Book Review: Jairam Ramesh, Green Signals: Ecology, Growth and Democracy in India
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916668281 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Author | Jan-Erik Lane |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsAsia and the Pacific |
162 Political Studies Review 15 (1)
Despite these weaknesses, the book provides
rich narratives about how people of the periph-
ery have to deal with the state in their everyday
lives. Hussain’s book gives new insights into
looking at the border in South Asia, which has
been a neglected subject for a long time.
Chandra Moni Bhattarai
(Jawaharlal Nehru University)
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929916672797
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Risk State: Japan’s Foreign Policy in an
Age of Uncertainty by Sebastian Maslow,
Ra Mason and Paul O’Shea (eds). Farnham:
Ashgate, 2015. 182pp., £60.00 (h/b), ISBN
9781472417138
Japan has been transformed from a nation state
into a risk state. That is the key claim of the
present volume. What does it exactly mean?
According to the editors, norms such as anti-
militarism, developmentalism and isolation-
ism inform the framing, mediation and
calibration of risks in foreign policy. During
the mediation process, various stakeholders
such as media, governments, civil society and
the market influence the public framing and
discursive direction of constructed security
risks. Power relations determine which norms
and risks become finally prioritised.
The book asserts that it is Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe’s pro-active pacifism which has
been declared the ‘guiding norm in Japan’s for-
eign policy’ (p. 10). The case studies which are
presented stress how Abe has ‘reshaped political
discourse in order to direct changes’ in Japan’s
foreign policy (p. 161). They deal – through the
analytical lens of risk framing – with well-
known and important topics such as the seem-
ingly paradoxical non-recalibration of risks with
regard to territorial claims against Russia over
the Kuril islands; the politically motivated
reframing of the North Korean terrorist threat
through Abe in the 2000s; the public opinion
divisions in Okinawa over endorsing Abe’s mil-
itarisation strategy which portrays China as a
serious security threat; and environmental issues
or the changing of the domestic security dis-
course since 9/11. One chapter though seems to
be an outlier, because it uses a different analyti-
cal concept – namely Campbell’s theory of
defining one’s identity through others.
The case studies are informative and the
reader not so familiar with the Kurils dispute,
North Korea or Okinawa will appreciate the
wealth of information and historical facts.
However, there is also room for critique. For
example, at least five different analytical con-
cepts are referred to (Beck, Ewald, Giddens,
Campbell and Luhmann) but it remains unclear
how these concepts are related either to each
other or to risk. Content-wise some chapters
are less convincing than others. To argue, for
example, that disaster diplomacy reflects the
new national identity of Japan is problematic
because it is assumed that there is a national
normative consensus on disaster risk mitiga-
tion policies; this is not the case. Likewise, the
claim that the image of ‘disaster diplomacy’
can help ‘Japan’ (who is meant by ‘Japan’,
Abe?) to ‘separate itself from past images as a
brutal imperial power’ (p. 153) requires further
explanation and evidence in support of the
claim. The chapter on risk perceptions in
Okinawa, which concludes with the words that
Okinawa will become the ‘target of a pro-
tracted high-risk game’ (p. 74), leaves the
reader rather perplexed and lost because it
remains unclear how real or constructed the
expressed fears of China are among the
Okinawans themselves and how this affects
their threat perceptions.
Patrick Hein
(Meiji University)
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929916676744
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Green Signals: Ecology, Growth and
Democracy in India by Jairam Ramesh. New
Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2015. 604pp.,
£27.99 (h/b), ISBN 9780199457526
Green Signals is a remarkable book which is
comprised of official documents rather than
the author’s own written analysis. Jairam
Ramesh has brought together documents from
his period as Minister of the Environment in
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