New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, va...

Following the 2014 coup in Thailand, in which the Thai military overthrew the caretaker government after 6 months of political crisis, major media outlets suggested that the coup could lead to ethnic tensions—and potentially civil war—between the Isan people of northeastern Thailand and the central Thai government. While this civil war never eventuated, there were genuine tensions between the Isan...

The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand (University of California Press, 2020) is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements i...

What can textiles tell us about histories of genocide and the lived experiences of prisoners? In this episode, Dr. Magali-An Berthon discusses the treatment of prisoners at S-21 and how clothes played a role into their imprisonment and dehumanization. She retraces the formation of the textile collection at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, starting with a large pile of clothes on display in the firs...

We often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing. Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia...

In the past few years, youth-led groups such as the Fridays for Future school strike movement have changed the face of climate activism globally. In this interview, Malaysian youth climate advocate Farhana Shukor talks about her experience working on climate change issues in her native country as well as at the international stage as an observer at the COP26 climate conference in November 2021. Fa...

Jose Ramos-Horta topped the first round of polling in the 2022 East Timor presidential elections, securing 46.56 per cent of the popular vote on 19 March. Here he speaks to Amber Woortman in a special interview for the Nordic Asia Podcast. During the 24 years he spent in exile, José Ramos-Horta was a strong advocate for the people of Timor-Leste during the brutal Indonesian occupation, and travell...

To say that World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an impressive achievement is a huge understatement. Based on years of research in over two dozen archives on three continents, this book won the Lindart-Williamson prize from the Economic History Association. World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Jap...

Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media...

Cambodia is home to Angkor, one of the most important archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. Greater Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, was a low-density city covered about a 1000 sq km and was the home of between 750,000 to 900,000 people in the 12th century CE. The urban complex was largely abandoned in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its central 300 sq km is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and...

Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship—which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures—overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes un...

“An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are the greatest climate risks for the region and where are we in terms of adapting to them? And...

In popular understandings of the modern history of Vietnam we are familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s anti-imperialism, but we know much less about the anticommunist nationalism of South Vietnam – officially the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The RVN tends to be viewed as a creation of the French and later a “puppet” of the Americans. But as Nu-Anh Tran shows in her book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism a...

Launched in 2013 by Chinese President XI Jinping, China’s Belt and Road initiative has manifested throughout Southeast Asia in the form of multibillion dollar investments in transport infrastructure, industrial estates and other forms of “hard” development. This push for trade and hard infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in various soft power initiatives, including the use of religion a...

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Ir...

East Timor is choosing a president. What is the significance of the 2022 presidential elections in Timor Leste? Has Asia’s youngest and newest country become a prisoner of its short but turbulent political part? How do young people view the older generation of former freedom fighters who continue to dominate the political order? What has the atmosphere been like on the ground during the election c...

Vaccines have controlled or even eradicated some of the world’s most serious diseases. Throughout the last century and up until recently with the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of successful vaccines has widely been heralded a triumph to combat devastating virus outbreaks. The success of immunisations, however, has always been limited by issues of public acceptance. Understanding why people ar...

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolutionary Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands...

Southeastern Myanmar (Burma). The Myanmar military has carried out arial attacks on villages: targeting schools, libraries, and villagers’ agricultural fields. In the past year, roughly one hundred thousand civilians have been displaced in the Southeast alone. Many have attempted to seek refuge in neighboring Thailand but have not been accepted as refugees. In addition to this ongoing emergency of...

Why did Restart Thailand, a 2020 student-led pro-democracy movement, sport a red Communist-style logo with a hammer and sickle? Why did a Thai BNK48 singer wear a swastika t-shirt for the band’s 2019 concert rehearsal? And why did the latest Thai junta produce a video of two boys applauding a portrait of Adolf Hitler to promote Thai values? Verita Sriratana, an Associate Professor in Literary Stud...

Migration and architecture have emerged as a new topic of research at a global level. Migrant worker dormitories in Singapore, for example, are sites where structural inequities in architecture and legal regulations have had a significant impact on the living conditions of migrant workers, and they hit the headlines in 2020 as sites for the rapid spread of COVID. Dr Jennifer Ferng joins Dr Natali...

In conversation with Duncan McCargo about her new book Chasing Freedom: The Philippines Long Journey to Democratic Ambivalence (Sussex Academic Press, 2022), Adele Webb offers a spirited defence of what she calls 'democratic ambivalence': the mixed feelings many Filipinos harbour about their own hybrid political system. She argues that Philippine ambivalence towards democracy results from a partic...

Analysing three cases of British colonial violence that occurred in the latter half of the 19th century, this book argues that all three share commonalities, including the role of racial prejudices in justifying the perpetration of extreme colonial violence. Exploring the connections and comparisons between the Perak War (1875–76), the 'Hut Tax' Revolt in Sierra Leone (1898–99) and the Anglo-Egypt...

Bangkok, as Thailand’s largest and most economically-important cities, attracts migrants from all over the country. Drawn to its economic opportunities, migrants eke a living working in informal jobs, with few protections–yet they build a community among their fellow migrants and workers. The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press: 2021), written by Claudio Sopranzetti, illustrated by Sara F...

King Vajiravudh ruled over Siam from 1910 to 1925. He is widely known to Thais as a nationalist king who proposed an essential ‘Thainess’ through his myriad of writings. Yet contrary to popular expectations, King Vajiravudh’s attitude towards the West was nothing short of ambivalent. In fact, King Vajiravudh’s dynamic practice of translating works of Western literature into Thai points to strong b...