Southeast Asian Societies Research Articles

A history of sex and the state in Southeast Asia: class, intimacy and invisibility

This essay offers a history of international marriages that questions the definition of marriage and what it meant to belong, as a legal subject or citizen, to a colonial state in Southeast Asia. European imperial states deployed monogamous marriage alongside other weapons of empire as a justification for intervention into Southeast Asian societies. With monogamous marriage came also European notions of belonging that traced surnames and legal subject status (later citizenship) via husbands and fathers. The ramifications for individuals in international marriages between Asian women and European men are well known. However, the vast majority of ‘international marriages’ were not those between colonial Europeans and Southeast Asian women, but between Southeast Asian women and lower class Asian men from India and China. Colonial states ignored or failed to register these lower class intra-Asian intimacies because their unions did not threaten colonial rule so long as they ensured a continuous pool of labor and promoted the colonial economy. Unlike recent theories which argue for an omniscient state that penetrates into the personal lives of its populations, this essay maintains that states intensely regulated marriage and belonging for some subjects but not for others. This longstanding unevenness in the management of intimate unions provides a historical context for understanding shifts in the marital regimes of contemporary postcolonial states. Taking a long-term view, the essay asks if recent increases in international marriages might be better understood as spikes rather than as absolute increases resulting from ‘globalization’. A historical framework ties the rise and fall of international marriage to early modern trade patterns, imperialism's labor requirements, war, and the recent demand for labor that has arisen from low birth rates and economic changes. Each of these ‘events’ entailed a large-scale movement of populations which resulted in the development of intimate unions.

List of Contributors

ASIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCEAsian Journal of Social Science Aims & Scope Th e Asian Journal of Social Science is a multi-disciplinary journal for the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Published continuously since it was launched in 1973, the journal provides a forum for exploring issues in Southeast Asian societies. Contributions are from anthropology, economics, geography, history, language and literature, political science, psychology and sociology. AJSS covers the Asian region and has a social science focusing on theoretical issues of the social sciences in the context of Asian empirical realities. Doing so, the journal does not restrict

Giving help in return: family reciprocity by older Singaporeans

ABSTRACTReciprocity is a powerful principle in social ties. The ethos of family reciprocity is especially strong in Asian societies. We study contemporaneous family exchanges, hypothesising that the more current help older Singaporeans receive from family, the more they give in return. Cross-sectional analyses were undertaken of data from two national Singapore surveys conducted in 1995 and 1999. The help received by older people is measured by income and cash support, payment of household expenses by others, having a companion for away-from-home activities, and having a principal carer. The help given by older people is measured by baby-sitting, doing household chores, giving financial help to children, and advising on family matters. Multivariate models are used to examine the factors that affect an older person's ability and willingness to give help. The results show that the more financial support Singapore seniors received from kin, the more baby-sitting and chores they provided. In their swiftly modernising society, Singapore seniors are maintaining family reciprocity by giving time in return for money. We discuss how during the coming decades, reciprocity in Southeast and East Asian societies may shift from instrumental to more affective behaviours.

The Localization of Power in Southeast Asia

The article analyzes the localization of power in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia after 1998, when the institutional frameworks of the authoritarian New Order of Soeharto quickly unravelled and new ones were rapidly constructed, associated both with electoral democracy and decentralization policy. Comparisons are made in the process with the trajectories of the Philippines and Thailand, two other major post-authoritarian societies in Southeast Asia (though the label can only problematically be applied to Thailand after the coup of September 2006), which have undergone democratization and varying degrees of decentralization. It is argued that the collective experience of these Southeast Asian societies displays some of the more tangible limits to technocratic power. In Indonesia, there are two sets of interests being marginalized under decentralized electoral democracy: class-based interests in opposition to the brand of predatory capitalism that has survived the demise of the New Order; and foreign and domestic supporters of decentralization as ‘good governance’ that threaten local coalitions of predatory power deploying money politics and developing greater economic and political aspirations and ambitions. While the rise of electoral democracy has meant broader political participation, political contestation remains confined to competing coalitions of local predatory interests.

Innovative Viewpoints on Late Colonial Southeast Asian Society: Three Examples

Innovative Viewpoints on Late Colonial Southeast Asian Society: Three Examples

Cambodia's Muslim King: Khmer and Dutch Sources on the Conversion of Reameathipadei I, 1642–1658

This article surveys the reign of Cambodian King Reameathipadei I (1642–58) on the basis of Khmer and Dutch sources, with a particular focus on the monarch's conversion to Islam in the early 1640s. This episode provides an illustration of the pluralism of Southeast Asian societies during the Age of Commerce.

