New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

Visual Anthropology of Indian Films: Religious Communities and Cultural Traditions in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films. Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal of Indian religious communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. The themes covered include unique Indian feminism and male chauvinism, environment and climate issues, international locations and diaspora tourism, religious harmony and conflict, the India-Pakistan relationship, asceticism, and renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Unlike many recent studies of In

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527. Today, the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit is an important source of national pride in today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia: Even the Indonesian coat of arms, with its garuda and the motto “Unity in Diversity”, is rooted in the Majapahit era. But the tale of Majapahit–as told in Herald van der Linde’s book, Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Monsoon Books: 2024)–is a story of mythical kings, conquest, betrayal, and intrigue, as Indonesian royals jostled for position…and at times fought off external enemies like the Mongols. Herald van der Linde has travelled, lived and worked in Ind

How exactly were Thailand’s new slate of 200 Senators selected? What is it like to be an independent member of the Senate, when the chamber is now dominated by members closely associated with one of the government parties? Now that the Thai senate plays no role in selecting the prime minister, is it anything more than a talking-shop? What is the atmosphere like inside Thailand’s contentious upper house? In this episode, senator Pornchai Witayalerdpan discusses the extraordinary process by which he and the 199 other new senators were selected in July 2024. He also explains how a small group of independent-minded senators are trying to promote democratic agendas, despite being consistently outvoted by the conservative majority. Here is a link to the BBC Thai article mentioned by Pornchai in the interview, which provides some critical analysis on how the majority ‘blue group’ of senators dominated key votes in their first parliamentary session: https://www.bbc.com/thai/articles/cy4nkvx99kro Independent Thai sena

In Cambodian history most people have heard of the great Khmer empire of Angkor, and the radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. But who has heard of the famous story of the sweet cucumber farmer who became king of Cambodia in the fourteenth century?  In this original book, Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970 (U Hawaii Press, 2024), Theara Thun traces the development of Cambodian historiography, from the royal chronicle tradition of premodern times to modern histories based on Western historical methods introduced by French colonial scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theara discusses the intellectuals – Khmer, French, and maybe surprisingly even Thai - who helped shaped modern Cambodian history writing. He shows that indigenous Cambodian historiographical traditions survive in the present in surprising forms. This is an important contribution to an emerging scholarship on Southeast Asian intellectual history. Support our show by b

Why are dubious power-sharing deals on the rise across Southeast Asia? What effects do they have on the region’s prospects for democracy? And are they going to be tolerated? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Duncan McCargo and Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa about their recent Journal of Democracy article ‘Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances.’ They discuss the factors that underpin the rise of these toxic alliances among Southeast Asian elites, their characteristics, and their effects on democracy by focusing on three countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs at the Nanyang Technological University. He works mainly on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. His dozen books include the best-selling The Thaksinization of Thailand (co-authored, NIAS Press 2005), and the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008); and more recently Fighting for Virtue: Po

How do we confront difference and change in a rapidly shifting environment? Many indigenous peoples are facing this question in their daily lives. Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest (U Nebraska Press, 2024) explores the lives of Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds. Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as

Today’s episode focuses on the policy challenges and politics of public healthcare in Southeast Asia, a topic which has become increasingly visible and important in Southeast Asia and in the study of the region over the past decades in the context of expanding public healthcare programs in many countries across the region and the recent experience of the global pandemic. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Professor Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, who has been conducting research on public healthcare in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past several years. Sarah Shair-Rosenfield is a Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York here in the UK. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina and then taught at Arizona State University and the University of Essex before taking up a professorial chair at the University of York. She is the author of Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies: Lessons from the Indonesian C

How far does geopolitics relate to domestic political leanings? Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favour China? A recent article by Petra Alderman, Duncan McCargo, Alfred Gerstl and James Icovocci drawing on a 2022 survey finds some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, but also shows that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China. To view election outcomes in a country such as Thailand as “wins” for one or other great power would be highly misleading. Article details: Petra Alderman, Duncan McCargo, Alfred Gerstl and James Icovocci, ‘All About China? (Mis)Reading Domestic Politics through a Great Power Lens’, Asian Survey, 2024, 64 (5): 877–911. Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham, and a Research Fellow at Birmingham’s Centre for E

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 traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology.  Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the ear

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 decades on, how do we understand the 'languages' of Indonesian politics? How are figures of politics constituted through language?  Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies at The University of Sydney, Dwi Noverini Djenar, expands on these issues. She has worked on the stylistics of adolescent literature, focusing on the production and circulation of styles and their relationship to sociolinguistic change. Her current research focuses on language and relations among social actors in public spheres, particularly in broadcast settings. Novi is co-author of Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction (2018) and co-ed

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 evidence-based analyses of the root causes underling the violence? And why does the Thai state struggle to embrace narratives of local identity that offer space for diversity, disagreement and pluralism? Don Pathan is a senior journalist and security analyst, well known for his expertise on the Southern insurgency. Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. He has published extensively on the southern conflict, including the award-winning book Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008). Chayata Sripanich is a research associate with the G

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 specialists on authoritarianism in Southeast Asia and the author of important and influential works on this topic and more broadly on the politics of the region. Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center of Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, where he’s been since 2017 after receiving his PhD from Emory University in 2005 and teaching at the University of Chicago. Dan is one of the most prolific and prominent scholars of Southeast Asian politics, publishing a raft of important and influential articles in leading Political Science and Southeast Asian Studi

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 new book Thailand: Contestation, Polarization and Democratic Regression (Cambridge UP, 2024), with Duncan McCargo. Prajak is an associate professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Thammasat University, and is well known for his extensive writings on Thai politics, notably on elections and political violence. His new book is an invaluable introductory text that anyone teaching Southeast Asian politics is likely to assign to their students. Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand

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 Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru. Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-cent

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-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format. The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art s

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 its heterogeneous territories and populations. While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice. The entanglement of these two ideologies-nation-building and equity-shaped how electrification was carried out, including how the state chose the technologies it did. Private companies and electric cooperatives vied with the hegemonic state power company to participate in a monumental undertaking that would transform daily life for all Indonesians, especially rural citizens. In this innovative volume, Anto Mohsin brings Indonesian studies together with

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. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfo

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 than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state's ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued

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 studied and worked in Germany before deciding to return to Thailand to taken on the challenging work of defending outspoken figures in the post-2020 student-led protest movement. Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Chayata Sripanich is a research associate with the Generation Thailand project. Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant

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. By examining the organization, motivations, capabilities, and operations of the guerrillas, James Villanueva argues that the guerrillas were effective because Japanese punitive measures, along with a strong sense of obligation and loyalty to the United States, pushed most of the population to support the guerrillas. Unlike their predecessors opposing the Americans in 1899, the guerrillas during World War II benefited from the leadership of US and Filipino military personnel and received significant aid and direction from General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) Headquarters, conducting one of the mo