Sulak Sivaraksa is Thailand’sl eading social critic and the 1998 United Nations’ Human Rights Award Winner.
摘要
Alternative Politics for Asia is a conversation between two leading religious thinkers from Buddhism and Islam on certain key questions: Are the profound values and worldviews embodied in the religions and cultures of Asia capable of shaping a different kind of politics—a politics more concerned with justice and humanity rather than power and position? Or, are those values so deeply buried within layers of feudal history and colonial psychology that they are incapable of informing and influencing contemporary politics? Or, is it simply a case of elite vested interests suppressing the emergence of alternative value systems capable of challenging their dominant power? Or, is politics such that whatever the religious or cultural values that obtain in a particular society, power and the dictates of power will determine that politicians the world over will invariably behave in a certain manner? Both men, scholars of religion and political analysts, explore the effects of globalization on their Asian Buddhist and Muslim societies, and offer their views of the alternatives—more local autonomy, a revivified environmental awareness, and an honest confrontation with the legacies of colonialism and post-colonialism.
