Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Companies chartered for overseas exploration and trade proliferated in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A chief motivation for their creation was the profitable trade in spices, sugar, tea, coffee, silk, china, valuable metals, and other goods from the Indies. Europeans have been long exposed to these exotic products, but for centuries they had no direct control over the mercantile networks across the Orient supplying them. Gaining control of these commercial routes was not easy; the travel to the Indies could take up to a few years between departure and return, and the risks involved were necessarily high. This persuaded merchants to share risk and organise themselves in large groups, which adopted the form of joint-stock enterprises. These were chartered ventures, during early modern times private enterprising required governmental consent, which was granted in the form of a charter. The charters of overseas trading ventures allowed companies to raise their own forces to accompany them on the risky voyages overseas. More than any of the early modern forms of military organisation with a private element, I argue in this paper argues the forces maintained by the overseas trading companies constitute the closest historical antecedent to Private Military Companies (PMCs) and can be regarded as PMCs in an embryonic form.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the wake of 9/11, intelligence reforms have sought to resolve problems of stovepiping, intelligence sharing, and program management in Washington. The result has been the increase in centralized bureaucracy. However, analysis of the future challenges to national security have highlighted the importance of improved policies and practices related to collection and joint operations far away from Washington, in very dynamic operating environments. Advocates of recent proposals for reform argue that greater authorities at the top of the intelligence establishment will aid operations in the field; others say they will confuse and frustrate long standing relationships among the military, law enforcement, diplomatic and intelligence officers, leading to losses in capabilities that may last for years. In addition, critics of aggressive cooperation among these officers within the US, point to civil liberties issues that have yet to be resolved. Five years after 9-11, what does the record show and how do we measure success and failure?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to fill a void in international relations literature by highlighting the substantial economic and political influence of the Overseas Chinese in Mainland China, Taiwan, and the Pacific Rim.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: By Aswin Punathambekar


This paper examines how convergence with new media has shaped Bollywood’s imagination of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) audiences. Drawing on interviews conducted with an array of executives, content producers, and film journalists at prominent dot-com companies such as Rediff.com and Indiafm.com, and trade and press coverage of Bollywood’s convergence with the Internet, I demonstrate how dot-com companies imagined and represented themselves as uniquely positioned to reconfigure a geographically vast yet poorly defined overseas territory into a well-defined NRI audience segment. I argue that dotcom companies emerged as indispensable knowledge brokers who could mediate a range of relationships between Bollywood and overseas audiences.
I begin by detailing how dot-com companies situated themselves in relation to a discourse of corporatization and capitalized on three interlocking shifts in Bollywood:
(a) the growing importance of marketing and market research, (b) the normalization of the overseas territory as Bollywood’s route to the global, and (c) structural changes in the domain of film distribution, particularly where the overseas territory was concerned. Following this, I analyze how dot-com companies’ role as knowledge brokers was defined. Drawing on the work of cultural geographers and media industry scholars, I explain how the production and flow of Bollywood content on the Internet is a direct function of dot-com companies’ proximity to Bollywood and dot-com professionals’ ability to forge connections and establish themselves within existing social networks in Bombay. This analysis of the spatial logics of convergence between Bollywood and new media leads to an examination of how the dynamics of content-creation on the Internet shapes relationships between Bollywood and overseas audiences.
Email: aswinp@umich.edu

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The experience of female Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), particularly domestic workers in the United States, is characterized by isolation from the nuclear family and has often resulted in alienation from children and spouses. The popularity and affordability of cellphones in the Philippines coupled with the adoption of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) in the U.S. has led to the frequent use of the Short Message Service (SMS) or text messaging. This capacity for real-time communication has facilitated the reassertion of mothering, mitigating the isolation and dislocation that comes with a transnational family structure. Cellphone technology has empowered these women, creating new ways to “mother” their children across time and space. While allowing the deep-seated ideological beliefs of traditional mothering to continue, these mothers are also simultaneously reinventing transnational motherhood. Furthermore, this use of cellphone technology can be read as both a form of resistance against and repression from the political economic reality that has led these women to leave their families in the first place.