New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one way, and Chinese-made goods the other. But how did the Galleons actually work? Who paid for them? How did buyers and sellers negotiate with each other? Who set the rules? Why on earth did the shippers decide to send just one galleon a year? Juan Jos...

Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today. In The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in...

Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as well as building...

In The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2024), Kevin D. Pham introduces Vietnamese political thought to debates in political theory, showing how Vietnamese thinkers challenge Western conventional wisdom. He traces an intergenerational debate among six influential figures in colonial Vietnam. These figures had competing visions for how the Vietnamese should re...

What are the threats to academic freedom in Thailand? Why does the freedom of scholars and students matter for society at large and how are the attacks on Thai academia linked to the larger democracy movement in the region? Julia Olsson, a doctoral student at the Center for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, talks to Dr. Karin Zackari, a human rights scholar, about the Thai stat...

Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In p...

Conventional accounts of the Cold War focus on competition between the United States and Soviet Union as key to shaping world events. In focusing on the agency of Indonesia’s Suharto regime during its first decades, Matthias Fibiger casts new light on how the Cold War was experienced elsewhere. Based on extensive analysis of state archival records, Fibiger shows how Suharto navigated risks as he t...

Southeast Asia is of vital importance to Australia. As a nation, Australia’s prosperity, security and economic future are intimately connected to the region. According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Southeast Asia is expected to be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2040, with its middle class already numbering close to 200 million people. Recognising the crucial signific...

Visual Anthropology of Indian Films: Religious Communities and Cultural Traditions in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films. Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various...

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527. T...

How exactly were Thailand’s new slate of 200 Senators selected? What is it like to be an independent member of the Senate, when the chamber is now dominated by members closely associated with one of the government parties? Now that the Thai senate plays no role in selecting the prime minister, is it anything more than a talking-shop? What is the atmosphere like inside Thailand’s contentious upper...

In Cambodian history most people have heard of the great Khmer empire of Angkor, and the radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. But who has heard of the famous story of the sweet cucumber farmer who became king of Cambodia in the fourteenth century?  In this original book, Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970 (U Hawaii Press, 2024), Theara Thun t...

Why are dubious power-sharing deals on the rise across Southeast Asia? What effects do they have on the region’s prospects for democracy? And are they going to be tolerated? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Duncan McCargo and Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa about their recent Journal of Democracy article ‘Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances.’ They discuss the factors that underpin the rise of these toxic...

How do we confront difference and change in a rapidly shifting environment? Many indigenous peoples are facing this question in their daily lives. Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest (U Nebraska Press, 2024) explores the lives of Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil...

Today’s episode focuses on the policy challenges and politics of public healthcare in Southeast Asia, a topic which has become increasingly visible and important in Southeast Asia and in the study of the region over the past decades in the context of expanding public healthcare programs in many countries across the region and the recent experience of the global pandemic. To discuss these issues, w...

How far does geopolitics relate to domestic political leanings? Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favour China? A recent article by Petra Alderman, Duncan McCargo, Alfred Gerstl and James Icovocci drawing on a 2022 survey finds some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States...

In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge tra...

In the wake of the twentieth anniversary of the dreadful Tak Bai massacre, what are the prospects for a resolution of the long-standing insurgency in Thailand Malay-Muslim majority southern border provinces? Why has the Paetongtarn Shinawatra government failed to support justice for the families of the 85 men who died in the incident? Why do absurd conspiracy theories often loom larger than eviden...

In 1966 Benedict Anderson published 'The Languages of Indonesian Politics', a seminal paper exploring the development of Indonesian as a new language for talking about national politics. In that paper Anderson underlined the contrast between the formal/official style of Indonesian news reports and the colloquial, playful speech style of ordinary Jakartans as depicted through comics. Nearly six dec...

Today’s episode focuses on a major issue of enduring importance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies: authoritarianism. Even today, various forms of dictatorship remain alive and well across Southeast Asia, raising questions about their origins, their endurance, and the prospects for their evolution. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dan Slater, one of the world’s leading speci...

Why has Thailand’s politics been so contested and so intensely polarized in recent decades? How can we account for the persistent democratic regression of the past twenty years, despite the fact that the parallel vigour of progressive oppositional politics remains a source of hope for many? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, prominent Thai political scientist Prajak Kongkirati discusses his...

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. But as Andrea Be...

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academ...

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across...

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr....