Contemporary Southeast Asia Research Articles

Indonesia in 2020: COVID-19 and Jokowi's Neo-liberal Turn

“Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a must read.”  – Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University “Now in its forty-eighth edition, Southeast Asian Affairs offers an indispensable guide to this fascinating region. Lively, analytical, authoritative, and accessible, there is nothing comparable in quality or range to this series. It is a must read for academics, government officials, the business community, the media, and anybody with an interest in contemporary Southeast Asia. Drawing on its unparalleled network of researchers and commentators, ISEAS is to be congratulated for producing this major contribution to our understanding of this diverse and fast-changing region, to a consistently high standard and in a timely manner.”  – Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University

Alternative Voices in Muslim Southeast Asia: Discourse and Struggles ed. by Norshahril Saat and Azhar Ibrahim

Reviewed by: Alternative Voices in Muslim Southeast Asia: Discourse and Struggles ed. by Norshahril Saat and Azhar Ibrahim Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid Alternative Voices in Muslim Southeast Asia: Discourse and Struggles Edited by NORSHAHRIL SAAT AND AZHAR IBRAHIM. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2020. 230pp. ISBN 978-981-4843-80-5 A major pitfall which many editors of volumes on Islam in Southeast Asia have failed to avoid is the recurring problem of essentialisation. Tapping on their own research expertise and bias, both local and foreign scholars have produced admirable works that capture specific segments and chunks within the whole array of topics that could be categorised under the cluster of Islam and Muslims in Southeast Asia. With Southeast Asia becoming ever more diverse in the light of globalisation and the region becoming increasingly integrated with the world economy via such projects as China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), one could not be faulted for expecting a smorgasbord of offerings depicting the vast expanse of Muslim cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia. Bearing such an eye-catching title which begins with the word 'Alternative,' thus conveying the impression of bringing out hitherto neglected narratives and analyses of subaltern Muslim communities and figures of Southeast Asia, Norshahril Saat and Azhar Ibrahim's edited volume looks enticingly promising on first impression. One could imagine the appeal such a volume would have if it had explored such terra incognita as Muslims of Indochina and Timor Leste, resurgent sufi congregations in Southern Thailand of the types investigated by Chiengmai-based Christopher Joll, and Malaysia's and Indonesia's Chinese Muslims of the sort studied by Hew Wai Weng of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). Such adventurous detour allows us to debunk politically driven stereotypes, for example by disentangling us from the typical Malay aka pribumi-Chinese conflict paradigm of both Malaysia's and Indonesia's ethno-religious politics. Alas, the geographical essentialisation of Muslim Southeast Asia to only Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore is disappointing to say the least, but is then probably not altogether unexpected, coming from a group of scholars who share past and present affinity if not professional affiliation with the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore. Treated as practically synonymous with the Malay world, not only is the volume's conception of a Muslim Southeast Asia bereft of any examples from the 'unMalay' world, but Alternative Voices in Muslim Southeast Asia also marginalises voices whose discursive location are found beyond the cognitive domain of 'progressive Islam'—the overarching theme that occupies Norshahril Saat and Azhar Ibrahim in this book and which they take for [End Page 225] granted as the proxy for whatever is worthy of the label 'alternative voice' among Southeast Asian Muslims. The strand of thought calling itself 'progressive Islam,' while appearing in many aspects to be a post-colonial phenomenon as much as it is a reaction against the dominance of conservative stripes of Islam following the religious resurgence that enveloped Muslim Southeast Asia in the 1970s–80s, shares ancestral linkages with the Kaum Muda (Young Faction) movement of early twentieth century, as chronicled by Azhar Ibrahim in Chapter Four. However, if Kaum Muda's ideological rival was the then Kaum Tua (Old Faction), latter-day progressive Muslims have had to contend not only with the traditionalist ulama (religious scholars) who customarily control the Islamic officialdom of Muslim-majority countries, but they have also had to compete with thinkers from the ultra-conservative Wahhabi-Salafi school ascendant in contemporary Southeast Asia, even lately penetrating Islamic religious bureaucracies in Malaysia. Both conservative trends, namely the traditionalist school and the increasingly influential Wahhabi-Salafi puritanical strand, despite their separate intellectual genealogies,1 are wont to label progressive Muslims as purveyors of 'liberal Islam,' which within mainstream Southeast Asian Islam carries negative connotations implying deviation from the righteous path. These liberal-conservative tensions are brought out in Noor Aisha Abdul Rahman's Chapter 5 on Singapore and Norshahril Saat's Chapter 8 on Malaysia. Further, progressive Muslims are likened to the Mu'tazilites, the rationalist school once dominant in the early ninth century who, because of their fascination with Greek philosophy, prioritised usage of the reason...

One Year on, the Centrality of Politics in Malaysia's COVID-19 Crisis

“Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a must read.”  – Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University “Now in its forty-eighth edition, Southeast Asian Affairs offers an indispensable guide to this fascinating region. Lively, analytical, authoritative, and accessible, there is nothing comparable in quality or range to this series. It is a must read for academics, government officials, the business community, the media, and anybody with an interest in contemporary Southeast Asia. Drawing on its unparalleled network of researchers and commentators, ISEAS is to be congratulated for producing this major contribution to our understanding of this diverse and fast-changing region, to a consistently high standard and in a timely manner.”  – Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University

The Populist Brand is Crisis: Durable Dutertismo amidst Mismanaged COVID-19 Response

“Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a must read.”  – Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University “Now in its forty-eighth edition, Southeast Asian Affairs offers an indispensable guide to this fascinating region. Lively, analytical, authoritative, and accessible, there is nothing comparable in quality or range to this series. It is a must read for academics, government officials, the business community, the media, and anybody with an interest in contemporary Southeast Asia. Drawing on its unparalleled network of researchers and commentators, ISEAS is to be congratulated for producing this major contribution to our understanding of this diverse and fast-changing region, to a consistently high standard and in a timely manner.”  – Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University

Repositioning Indonesia in the Post-COVID-19 Global Value Chains

“Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a must read.”  – Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University “Now in its forty-eighth edition, Southeast Asian Affairs offers an indispensable guide to this fascinating region. Lively, analytical, authoritative, and accessible, there is nothing comparable in quality or range to this series. It is a must read for academics, government officials, the business community, the media, and anybody with an interest in contemporary Southeast Asia. Drawing on its unparalleled network of researchers and commentators, ISEAS is to be congratulated for producing this major contribution to our understanding of this diverse and fast-changing region, to a consistently high standard and in a timely manner.”  – Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University

Vietnam's Economic Prospects in the Wake of the US-China Trade Conflict and COVID-19

“Southeast Asian Affairs, first published in 1974, continues today to be required reading for not only scholars but the general public interested in in-depth analysis of critical cultural, economic and political issues in Southeast Asia. In this annual review of the region, renowned academics provide comprehensive and stimulating commentary that furthers understanding of not only the region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a must read.”  – Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University “Now in its forty-eighth edition, Southeast Asian Affairs offers an indispensable guide to this fascinating region. Lively, analytical, authoritative, and accessible, there is nothing comparable in quality or range to this series. It is a must read for academics, government officials, the business community, the media, and anybody with an interest in contemporary Southeast Asia. Drawing on its unparalleled network of researchers and commentators, ISEAS is to be congratulated for producing this major contribution to our understanding of this diverse and fast-changing region, to a consistently high standard and in a timely manner.”  – Hal Hill, H.W. Arndt Professor of Southeast Asian Economies, Australian National University

The Inefficacy of Naming Genocide in Contemporary Southeast Asia

This article examines two cases of ongoing persecution in Southeast Asia and the problems of naming either genocide. Specifically, I discuss the politics of naming the decades’ long persecution of the Rohingya in Burma and West Papuans genocide. Both cases highlight some critical points of contention within the field of genocide studies which revolve around competing conceptions of how and what genocides destroy. Often separated into liberal and post-liberal camps, or those which conceive of genocide as a crime or as a process, these competing views create deep divisions over what cases of mass violence can be named genocide, or not. I take up some of these highly politicized and moralistic debates around the naming of genocide in light of these two contemporary Southeast Asian cases; that of the Rohingya which arguably has been recognised as a case of genocide since the latest wave of violence in 2017; and the case of West Papua, which remains very much at the fringes of genocide studies. I also draw on the work of a range of scholars who question the “effectivity” of naming genocide. I argue that, in these two contemporary Southeast Asian cases, naming (Rohingya) and not-naming (West Papua) cases of ongoing persecution genocide has had little effect whatsoever.

