New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Recurring tropes about fragmented communities living on frontier forestlands living in Southeast Asia are that they are either guardians of flora and fauna their destroyers. In much analysis gravitating to one or other position in this dichotomy the role of organised religion is absent. But as Faizah Zakaria shows in The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Sou...

Mango: A Global History (Reaktion, 2024) by Constance L. Kirker & Dr Mary Newman is a beautifully illustrated book that takes us on a tour through the rich world of mangoes, which inspire fervent devotion across the world. In South Asia, mangoes boast a history steeped in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, even earning a mention in the Kama Sutra. Beyond myth, mangoes hold literary significance as a po...

Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Instead of searching for...

What is the right way to live? This is an old question in Western moral philosophy, but in recent years anthropologists have turned their attention to this question in what has been called, a “moral turn”. In this original ethnographic study, Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar (NUS Press, 2024), Justine Chambers examines the Plong (Pwo) Karen people’s conceptio...

In this episode, host LSE Southeast Asia Centre Director John Sidel speaks with Meredith Weiss, Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and a leading specialist on Malaysian politics. In the interview, Professor Weiss provides in-depth analysis and insights with regard to the complex patterns of continuity and change in Malaysian politics since the watershed election of 2018. Meredith Weiss...

Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu. These are just a few of the historical topics from Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period (Faction Press: 2024), a collection of 13 essays on stories from Filipino history as a Spani...

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situati...

The spice islands: Specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic. Roger Crowley, in his new book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale Univer...

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Qingfei Yin talks about her new book State Building in Cold War Asia Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (due out with Cambridge University Press in August 2024), explains how she became interested in her research on China and Vietn...

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Dr. Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the...

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situati...

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (U Chicago Pre...

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situati...

Does Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”? Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history f...

In Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (NUS Press, 2024), historian Tim Barnard and his colleagues offer an edited volume of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into the development of Singapore as a modern, urban nation-state, highlighting some of the challenges of...

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situati...

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Li...

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situati...

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situati...

In 2016, journalist Clare Hammond embarked on a project to study the railways of Myanmar–a transportation network that sprawls the country, rarely used and not shown on many maps, and often used at the pleasure of the country’s military. In her book On the Shadow Tracks; A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar (Allen Lane, 2024), Clare travels the lengths of Myanmar’s railways, from the south of the co...

With the ever-greater shift of the balance of global power towards the Pacific region, what does this have implications for the geopolitics of the region? How should the rest of the world, especially Europe, address the growing power and influence of the Pacific region? How does the complex interplay of cultural, civilizational, economic, legal, environmental, and political factors affect the Paci...

Politicians in Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters, but the ways in which they do this vary tremendously, both across and within countries.  Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage d...

European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonisation and decolonization processes have had a profound impact on the formation of the majority of sovereign states that exist today. But how exactly have natural resources influenced the creation of formerly colonised states? And would the world map of sovereign states look significantly different i...

"When the Spanish colonization of the Philippines began in 1565, early reports boasted of mass conversions to Christianity and ever-increasing numbers of people paying tribute to the Spanish crown. This suggests an uncomplicated story of an easy imposition of Spanish sovereignty.  But as Stephanie Mawson shows in her book, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Centu...

What does an inclusive society look like? And what are the challenges and opportunities when the society in question, Timor-Leste, is one of the most resource-constrained in Southeast Asia? My guest today is interested in these questions of inclusion and participation, and argues that people with a disability are a key component of a truly inclusive society – and that employment can be a key polic...