This paper argues that international security studies can most profitably engage the issue of international terrorism by considering terrorist groups as transnational social movement organizations. It takes as its case Al Qaeda's role in Southeast Asia, focusing especially on the efforts of Al Qaeda leaders to align the demands and grievances of local Islamist movements and to spread a set of tactics and methods of political violence. In so doing, the paper builds on the often-neglected literature on the politics of terrorism while tying the argument to prevailing debates over social movements. The paper thus aims at clarifying the ways in which Southeast Asian organizations have adopted Al Qaeda's tactics and language but appear to be addressing primarily local or provincial concerns. This perspective also draws terrorism into current discussions of international security while maintaining a detailed focus on the interactions of individual agents and larger violent movements.
Recent scholarship on crime, law, and society in China and Japan has addressed the politics of globalization and legal reform in both countries, but political context is not self-revealing. The literature on China has focused too often on the role of the police in an authoritarian state without sufficiently taking into account the changing balance of power among judicial actors, which may be more important for understanding the shape and direction of Chinese legal reform. In contrast, the literature in Japan has recently begun to grapple with the new politicization of criminal justice but could do more to show how these concerns are intimately connected to deeper unease about the country's future. In suggesting new ways of analyzing the politics of criminal justice in China and Japan, this article also argues for increased attention to the social consequences of crime's increasing political saliency, including patterns of marginalization and constructions of deviancy.
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