The State of Responsibility to Protect Inception in ASEAN Regionalism

As a regional organization, ASEAN upholds its core principles of non-interference, consultation and consensus. Meanwhile, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) encourages the need for the international community’s intervention to a country that falls to its citizens. Hence, this creates tension between ASEAN principles and R2P. The tension is reflected when the limited capacity of a member state’s government might invite humanitarian intervention from the international community. This research aims to discuss how Southeast Asian regionalism adapts to this situation and is undergoing dynamic reformulation to reconcile ASEAN Way and humanitarian principles. In contemporary Southeast Asian Studies, the extent of R2P inception in ASEAN regional cooperation is understudied. These methods utilize a reductionist approach in I.R. studies by explaining ASEAN through the analysis of individual actors based on a constructivism school of thought. The data taken from the interviews are utilized to confirm ASEAN and member states’ positions. This study argues that the traditional constructivist tipping point measurement for an international norm needs to be revisited. The tipping points for R2P in international forums may not necessarily be well-reflected at the regional level.

Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, by John Clifford Holt.

Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, by John Clifford Holt. University of Hawai’i Press. 2017. 391pp. Hb. $68, ISBN-13: 978-0-82486-780-5.

<i>Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka</i>, by John Clifford Holt

Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, by John Clifford Holt. University of Hawai’i Press. 2017. 391pp. Hb. $68, ISBN-13: 978-0-82486-780-5.

EXPLAINING ISLAMIC POPULISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: AN INDONESIAN MUSLIM INTELLECTUALS PERSPECTIVE

Why do religious populism can strengthen in contemporary Southeast Asia? The recent rise of mass mobilization that uses religious identities in Southeast Asia has driven scholarly debate about what caused the unprecedented religious populism. This article seeks to explain an Indonesian Muslim intellectual discourse on the rise of Islamic populism, and it’s causes through a close examination of the case of Islamist-populist mobilization in Indonesia in late 2016. As already well known, there has been no singular explanation of Muslim intellectuals, in this case, are moderate and progressive groups, in response to the Islamist mobilization. Some scholars have argued that increasing conservatism among the Muslim population is an important factor, while others have disputed such a view, arguing that the crisis of democratic representation is the main factor. Borrowing Faucoult’s perspective, the article argues that the plurality and even contradictions of thoughts among moderate-progressive Muslim intellectuals are not only due to differences in their perspectives but also their position in the power/knowledge constellation.

Teaching Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art

Teaching Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art

A HISTORY OF Hadrami COMMUNITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Hadrami-Arabs have played essential roles in Islamisation process across Southeast Asian region. This article diachronically examines the history of Hadrami community and their roles in islamisation. It looks at the dynamics, adaptation, and contestation of Islamisation in the region. This article offers actors-centered accounts of how the Hadrami community contributes to Islamic proselitisation activism (dakwah), politics, and contestation within the community. It further argues that, throughout the history of Hadrami in Southeast Asia, political adaptation and contestation have been essential elements that shape the current Islamic-scape in contemporary Southeast Asia.

A Study on the Attainment of Regional Peace: Insinuation of Johan Galtung’s Philosophy of Peace in Southeast Asian Countries

<p><em>The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the insinuation of Galtung’s </em><em>“</em><em>positive</em><em>”</em><em> and </em><em>“</em><em>negative</em><em>”</em><em> peace in southeast Asian countries. Applying the qualitative research methodology and a case study approach, this study finds a relation of Galtung’s’ peace theory and peaceful coexistence in contemporary Southeast Asian nations. This study reveals that the southeast Asian nation-states beneath the authority of ASEAN’s regionalism have efficaciously been managed its negative peace since the 1970s. The execution of positive peace, on the other hand, had instigated with the enactment of treaty, accord and agreement since the 1980s. This regional organization has taken numerous strategies, which contributes to speed up its economy, improve social lifespan and develop a culture of peace in this area. The zone which was once well-known for its mutual confrontation, hostility and conflict, has now converted diplomatic. Its non-coercive approaches, soft diplomacy and, nuclear nonproliferation has now turned into a pioneer characteristic for the conflict-prone regions of the world. </em></p>

Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: New Insights into Jihad in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines

After more than two decades of existence, Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) has entered a new phase of specialization to reflect more directly the changing priorities of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) as well as to cater to an increasing demand among our subscribers for a focus on issues related to domestic politics, international affairs, and regional security. This primary emphasis on political developments, socioeconomic change and international relations is in keeping with the rapid advances in the field of strategic studies concerning not just Southeast Asia but, indeed, the larger Asia-Pacific environment. Contemporary Southeast Asia comprises up-to-date analyses of important trends and events as well as authoritative and original contributions from leading scholars and observers on matters of current interest. It is also the policy of the Editorial Committee of CSEA to produce special issues in order to focus attention either on particular national situations or on major strategic trends in both Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. Contemporary Southeast Asia is published three times a year, in April, August, and December.

