Adi Kumar explores the diasporic response to India’s 1975 Emergency, showing how the crisis presented a framework for Indian Americans and Canadians to forge new political solidarities within the Third World Left. By locating the Emergency in the context of broader critiques of Western imperialism and postcolonial statehood, Kumar argues for an expanded framework of interracial solidarity and pan-Asian identity staked to divergent geopolitical struggles and diasporic identities.

Mark Tseng-Putterman shows how Philippine martial law became a platform for local political struggle in Hawai‘i’s Filipino communities. Juxtaposing Hawai‘i’s anti-martial law movement and the pro-Marcos community establishment, Tseng-Putterman argues that the reverberations of martial law in Hawai‘i revealed the interlinked systems of multicultural settler democracy and Third World authoritarianism, as various community factions sought to mobilize the symbolic positioning of the Filipino diaspora to alternately challenge or entrench the Hawai‘i-Philippines “special relationship.”

Minju Bae examines how coalitional efforts to oppose the 2006 Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (Kor-US FTA) exposed the entrenchment of Cold War US-ROK relations in an era of neoliberal globalization. Tracing the campaign efforts of diasporic Koreans, Asian American activists, and Korean labor organizers, Bae argues that the organizing against Kor-US FTA expanded the parameters of labor organizing by placing US empire at the center of a working-class politics that linked the struggles of Koreans and Korean Americans.