two key components of the state ideology. Thirdly, it discusses developments within civil society, focusing in particular on issues related to patriarchy and feminism, hetero-normativity and gay activism, immigration and migrant worker exploitation, and the contest over history and national narratives in academia, the media and the arts. Fourthly, it discusses the PAP government’s efforts to connect with the public, including its national public engagement exercises that can be interpreted as a subtler approach to social and political control. In increasingly complex conditions, the state struggles to maintain its hegemony while securing a pre-eminent position in the global economic order. Tan demonstrates how trends in these four areas converge in ways that signal plausible futures for a post-LKY Singapore.

In This IssueSpecial Issue Editors: Kenneth Paul Tan & Dorothy LauLetter from the Editor - YING ZHUCold War and New Cold War Narratives: Special Issue Editor’s Introduction - KENNETH PAUL TANResearch ArticlesNotes on Cold War Historiography - LOUIS MENANDTales from the Hot Cold War - MARTHA BAYLESBomb Archive: The Marshall Islands as Cold War Film Set - ILONA JURKONYTĖDas unsichtbare Visier—A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too - TARIK CYRIL AMARTo Whom Have We Been Talking? Naeem Mohaiemen’s Fabulation of a People-to-Come - NOIT BANAIThe Man without a Country: British Imperial Nostalgia in Ferry to Hong Kong (1959) - KENNY K. K. NGImagining Cooperation: Cold War Aesthetics for a Hot Planet - MARINA KANETIBook ReviewsThrough Space and Time - Review of The Odyssey of Communism: Visual Narratives, Memory and Culture edited by Michaela Praisler and Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021 - ISABEL GALWEYReview of Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market by Ying Zhu, New Press, 2022 - YONGLI LIThe Cautionary Tale of Painting War Remembrance in China as a New Nationalism - Review of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism by Rana Mitter, Belknap Press, 2020 - FUWEI ZUOTracking American Political Currents - Review of White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina, Cambridge University Press, 2019, and Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class by Reece Peck, Cambridge University Press, 2019 - DAVID GURNEY

This book addresses the question of what Singapore's COVID-19 pandemic response in the first year can tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of the Singapore model and what its prospects might be in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous post-pandemic world. As a concise, holistic, and critical documentation of the first year of COVID-19 in Singapore, the multi-disciplinary chapters in this book provide a broad-ranging analysis of an internationally admired model of governance severely tested by a global pandemic crisis whose end is still not in sight.The book focuses specifically on the interconnections among Singapore’s political economy, public health policies, immigration policies, and the elite and pragmatic system of state authoritarianism that, especially since the 1980s, has been at the heart of managing the tensions and contradictions of a nation-state that is also a global city, an important node in a network of goods, services, investments, wealth, people, ideas, and images, all moving rapidly. The chapters critically employ topics and concepts such as neoliberal globalization, authoritarian populism, moral panic, social stigmatization, heterotopia, spatial segregation, and others to make sense of a thoroughly complex situation.

As grand narratives and strategies of the Cold War jostle to make sense of high-level geopolitical events, this book descends to the level of lived experience, zooming in on ordinary and marginalized peoples, whose lives and livelihoods have been affected over the decades by the Cold War and its legacies.

As grand narratives and strategies of the Cold War jostle to make sense of high-level geopolitical events, this book descends to the level of lived experience, zooming in on ordinary and marginalized peoples, whose lives and livelihoods have been affected over the decades by the Cold War and its legacies.