Contributors

Previous article FreeContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCarlos Garrido CastellanoCarlos Garrido Castellano is Lecturer of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork. He has taught widely on Spanish, Lusophone and Latin American visual culture. His research interests focus on visual culture, critical theory, activism and collaborative artistic practices in postcolonial contexts.Daria GhiuDaria Ghiu lives and works in Bucharest. She wrote a book on the history of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (IDEA Publishing House, 2015) and is an art critic and radio author. Since 2016 she is an associate professor at the University of Bucharest.Vasif KortunVasif Kortun is a curator, writer and teacher in the field of contemporary art – its institutions and spatial practices. He was the founding director of Research and Programs of SALT, Istanbul. A recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence from Bard College, he is the chairman of the board of the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.Ana LongoniAna Longoni is a writer, researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires and teaches in the Independent Studies Program of the MACBA, Barcelona. She studies the intersections between art and politics in Argentina and Latin America from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Currently, she is the director of public activities for Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.Michael A. MelMichael A. Mel is of the Mogei tribe in the Mt Hagen area in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). He completed a PhD at Flinders University, Adelaide and was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Goroka, PNG. He is currently a manager for Pacific and international collection at the Australian Museum, Sydney.Serubiri MosesSerubiri Moses is an independent writer and curator. His curatorial work, writing and research has been presented internationally in Kampala, Hong Kong, Cali, Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg and Berlin. He was on the curatorial team for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, ‘We don’t need another hero’, in 2018.Vijay PrashadVijay Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He first wrote about Naeem Mohaiemen’s work for journal TAKE on art (New Delhi) in 2010 and appears in Mohaiemen’s film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017).Filipa RamosFilipa Ramos is editor-in-chief at art-agenda, and lectures at Kingston University, London and Institut Kunst, Basel. Ramos is co-curator of Vdrome, was associate editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed to dOCUMENTA 13 and documenta 14. She edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2016) and curates ‘Animalisk’ at Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden in 2019.Jerssi Esperança Restino PauloJerssi Esperança Restino Paulo is an Angolan student in African Studies at Universidade de Lisboa. In the future, she would like to work with NGOs that support Africa’s development or in matters related to African history.Charles StankievechCharles Stankievech is an artist and Director of Visual Studies, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto. From 1996 to 2004 he worked as a licensed atomic energy technician for the world’s largest materials engineering firm that did forensic analysis on architectural, industrial and military assets. He is a contributing editor to Afterall.Nora A. TaylorNora A. Taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian art at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii, 2004/NUS Press, 2009) and numerous articles and co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Southeast Asia Program Publications, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2012) among other edited volumes.Reiko TomiiReiko Tomii is an independent art historian who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts. She is co-director of PoNJA-GenKon (www.ponja-genkon.net), a scholarly listserv. Among her latest publications is Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016).Clare VealClare Veal is a lecturer in the MA Asian Art Histories programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore where she conducts research on Southeast Asian photography, art and visual culture with a focus on Thailand. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Sydney in 2016.Kaelen Wilson-GoldieKaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer based in New York and Beirut. She is contributing editor for Bidoun and writes regularly for Artforum, Bookforum, Aperture and Frieze. Her first book, Etel Adnan (Lund Humphries), on the paintings of the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, was published in 2018. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Afterall Volume 47Spring/Summer 2019 Published by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704207 © 2019 by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Damien Kingsbury, Politics in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Authority, Democracy and Political Change.

Damien Kingsbury, Politics in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Authority, Democracy and Political Change.

