New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Who are the Wa of Myanmar and how, in three decades, have they built a force that is now the largest non-state military actor in Asia-Pacific? How does China’s economic, political, and military support for the Wa factor into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative? What role might the Wa play in the unfolding political crisis in the wake of the February 1, 2021 coup in Myanmar, and Covid-19 pandemic?...

In Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration (Routledge, 2021), Carlos M. Piocos explores the politics of gendered labor migration in Southeast Asia through the stories and perspectives of Indonesian and Filipina women presented in films, fiction, and performance to show how the emotionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women's social movements in S...

Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand (Routledge, 2020) examines how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct an identity at the intersection of global capitalism, state ideologies, and local culture. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research, the book explores the impact of rapid urbanisation and modernisation on contemporary Thai youth, focusing on conspicuous youth subcultur...

How is childhood experienced in the slums of Bangkok and how does it relate to socio-political processes in Thailand? What role do mothers play in the leadership of the slums? And how can we understand recent mass protests in Thailand through the lens of children’s activism? Giuseppe Bolotta gives insights into his recently published book Belittled Citizens: The Cultural Politics of Childhood on B...

Cambodia’s Tonle Sap is the largest inland lake in Southeast Asia. Each year, during the monsoon, this freshwater lake experiences an incredible hydrological phenomenon, in which it is inundated with swelling waters from the Mekong River, causing it to rise by up to tenfold in some places, before returning to its pre-monsoon level as the dry season returns. But Tonle Sap is facing a triple environ...

In this episode I chatted with Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai, two scholars of film, about their new anthology The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul out with Rutgers University Press, 2021. As a child Rithy Panh survived the Khmer Rouge regime yet lost his immediate family during those awful years. He was fortunate enough to emigrate to France where he studied film and became a prolific di...

The massacre of student protestors at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976 is one of the most infamous incidents in modern Thai political history. It is also among the most problematic for historians, who have struggled with the silences and ambiguities enveloping events of that day, not to mention survivors and families of the victims, who have had to carry on with their lives or grieve for los...

Why do Southeast Asia specialists get tired of explaining that the politics of the region cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game of Chinese-US great power rivalries? How do relatively small Southeast Asian states negotiate their relations with these major powers in an increasingly antagonistic environment? And why has the idea of the Indo-Pacific become so popular in recent years, and where does tha...

Why do Southeast Asia specialists get tired of explaining that the politics of the region cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game of Chinese-US great power rivalries? How do relatively small Southeast Asian states negotiate their relations with these major powers in an increasingly antagonistic environment? And why has the idea of the Indo-Pacific become so popular in recent years, and where does tha...

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. For the final episode in the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Emeritus Professor Peter Windsor who brings to light how research improving animal health and production is intrinsically linked to human rig...

Mirjam Lücking's Indonesians and Their Arab World: Guided Mobility Among Labor Migrants and Mecca Pilgrims (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2021) explores the ways contemporary Indonesians understand their relationship to the Arab world. Despite being home to the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia exists on the periphery of an Islamic world centered around the Arabian Peninsula...

How can we best understand ethnic armed organizations on the borderlands of Myanmar? Why did the Karen embrace the military-initiated peace process in 2012, shortly after the Kachin had rejected ceasefire proposals? How can ethnographic fieldwork inform studies of insurgent movements? And what does the February 2021 military coup mean for the future of ethnic conflicts in Myanmar In this wide-rang...

Everyone looks to Singapore as a role model for what they want their country to be. Several countries from China to Rwanda hope to emulate its high administrative competence, standard of living, and “social harmony.” Post-Brexit Britain wants to copy the city-state’s assertive and independent position in the world economy and its aggressive support for international business. Housing policy advoca...

Indonesia’s corruption eradication commission, known as the KPK has widely been considered one of the most powerful and successful anti-corruption agencies in the region, if not in the entire world. Yet over the past years, it has been systematically undermined from above. One of the most devastating developments was a revision of the law on the KPK. The law effectively stripped the KPK of autonom...

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. Maternal and child health is the cornerstone of a life lived healthily. Healthy women grow healthy children, who then go on to have healthy children themselves. In resource poor settings, healthy families can i...

How important is Islam to Indonesia’s identity? How different is Salafism from a more mainstream Sunni Islam? Why is it popular with mostly young Indonesian Muslims? And what effect does it have on Indonesian identity and democracy? In this episode, Chris Chaplin joins Petra Desatova to discuss his new book Salafism and the State: Islamic Activism and National Identity in Contemporary Indonesia (N...

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. In the second episode, Dr Thushara Dibley talks with Professor Nick Enfield about how the field of linguistics intersects with human rights. They discuss some of the impacts that major hydro-electric dam projec...

Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949 (Cornell UP, 2021) explores a fascinating archive of Sino-Malay texts – writings produced by the Chinese community in the Malay language – in Indonesia. It demonstrates the myriad ways in which the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia resorted to the press for their education, legal and medical advice, conflict resolution, and entertai...

What is image-based abuse? Why has it been on the rise in Asia, especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic? What has been done to tackle the issue? Raquel Carvalho, Asia Correspondent for the South China Morning Post, shares the story of how a group of journalists across some Asian newsrooms collaborated in a months-long investigation and uncover the stories inside the online groups spreading stolen se...

For the next four weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. To kick off the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Human Rights Watch Australia Director Elaine Pearson to discuss the interactions and tensions between academic research and investigation of human rights ab...

In this episode, Camilla T.N. Sørensen joins Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS for a conversation about the Indo-Pacific region as seen from a Danish and broader European perspective. Camilla was recently tasked by the Danish government to provide an assessment of current development trends in the Indo-Pacific ahead of a forthcoming new Danish foreign and security policy. Apart from discussing the sco...

In the extreme north of Laos, in Phongsali Province, lies a tiny village home to around 24 households. Until recently it was a monoethnic Khmu village. The Khmu have had a historically ambivalent relationship to the national majority in contemporary Laos. It’s also home to the Akha, another ethnic group that have been described as state evaders seeking to avoid lowland politics and who migrated to...

Tuberculosis: The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018 (Routledge, 2021), co-written by Dr. Loh, a historian and Dr. Hsu Li Yang, a medical doctor offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the way in the which the disease was managed from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book charts the relationship between disease, society and the state, outlining the struggles of colonial and post-colon...

Seeds, plants and food can act as repositories of memory and identity, thus countering the alienation caused by displacement. How does this manifest in the case of Karen refugee communities across the world holding on to a connection to their homeland in Myanmar? And how is the Karen people’s struggle for political sovereignty connected to global biodiversity and climate change issues? Terese Gagn...

What happened to the Filipinas who migrated to Denmark to staff iconic new international hotels in the 1960s and 1970s? Why did the Philippine government encourage so many talented people to leave the country? How did Danes react to this influx of lively Southeast Asians? What was the impact on the Danish labor movement? And why did so many lives change forever? In this conversation with NIAS Dire...