Developed from an earlier research project (see annual report 2006) on Intermediated Cross-border Marriages, this project is a comparative study on intra-regional flows of migration in East and Southeast Asia with a focus on gender and family. It aims at studying the linkage between the immigration regimes, transnational families and migrants' experiences.

The IIAS Centre for Regulation and Governance is the first European research centre devoted to the study of regulation and governance in Asia. The Centre engages in innovative and comparative research on the theories and practices of regulation and governance. Focusing on emerging markets of Asia such as China, India, South Korea, and Indonesia, the Centre serves as a focal point of collaborative research between European and Asian scholars. It emphasises multidisciplinarity in its research undertakings which combine approaches from political economy, law, public administration, criminology, and sociology in the comparative analysis of regulatory issues in Asia and in developing theories of governance pertinent to Asian realities.

IIAS, the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University, the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge and the Recherches Epistémologiques et Historiques sur les Sciences Exactes et les Institutions Scientifiques (REHSEIS) in Paris have started a scholarly network of researchers who address topics of the history of science in Asia.

This research examines the postcolonial cities of South and East Asia, and how some of them have made the successful segue from nodes in formerly colonial networks to global cities in their own right. This is intended to be an inter-disciplinary approach bringing together architects and urbanists, geographers, sociologists and political scientists, as well as historians, linguists and anyone else involved in the field of Asian studies. The area under investigation consists of South, East and South-East Asia, and includes India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Indochina, Australasia and Micronesia, and concentrates on cities that have successfully made the transition from colonial to postcolonial nodes in the global network (e.g. places like Hong Kong, Singapore or Shanghai).