New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge tra...

In the wake of the twentieth anniversary of the dreadful Tak Bai massacre, what are the prospects for a resolution of the long-standing insurgency in Thailand Malay-Muslim majority southern border provinces? Why has the Paetongtarn Shinawatra government failed to support justice for the families of the 85 men who died in the incident? Why do absurd conspiracy theories often loom larger than eviden...

In 1966 Benedict Anderson published 'The Languages of Indonesian Politics', a seminal paper exploring the development of Indonesian as a new language for talking about national politics. In that paper Anderson underlined the contrast between the formal/official style of Indonesian news reports and the colloquial, playful speech style of ordinary Jakartans as depicted through comics. Nearly six dec...

Today’s episode focuses on a major issue of enduring importance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies: authoritarianism. Even today, various forms of dictatorship remain alive and well across Southeast Asia, raising questions about their origins, their endurance, and the prospects for their evolution. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dan Slater, one of the world’s leading speci...

Why has Thailand’s politics been so contested and so intensely polarized in recent decades? How can we account for the persistent democratic regression of the past twenty years, despite the fact that the parallel vigour of progressive oppositional politics remains a source of hope for many? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, prominent Thai political scientist Prajak Kongkirati discusses his...

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. But as Andrea Be...

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academ...

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across...

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr....

Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Southeast Asia Program Publications/Cornell UP, 2022) asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities. Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more t...

What is it like to be a human rights lawyer in Thailand? How does the new generation of 2020s political activists differ from those of previous eras? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, we talk to Kunthika Nutcharut about her work with Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. Kunthika comes from a political family – her lawyer father Krisadang Nutcharut was a student activisit in the 1970s – and she s...

Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan's occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrillas never possessed the combat strength to overcome the Japanese occupation on their own, they disrupted operations, kept the spirit of resistance alive, provided important intelligence to the Allies, and assumed frontline duties fighting the Japanese....

Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known about the Manila trade. The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) offers the first reconstruction of the capital market of Manila using new archival sources that have never been used in the economic his...

This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, global commodity chains or supply chains, exploitation of labour and environmental degradation, and resistance. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dr. Alyssa Paredes, an environmental and economic anthropologist who is an Assistant Professor in...

Today’s episode focuses on Indonesia, the presidential election held in February 2024, and the impending inauguration of the winner of that election, former Army general and current defence minister Prabowo Subianto, in a few weeks’ time. Prabowo’s victory in February, events over the past several months, and the imminent transition to a Prabowo presidency have heightened concerns about the state...

When we think of the history of French colonialism in Indochina, we tend to think of the French in Indochina. Yet during the colonial period about 200,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao travelled to France to study, work, or plan revolution. While we may be familiar with the most famous of these Indochinese sojourners in France, Nguyen Ai Quoc, aka Ho Chi Minh, the stories of these other Indochin...

From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China’s relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority. Rulers and...

Why was the late Ajarn Chaiwat Satha-Anand so passionate about bringing peace to Thailand’s deep south? How did he try to speak nonviolence to Thai power elites? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, Ajarn Mark Tamthai of Payap University talks about his memories of working with Chaiwat, especially their efforts to end the ongoing violent conflict in the Malay-Muslim-majority region that inclu...

In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global infrastructure production today is focused squarely on Asia. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (U Hawaii Press, 2022) investigates the deeper implications of that pivot to the East. Written by leading international infrastructure experts, it demon...

The open-access edited volume Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia (Springer, 2023) collects philosophical approaches to Southeast Asian traditions of philosophy and religion. The editors, Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, and Frank J. Hoffman, have produced a volume that treats traditional topics in philosophy of religion, such as the problem of evil a...

The achievement of Singapore’s national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the People's Action Party began to deliver on its promises in dramatic fashion. By the 1980s, 85 percent of the population had been rehoused in modern flats, and today, decades later, the provision of public housing shapes Singapore's environment. The s...

Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking...

In this inaugural episode of Talking Thai Politics, Pannika Wanich of the Progressive Movement talks about generational contestation in Thailand, as well the evolution of Future Forward, Move Forward and the newly-formed People’s Party. A former political journalist and LSE graduate, 36-year old Pannika served as the spokesperson of the now-dissolved Future Forward Party; but was recently banned f...

Lesbian poetry as a form of socio-political praxis in the Philippine context. This episode’s guest argues that lesbian writing – by lesbians and about lesbians – is a form of activism and decolonial praxis, as well as an important form of political identity. Dr Naomi Cammayo’s academic/literary interests are within the fields of poetry, Philippine Studies, lesbian feminism and queer feminism. She...

When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictator...