New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Despite decades of research into the historic settlements of Mainland Southeast Asia, our understanding of the region’s long-term settlement history remains incomplete. We know, for example, that mainland Southeast Asia was home to the world’s most extensive pre-industrial low-density urban complex at the site of Greater Angkor in Cambodia – but we don’t know how the site, and its low-density conf...

To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham (ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series / NUS Press, 2022) is a particularly vivid biography of a remarkable individual, an Indonesian historian and public intellectual who was both a public figure and a multi-minority member, being Dutch educated, Indonesian Chinese, gay, alcoholic, irreligious and hedonist, in a conservative society. This is the first...

In The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (U Washington Press, 2021), Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last two decades, Corey connects artistic developments with social transformations as reflected...

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that sp...

As the Asia-Pacific becomes the central stage of the US-China rivalry, Vietnam has emerged as one of the key countries to watch. While Vietnam has positioned itself as a critical player in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy, and Hanoi’s distrust of China has grown in response to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, the Vietnam-China relationship transcends mere ge...

Though human rights monitors talk of fact-finding missions and reports, human rights facts are, like all social phenomena, not in fact found but made — through processes by which we come to know and talk about them. But how exactly does that happen? And how, by attending to these processes, might we arrive at a more robust understanding of human rights facts? These are the kinds of questions anima...

France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840-1930 Maritime Competition and Imperial Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores imperial power and the transnational encounters of shipowners and merchants in the South China Sea from 1840 to 1930. With British Hong Kong and French Indochina on its northern and western shores, the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ was for almost a century a crucible of power...

After decades of authoritarian rule by the Barisan Nasional coalition, a new alliance, Pakatan Harapan, was voted in in 2018, marking Malaysia’s first-ever transfer of federal power through elections in what was widely heralded as the start of a democratic transition. But that new government collapsed within two years, and Malaysian politics has remained unstable ever since. With elections likely...

The twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regi...

Every nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO’s role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Mo...

Southeast Asia is a region often associated with authoritarian resilience and democratic decline. In this podcast, Professor Baogang He examines the various ways in which Southeast Asian countries have institutionalised mechanisms for deliberative democracy to address complex governance issues. He is the editor (together with Michael Breen, and James Fishkin) of Deliberative Democracy in Asia (Rou...

As the newest nation in Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste has been independent for just over 20 years. Timor-Leste is regularly ranked the most democratic nation in the region, and since reclaiming independence in May 2002, the country’s political situation has grown increasingly complex, with the emergence of new parties, new coalitions and new leaders. Yet the recent presidential election in April 202...

In the voluminous literature on the history of modernisation theory and its associated concept of development since the end of World War II, much of the focus lies on the efforts undertaken by developed nations—most notably the United States and Soviet Union—to establish a model for developing countries to build not just their economies but their nations as well. Eschewing this paradigm, Dr Nichol...

This year sees the publication of the fourth edition of the book, A History of Thailand (Cambridge UP, 2022), by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Remarkably, the Thai language translation of the book, ประวัติศาสตร์ไทยร่วมสมัย, is now in its 13th edition. This makes A History of Thailand arguably the most successful general book on Thai history of the modern period for both Thai and internationa...

With the upcoming G20 summit this November, all eyes should be on Indonesia – the fourth largest country in the world and current holder of G20 presidency. How has Indonesia reacted so far to the war in Ukraine? Why are so many Indonesians sympathetic to Russia, despite Indonesia’s historical tendency to favour the underdog in international disputes? What does all this have to do with the price of...

Duy Lap Nguyen's book The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam (Manchester UP, 2019) proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that has been largely excluded from historical accounts of the conflict, that of the South Vietnamese. Challenging the conventional view of the conflict as a struggle on the part of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism...

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2018) by Ethan Mark draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex non-Western Asian societies – one a colonizer and the other colonized. The book places this narrative in a larg...

On 9 May 2018, an ideologically diverse opposition alliance called Pakatan Harapan (PH) defeated the long-ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition which had dominated politics in Malaysia since the 1980s. This was the first regime change in Malaysia’s history. This outstanding development was shortly followed by a series of defections culminating in the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government in...

In The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns (Cornell UP, 2022), Elisabeth Kramer tells the story of how three political candidates in Indonesia made decisions to resist, engage in, or otherwise incorporate money politics into their electioneering strategies over the course of their campaigns. As they campaign, candidates encounter pressure from...

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports? In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of A...

In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create wha...

The last few years have brought to the fore the brilliant work of scientists as they worked to find a vaccine for Covid-19. But have you ever stopped to think about the role of biological materials in this and other science- and health-related research? In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Associate Professor Sonja van Wichelen to take a close look at the complex world...

What is the relationship between the military and the monarchy in Thailand? How has that relationship changed since King Vajiralongkorn (Rama X) assumed the throne in 2016? Why have recent military coups in Thailand been staged partly in order to defend the throne? And how far can earlier interpretations of Thai politics be adapted to explain the growing influence of the monarchy in recent years?...

The story of India and Indians in World War II has been overshadowed by other historical events of the 1940s, a busy decade that included such historical watersheds as Indian independence (and the anti-colonial nationalist movement that led to it), as well as the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, many in Europe and North America, and even many in India, probably know very little about...

What is the relationship between Spirit Possession Rituals and Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia? How has modernity transformed Spirit Possession cults in the 21st century and what has led to the efflorescence of possession rituals across Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in recent decades? Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson joined Terese Gagnon on the Nordic Asia Podcast h...