New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

How could we turn the tables on the military junta who held power in Thailand between 2014 and 2019, by using legal mechanisms to challenge the culture of impunity under which the regime operated? Like previous military coups in Thailand, the May 2014 coup was completely illegal – yet the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), as the regime called itself, did not hesitate to deploy the full...

Since the decline of piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia has re-emerged as the world’s hotspot for maritime piracy, with 85 reported attacks in the region in 2020 alone. Unlike much of the rest of the world, Southeast Asia has also seen a resurgence of sophisticated maritime piracy, beyond just simple robberies. Yet this recent upsurge in maritime piracy is no coincidence. P...

The COVID-19 virus has brought the spotlight to respiratory health. Over the past year, we have become more aware than ever of cough and cold-like symptoms, fevers, feeling tired, shortness of breath and any other indicators that our immune system is fighting off an infection. But COVID-19 is not the only health condition to affect the respiratory system. Tuberculosis is one of many infectious bac...

There has been a resurgent global interest in the origins and formation of authoritarian regimes as many states around the world drift away from liberal democracy. Indonesia’s experiences with such an authoritarian turn in the 1950s and 1960s offers many lessons from history. In Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period (Brill, 2020), Farabi Fakih offers a historical ana...

Australia has always been multilingual. Yet English language sources have dominated political and popular discourses over the last few centuries, overshadowing the significant contribution made by other languages and cultures in shaping Australian history and identity. Professor Adrian Vickers spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about his work as part of an ambitious new Australian Research Council Discove...

Fungal infections are amongst the leading infectious disease killers globally. They result in more deaths than malaria, and almost as many as tuberculosis. However, they are often overlooked, and receive less research attention and funding than viral or bacterial infections. Over the past decade, this has started to change as the emergence of resistance in fungal pathogens has caused global alarm....

In this episode Astrid Norén-Nilsson of Lund University discusses her latest research about the Cambodian online news outlet Fresh News with Duncan McCargo, the Director of NIAS. Fresh News has become an indispensable source of information for Cambodia’s political and bureaucratic elite – but just how independent is the platform from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party? How can we classify the rol...

In post-Suharto Indonesian politics the exchange of patronage for political support is commonplace. Clientelism saturates the political system through everyday practices of vote buying, influence peddling, manipulating government programs, and skimming money from government projects. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Professor Michele Ford spoke with Professors Edward Aspina...

On 13 January 2020, Thailand confirmed the first known case of COVID-19 outside of China. As one of the world's most popular tourism destinations, with the majority of its travellers coming from China, this news came as no surprise. One year on, COVID-19 cases and related deaths have remained remarkably low in Thailand, and the country’s management of the pandemic has been hailed as a striking suc...

From drugs, communism and terrorism, and now the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippines under Duterte can been characterised as a rolling series of security threats. To manage these threats, the Duterte administration has relied heavily on the military. So what is the role of the military in Philippine politics under Duterte? How does it compare with the role of the military in other Southeast Asian c...

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-...

How did Indonesia’s labour movement go from being small and divided at the demise of the New Order regime in 1998 to play lead parts in politics some two decades later? What lessons have labour organizers learned along the way? And what lessons can we draw from Indonesia relevant to industrial organizing elsewhere? Informed by over a decade of multi-method research in selected sites across the wes...

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-...

Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2021) (University of California Press, 2021) focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by de...

How can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside) are the editors of a recent special issue of Contexts magazine, New Ethnographies of the Global So...

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge UP, 2021) disrupts the male-dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migration and showing how South Asian women labour migrants engaged with the process of migration, interacted with other migrants and negotiated colonial laws. This is the first study of Indian coolie women in British Malaya to...

Angkarn Kallayanapong (1926-2012) was arguably Thailand’s most famous poet of the modern period. His career spanned the era from the 1940s to the 1980s when Thai society was fundamentally transformed by rapid economic development and the process of globalization. His poetry is a testament to the massive disruption, dislocation, and alienation caused by these changes, and a lament for cultural loss...

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-...

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-...

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-...

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflecti...

What exactly is an archive? Who and what are involved in the making and naming of memory projects as archives? What kinds of stories become told through archives, and what stories are muted? Dr Beth Yahp chats with Dr Thushara Dibley about her work with Malaysia Design Archive, exploring the inner workings of the archive-making process, and inviting us to pay closer attention to the everyday stori...

Jean DeBernardi, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, has written an outstanding account of the evolution of evangelical protestantism in south-east Aisa. Christian Circulations: Global Christianity and the Local Church in Penang and Singapore, 1819-2000 (NUS Press, 2020) her third book from the National University of Singapore Press, reconstructs the complex relationships betwe...

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020) Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated...

After decades of economic and political isolation, Myanmar’s rural economy is rapidly shifting from a narrow reliance on low-productivity agriculture, to a more diverse array of farm and non-farm activities. This transition poses urgent policy and scholarly questions for the analysis of inequality, livelihood patterns and food security among the country's rural population. Despite some gains, pove...