Postcolonial Cacophonies:

Research Article| August 01 2018 Postcolonial Cacophonies:Yasmin Ahmad’s Sense of the World Gerald Sim Gerald Sim Gerald Sim is associate professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University, and the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014). He was the Lee Kong Chian NUS- Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia in 2016 – 17. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2018) 26 (3): 389–421. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868211 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Gerald Sim; Postcolonial Cacophonies:Yasmin Ahmad’s Sense of the World. positions 1 August 2018; 26 (3): 389–421. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868211 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search Situated astride Malaysian and global film culture, the late director Yasmin Ahmad presents a fresh model of postcolonial poetics. Her films gravitated toward interracial romance melodramas set in globalized social and cultural milieus, where she stages interethnic squabbles between speakers of different languages. First, using imperfect or absent subtitles, Ahmad steers attention away from dialogue’s linguistic meaning, toward the purely acoustic pleasures of dueling cultural phonemes or prosody—what language simply sounds like. The soundscape harbors an aesthetic that transcends the hybridity paradigm associated with postcolonial culture. When overlapped to the point of cacophony, the sounds emphasize the division between meaning and its absence. Ahmad’s second predilection, for highlighting characters who speak ethnically incongruent languages, also does not require audience comprehension. The sequences offer a cinematic experience that is thoroughly aural, spatially marginalized, and yet seductively immersive. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening, and its concepts of “ecouter” and “resonance,” appear to best describe the effect created by Ahmad’s multilingual soundscapes in the feature films Rabun (2003), Sepet (2005), and Gubra (2006), as well as her work in commercial advertising. By creating moments and objects that “resonate,” Ahmad fashions a cinematic subjectivity that is informed by Malaysia’s position as a newly independent nation and full participant in the neoliberal economy. Unlike the anticolonial movements of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, Malaysia’s project was not heavily influenced by Marxism. Its postcolonial culture is thus distinct, as captured vividly in Ahmad’s film style. This essay links her departure from traditional hybridity tropes with the nation’s postcolonialglobal duality. Through Nancy’s Sense of the World and Creation of the World or Globalization, the author contends that the films evoke a phenomenology that speaks to Malaysia’s own geopolitical “sense of the world.” postcolonial aesthetics, postcolonial cinema, multilingualism, film sound, Malaysian cinema The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 Duke University Press2018 You do not currently have access to this content.

BUREAUCRATIC ISLAM COMPARED: CLASSIFICATORY POWER AND STATE-IFIED RELIGIOUS MEANING-MAKING IN BRUNEI AND SINGAPORE

AbstractThis article presents a comparative anthropological approach to studying the bureaucratization of Islam in contemporary Southeast Asia. In line with this approach, the article understands thebureaucratizationof Islam not simply as a formalization, expansion, and diversification of Islamic institutions and legal frameworks; rather, bureaucratization is investigated as a social phenomenon that transcends its organizational boundaries and informs dynamics of socio-legal change alongside transformations of the meaning(s) of Islam in state and society. The article centers the state's “classificatory power” and its societal coproduction and contestation, and it takes both functional and hermeneutic modes of analysis into consideration. While the bureaucratization of Islam is always embedded in and shaped by power-political constellations, it simultaneously produces social and doctrinal meanings that are unique to its locally specific discursive arenas. Therefore, more conventional functional perspectives on bureaucratic Islam can be beneficially enriched by a more hermeneutically oriented anthropological analysis, as the article illustrates, based on ethnographic data gathered in Brunei and Singapore.The article first introduces the anthropology of bureaucracy and elaborates on the absence of such studies on state-Islam relations in Southeast Asia, as well as the potential of bringing these streams of scholarship into a fruitful dialogue. Second, it presents the Bruneian case study, focusing on postcolonial Islamization policies, the bureaucratization of a national ideology, legal reforms, and their workings on the microlevel. Third, it moves on to a regional comparison, by illustrating how Islamic knowledge and meaning-production inherent to the bureaucratization of Islam unfolds quite differently in Singapore, despite partly overlapping functional patterns. While anchored in Brunei and Singapore, the article offers a conceptual framework and analytic vocabulary for a wider study across and potentially beyond the region.

Maritime Terrorism Network: Threat and Security in Contemporary Southeast Asia

<p>Southeast Asia is a region that is vulnerable to terrorism. Of the total terrorism cases that occurred in the world, 50 percents occurred in this region. Mindanao is one of the regions in Southeast Asia that since a long time ago has been the basis of world-class terrorism. This situation is getting worse due to the presence of terrorist groups with a strong tradition of maritime piracy. The nexus between terrorism and piracy makes the issue of maritime terrorism in Southeast Asia a regional security concern. Abu Sayyaf Group is a terrorist group in the Southern Philippines that is very well-known but difficult to map. This makes the Abu Sayyaf a source of prolonged tension in the Southern Philippines in particular and in the Southeast Asia region in general. This study is a field observation that uses descriptive analysis to reveal the details of the Abu Sayyaf and the issue of terrorism in Mindanao.</p>