Southeast Asian Politics Research Articles

SOUTHEAST ASIA IN 2004 Stable, but Facing Major Security Challenges

During 2004, Southeast Asia's political and scene featured significant domestic developments in several of its states (notably Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Singapore), the continued salience of internal challenges including a new outbreak of separatist-inspired violence in Thailand's Muslim south as well as the threat from the pan-regional Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network, the growing interest of extra-regional powers in the sub-region's security, and continuing efforts to make ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) a more useful vehicle for cooperation. At the year's end, the massive impact of the tsunami generated by the earthquake off Sumatra created humanitarian crises for Indonesia and Thailand, raising the question of whether governments in the region had paid sufficient practical attention to human security issues.

Mapping Muslim politics in Southeast Asia after September 11

The events of September 11 left an indelible mark on the world. It made transnational terrorism a reality for states and societies alike. It raised new questions and resurfaced old ones regarding international security and state-to-state relations. September 11 also left a lasting impact on Muslim communities around the world including in Southeast Asia. Muslims were faced with renewed questions about their religion and of their relationship to the state. Muslim politics became increasingly a horizontal contestation of meanings and representations as well as a vertical negotiation with the secular state. This article looks at the trajectory of Muslim politics in Southeast Asia after the events of 9/11. It argues that Muslim politics in Southeast Asia had become more complex and dense prior to September 11 2001. However, 9/11 has complicated this process by directing state policies in a singular direction. It suggests that an increasingly centralized and coercive approach to Muslim politics will, in fact, undermine the very objective of dampening international Islamic terrorism.

Review of Atkins (2002): The Politics of Southeast Asia’s New Media

Review of Atkins (2002): The Politics of Southeast Asia’s New Media

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:ChinaNi Zhen. Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: the Genesis of China's Fifth Generation.Chunhou Zhang and C. Edwin Vaughan. Mao Zedong as Poet and Revolutionary Leader: social and Historical Perspectives.Susan Blum and Lionel Jensen. (eds). China off Center: mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom.Jie Tang and Anthony Ward. The Changing Face of Chinese Management.Frank Dikötter. Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China, 1895–1949.Japan And KoreaYukie Ohta (trans). A Rainbow in the Desert: an Anthology of Early Twentieth‐Century Japanese Children's Literature.Bob Johnstone. We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age.Andrew C. Ross. A Vision Betrayed: the Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742.South, West & Central AsiaPrema Clarke. Teaching and Learning: the Culture of Pedagogy.Robert Deliege. The Untouchables of India.Bina Gupta (ed). The Empirical and the Transcendental: a Fusion of Horizons.Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta. New Reproductive Technologies, Women's Health and Autonomy: freedom or Dependency?Pradeep Barua. The Army Officer Corps and Military Modernisation in Later Colonial India.Southeast AsiaKees Van Dijk. A Country in Despair. Indonesia between 1997 and 2000.Cheah Boon Kheng. Malaysia: the Making of a Nation.Robert L. Winzeler (ed). Indigenous Peoples and the State: politics, Land, and Ethnicity in the Malayan Peninsula and Borneo.Andrea Whittaker. (ed). Women's Health in Mainland Southeast Asia.Jan Breman and Gunawan Wiradi. Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: case Study of Socio‐economic Dynamics in Two Villages towards the End of the Twentieth Century.William Case. Politics in Southeast Asia: democracy or Less.Andrew McWilliam. Paths of Origin, Gates of Life: a Study of Place and Precedence in Southwest Timor.Patricia M. Pelly. Postcolonial Vietnam: new Histories of the National Past.Sally Ann Ness. Where Asia Smiles: an Ethnography of Philippine Tourism.General AsiaJohn Kelly and Martha Kaplan. Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization.

Book Review: John Funston (ed.), Government and Politics in Southeast Asia (London, New York: Zed Books, 2001, 435 pp., no price given, pbk.)

Book Review: John Funston (ed.), Government and Politics in Southeast Asia (London, New York: Zed Books, 2001, 435 pp., no price given, pbk.)

Racialization and Citizenship in Thai Forest Politics

The first part of this article argues for the usefulness of the concept of racialization in understanding the intersection between identity and resource politics in Southeast Asia. The production of space through cadastral mapping, forest reservation, and community forests has all been racialized to the degree that these spaces are also associated with naturalized and essentialized ethnic identities. The second part explores the tension between racialization and citizenship in Thailand. Racialized ethnic minorities have used community forestry as a vehicle for claiming both more secure resource rights and for formal and substantive citizenship rights. The community forest movement in Thailand is not exclusionary on the basis of ethnic or indigenous identity, because of how it is based in expanding citizenship rights. Reliance on environmental stewardship criteria to justify resource rights could mean that upland peoples are subject to limits not experienced by lowlanders, whose activities have tremendous impacts on the environment.

Book Review: Governments and politics in Southeast Asia

Book Review: Governments and politics in Southeast Asia

Review: The Politics of Southeast Asia's New Media

Review: The Politics of Southeast Asia's New Media

Democracy Under Stress in Thaksin's Thailand

Thailand has often looked like an emerging democracy. While it is true that considerable political instability and numerous military interventions followed the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, by 1990 there had been no successful military coup since 1977, and Thai political scientist Chai-Anan Samudavanija felt able to write in the inaugural issue of this journal that his country was “gradually moving toward full membership of the new and larger comity of liberal democratic nations.” But this optimism was confounded by the February 1991 coup, which demonstrated residual military ambitions to dominate the political order. In the wake of the putsch came a popular uprising that ended with the fatal shooting of at least 50 unarmed civilians (May 1992), two new constitutions (1991 and 1997), and five general elections (March 1992, September 1992, July 1995, November 1996, and January 2001). Several of these events were setbacks for democratic change. Writing in 1999, Suchit Bunbongkarn hailed as a virtually unqualified success the political reform process that had culminated in the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution. Arguing that the onset of the Asian economic crisis in 1997 had boosted popular awareness of the need for greater democracy and good governance, he felt confident that the new institutions and procedures introduced that year would in the long run loosen the grip of money on politics and clean up the Thai political order. Yet the rapid pace of change in Thailand makes taking a long view extremely difficult; what appear to be robust processes of political liberalization can rapidly give way to crises of democratic confidence. Coupled with the rise to power of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (“Thais Love Thais,” or TRT) party, the Senate and lower house Duncan McCargo is professor of Southeast Asian politics at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. His latest book is Media and Politics in Pacific Asia (Routledge, forthcoming).

Resources for Security and Stability? The Politics of Regional Cooperation on the Mekong, 1957-2001

This article tells about the relationship between resource politics and security in international relations. Using the Mekong River Basin as its case study, the article examines the place of resource and development issues in attempts to develop regional institutions. The question of whether a resource development regime with apparently low productivity in terms of technical output, but high levels of resilience and longevity, should be considered a failure or not, is considered. This question is examined within the broader context of Southeast Asian politics during the First, Second, and Third Indochina conflicts as well as the post–cold war era. The article argues that survival and a capacity to change to meet the challenges of extreme broader events are clear evidence of regime success. From this standpoint, the article explores ways in which the Mekong resource regime is linked to more general concerns for political security and stability and may in fact reflect political concerns for subregional neighborhood maintenance.

Craig A. Lockhard. Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Craig A. Lockhard. Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia. By Craig A. Lockard. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998. xix, 390 pp. $48.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

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Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia

Unexpected Convergences: Bakhtin's Novelistic Discourse and Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "Epic" Novels

try's former New Order regime, the literary work of Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer has been inevitably entangled with his politics. His fourteen-year political imprisonment and his outspoken resistance to the Suharto government have made him a symbol of democratic struggle, with student activists risking jail sentences to defy the ban on his books, particularly the novels of his best-known work, the Bum Quartet.2 Composed orally in the absence of pen and paper over ten years in the prisons of Buru Island, the tetralogy has attracted the attention of scholars of both Southeast Asian politics and comparative literature. Much of the discussion of the work, however, has been sidelined by the story of its author's persecution. Indeed, Pramoedya's status as cause celebre has detracted somewhat from the vital importance and relevance of his Buru Quartet to literary theory, specifically Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on literary form, which focus on the evolution of the novel and the

Dance of life: popular music and politics in Southeast Asia

Whatever its current role and significance in Anglo-American society, popular music has been and remains a tremendous social and cultural force in many parts of the world. This text explores the connections between popular music genres and politics in Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Over the past few decades, the countries of Southeast Asia have reverberated to the music of superstars like Indonesia's Rhoma Irama. Articulating the views of powerless citizens, they provided a critical discourse on national and international affairs. Some were even identified with mass-based sociopolitical movements seeking change.

Islamic Studies in the ASEAN Region

The College of Islamic Studies, Prince of Songkla University, organizedan international seminar on Islamic Studies in the ASEAN Region:History, Approaches, and Future Trends, between 25-28 June 1998 at thePattani campus of the Prince of Songkla University. The seminar wassponsored by the Toyota Foundation (Japan) and the Center for IMT-GTStudies, and the Prince of Songkla University, Thailand. The opening ceremonywas presided over by His Excellency Mr. Wan Muhammad NoorMatta (Speaker and President of the Thai Parliament). He was welcomedby Dr. Sunthorn Sotthibandhu (President, Prince of Songkla University).Dr. Hasan Madmarn (Director, College of Islamic Studies, Prince ofSongkla University) presented a briefing, and Mr. Shiro Honda representedJapan’s Toyota Foundation, the event’s major sponsor.In his speech, HE Mr. Wan Muhammad Noor Matta said that the traditionof Islamic studies has played, for several centuries, a significantrole in building a spirit of fraternity and the development of education,economy, society, and politics in Southeast Asia. Pattani, he noted, hadbeen an important center of this intellectual and social activity. Hence,this gathering of prominent contemporary scholars of Islamic studies recognizedthis legacy and contributed to the further development of Islamicstudies in the region. Commenting upon the traditional and modem formsof the Islamic tradition present in the Association of Southeast AsianNations (ASEAN), he called upon scholars to address cooperatively theintellectual and social challenges facing the Southeast Asian Muslimcommunities for the larger benefit and progress of the ASEAN countriesand the Muslim worldThe total number of participants in the seminar was 1 17, consisting of45 delegates from outside Thailand and 72 delegates from academic institutionsin various Thai provinces. A total of 33 research papers were ...

山本信人、高埜健、金子芳樹、中野亜里、板谷大世著『東南アジア政治学～地域・国家・社会・ヒトの重層的ダイナミズム』

山本信人、高埜健、金子芳樹、中野亜里、板谷大世著『東南アジア政治学～地域・国家・社会・ヒトの重層的ダイナミズム』