New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

The Philippines is one of the most natural hazard-prone countries in the world. With the social and economic cost of disasters in the country increasing due to population growth, migration, unplanned urbanisation, environmental degradation and global climate change, disaster resilience and management are more important than ever. In 2020, Dr Aaron Opdyke spoke with Dr Natali Pearson about his work...

Since 2004 the Malay-Muslim majority provinces in the border region of southern Thailand have been wracked by a violent insurgency. Over 7000 people have been killed and many thousands more injured. Currently 60,000 Thai security personnel are stationed in the region to conduct counter-insurgency operations. Another 80,000 people have been organized into a “volunteer defense force”. Ruth Streicher...

What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton UP, 2021) by Ismail Fajrie Alatas draws on groundbreaking anthropological insights to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. Taking readers from the e...

In 2017, Myanmar's military launched a campaign of widespread targeted violence against its Rohingya minority. The horrific atrocities was later described by United Nations experts as genocide. This had been building since 2012, when earlier ethnic violence erupted between Buddhists and Muslims in Western Myanmar. These very grave incidents leading to the deaths and also the flight of thousands of...

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealin...

What influence can online and visual activism have on protest movements? With a wave of anti-establishment protests sweeping over East and Southeast Asia over the past couple of years, the online phenomenon of the #MilkTeaAlliance has gained increasing international recognition. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is joined by Wasana Wongsurawat and Mai Corlin Fred...

With two megacities and strong economic growth, Indonesia has seen dramatic rates of rural-urban migrations. According to the World Bank, nearly 70 percent of Indonesia's population are expected to live in cities by 2045. While this transition has undoubtedly boosted the country's economic growth, it has also brought to the fore all the challenges that come with rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation...

Exploring Southeast Asia is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jacques Bertrand, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Collaborative Master’s Program in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. This conversation explores Jacques Bertrand’s extensive research on the politics and political changes in Southeast Asia and p...

Why is Vietnam's modern history so closely associated with a place that lies only just within the country's borders? What was at stake in the contest for the mountainous Black River region that culminated in the legendary French defeat of 1954? How did the different ethnic groups living around Điện Biên Phủ position themselves, when forced to choose between France and the Democratic Republic of Vi...

Early 20th century Southeast Asia was arguably home to the once of the most vibrant and diverse caldrons of revolutionary ferment in world history. Revolts against Western imperialism and traditional socio-economic structures developed into a range of utopian experiments. In Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP, 2021), John T. Sidel argu...

Why are land rights so bitterly contested in Indonesia, even after the end of Suharto’s New Order in 1998? What methods have grassroots movements used to re-possess – or to occupy – lands that have been seized by powerful entities? How come small-scale Indonesian farmers and marginalized communities crave legal recognition from the state? How did the Free Aceh Movement make the post-conflict land...

Improper pest management has led to significant yield loss in rice and other crop harvests in Cambodia, causing economic losses to farmers and environmental disruption through ill-informed chemical use. The use of broad-spectrum pesticides as a solution to all observed pests is commonplace in the rice and mung bean fields of lowland Cambodia and can be linked to unsuitable sources of agricultural...

Nicole Curato's Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action (Oxford UP, 2019)  investigates how democratic politics can unfold in creative and unexpected of ways even at the most trying of times. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in disaster-affected communities in Tacloban City, Philippines, this book presents ethnographic portraits of how typhoon survivors...

Southeast Asia was home to many of the hot battles of the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union the region has been beset by legacies of political violence. Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia serve as the most obvious examples here. In addition to these ideological conflicts, ethnic conflicts have exploded into ethnic cleansing and genocide. Meanwhile, in the Philippines and Thailand, po...

Former Philippine President Noynoy Aquino (in office from 2010 to 2016) recently passed away at the age of just 61. How should we assess the legacy of this “accidental” president, the scion of a prominent political dynasty whose strong sense of duty made up for his complete lack of flamboyance? Prominent Philippine journalist and public intellectual Sheila Coronel argues in this special Nordic Asi...

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Kenneth Bo Nielsen of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies is joined by Htwe Htwe Thein (Curtin University in Western Australia), Michael Gillan (University of Western Australia, UWA Business School) and Kristian Stokke (University of Oslo) to analyse how international governments and businesses have responded to the Myanmar military coup. At first gla...

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, its waters home to hundreds, if not thousands, of shipwrecks. As maritime neighbours with both a common boundary and a shared history, protecting and preserving this maritime heritage is an important element of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In recent years, government agencies from both countries have cooperated to manage the wreck of HM...

Does Southeast Asia face a stark choice between aligning with China or the United States? Can we understand domestic developments in the region as driven by wider geopolitics? Can the lacklustre regional organization ASEAN play a central role in mediating these dynamics, or are individual Southeast Asian countries locked into deeply unequal bilateral linkages? Is China a largely benevolent force i...

February 2021 witnessed yet another military coup in Myanmar. Whether it was unexpected or entirely predictable is, perhaps, a matter of debate. But what is without a doubt different this time around is the way the population of Myanmar has responded, with younger generations in particular taking to social media to call for change, in a bid to avoid the suffering of their parents’ generation. Amon...

Why did hundreds of thousands of Thai people rise up in opposition to elected governments in 2006, 2008 and 2013-14? What were the ideological underpinnings of the yellow shirt movement? How did the original People’s Alliance for Democracy differ from the later People’s Democratic Reform Committee? Were the yellow shirts simply trying to provoke military coups against administrations linked to the...

What do startling photographic images of state violence from events such as the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University tell us about the nature of human rights in Thailand? In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Karin Zackari of Lund University discusses some of the key themes that emerge from her doctoral thesis, the first study to view egregious episodes of human rights viol...

More than anywhere else in the world, Asia is experiencing an infrastructure boom. Although it is driven by both internal and external factors, this boom has accelerated noticeably as a result of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to extends port, railway and other connections throughout and across Southeast Asia. But what is the cost of this aggressive infrastructure development? What...

Since 2000, there has been a boom in Indonesian popular novels and films set overseas, showing young Indonesians living in foreign countries and having life changing adventures there. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 150 such novels and films released – many more than in the first 55 years of Indonesian independence. In this episode, Associate Professor David Reeve speaks to Dr Natal...

Thailand has been in a deep political crisis since the royalist-military coup against the Thaksin government in 2006. A second coup, in 2014, ushered in a hard-line military dictatorship. The passing of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 2016 and accession to the throne of his son and heir, King Vajiralongkorn, has further transformed Thailand’s political landscape. When the military junta organized new e...

Why has the military junta that seized power in Myanmar on February 1 failed to gain popular support and legitimacy? How credible are attempts by the opposition to form an alternative government in exile? Have strikes and civil disobedience run their course? Why are those opposed to the military turning towards violent resistance? And what future scenarios might we expect to unfold in the months a...