Globalizing Manga: From Japan to Hong Kong and Beyond

Globalizing Manga:From Japan to Hong Kong and Beyond Wendy Siuyi Wong (bio) Many modern societies produce a form of visual and narrative art that contains a series of printed pictures, usually though not always with text.1 In English, readers may call it sequential art, comics, comic books, cartoons, cartoon strips, or graphic novels. The French term is bande dessinée (BD), literally, "strip drawing." In Chinese, commonly used terms are manhua, lianhuantu, and car-ton. The written Chinese characters for manhua are the basis for both the Japanese and the Korean terms for comics, which are, respectively, manga and manhwa. No matter what it is called, this visual art form in various countries and languages has similarities and differences. Scott McCloud points out that this art form is a communication medium able to convey information and to produce aesthetic pleasure for readers.2 As a part of the globalization of media, American comics and animation have a long history of exporting such works. Studies find that American comics played an important role in introducing modern comics to Asia, as in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s.3 In Japan, the great comics artist Tezuka Osamu openly acknowledged the influence of early Walt Disney and Max Fleisher animation in his work.4 Japan's comics [End Page 23] and animation industry was the most developed among countries in Asia in the early 1960s. John Lent's study of the American animation industry and its offshore factory development in East and Southeast Asia confirmed that Japan was the pioneer in the field in the region at that time.5 Indeed, when comics started to take off in Japan in the early 1960s, the influences of manga began to spread to its neighbors, and American influence started to wane in the region. Manga is "one of the features of mass culture in present-day Japan. In 1994, 2.27 billion manga books and magazines were published, making up 35 percent of all material published."6 The manga market in Japan is big, and genres are highly diversified. However, when examining the exportation of Japanese cultural products, including comics, the cultural economist Dal Yong Jin points out that these products "have hardly penetrated worldwide to the same degree as its [Japan's] economic power and the domestic culture market."7 It was not until approximately fifteen years ago, partly because of Japan's economic recession, that the Japanese manga industry began to grant copyrights to overseas publishers in Asia and to explore the transnational development of its cultural products. The influence of manga in Southeast Asian societies is obvious. Outside Japan and Asia, the visibility of manga is clearly emerging into the mainstream media.8 Comics scholars and cultural studies scholars are optimistic that Japan can be "consider[ed] as another centre of globalization" because of the current global development of manga and anime.9 This chapter aims to investigate the flow of manga as a cultural product in the global market, from its country of origin, Japan, to the neighboring region and then to the rest of the world. Because of the influence of American and Western comics in manga, one may find that Japanese manga are undoubtedly deeply imbricated in U.S. cultural imaginaries, but they dynamically rework the meanings of being modern in Asian contexts at the site of production and consumption. In this sense, they are neither "Asian" in any essentialist meaning nor second-rate copies of "American originals." They are inescapably "global" and "Asian" at the same time, lucidly representing the intertwined composition of global homogenization and heterogenization, and thus they well articulate the juxtaposed sameness and difference.10 I am interested in exploring these globalization flows by focusing on manga. To begin the inquiry, I open with a brief review of the concept of globalization. [End Page 24] Globalization's Theoretical Issues Globalization is one of today's hottest buzzwords. Stuart Hall reminds us that this phenomenon is nothing new and can be traced back through the long history of Western imperialism.11; Following this Western imperialism, many people in non-Western countries had experienced different degrees of colonialization over the past few centuries. Anthony...

Fijian Males at the Crossroads of Gender and Ethnicity in a Fiji Secondary School

This article explores how two transgendered Fijian males navigate the intersections of sex, gender, and ethnicity or race in a Fiji secondary school. Their experiences illustrate, on the one hand, the negotiability of a transgendered category in Fiji. On the other hand, there is the potential for transgendered identity to open spaces for engagement with nonFijian ethnic markers in the face of essentialist discursive practices on ethnicity. The case study shows the individualized ways that two transgendered males negotiate and challenge notions of Fijian male authenticity. (Transgender, Fijians, ethnicity, Fijian schools) ********** In a seminal text, Butler (1990) problematizes contemporary Western notions of sex and gender, with sex constituting a biological construct rooted in a dimorphism of male and female versus gender as a culturally constructed concept subject to malleability and negotiation by oppositionally sexed bodies. She notes that to reckon gender as a free-floating artifice in relation to sex leaves much unexplained about sex since it retains its status as a finite, a priori category: And what is sex anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such facts for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? (Butler 1990:6) Drawing from Foucault (1978), Butler answers her own questions, arguing that the Western notion of sex is far from an objective fact of nature, tracing its genealogy to the eighteenth century medicalization of reproduction in the West, which rendered the physiologically distinctive roles of male and female in reproduction focal, and heterosexuality morally and functionally normative. Butler (1990) identifies the resultant heterosexual matrix that provides the grid through which both sex and gender are interpreted, and which consigns nonheterosexuals, third genders, and transgendered persons to the status of exotic, deviant others. She proposes that ultimately the givens of sex in the West should be recognized as the actual outcome of patriarchal regulatory mechanisms that claim the repetitive enactment of behavioral differences between males and females as natural and as sexual conventions. In short, sex is a cultural construction; sex is work. Errington (1990) more explicitly defines and empirically confronts the situatedness of Western notions of sex as a particular construct of human bodies (Errington 1990:26) that holds that differences in genitals are normatively contiguous with such elements of hidden anatomy as chromosomal and hormonal differences, as well as differences in bodily fluids, sexual preferences, practices, and specialized roles that potentially lead to reproduction. Yet, she seizes upon the opportunities that comparative analyses present for decentering Western constructs by engaging notions of sex in Southeast Asian societies, illustrating that while sex is everywhere recognized as including some distinction in male and female biology, the way these differences are reckoned, the emphasis they are given, and allowances for additional sex categories vary across societies. Societies of island Southeast Asia are among those where not only are not gendered in such fixed, oppositional ways, but where practice potentially overrides sexed in social classification. In terms of relative access to prestige and power, which are defined in spiritual rather than secular terms, Errington (1990) observes that Island Southeast Asians tend not to be biological reductionists: they usually do not claim that women, because they are anatomically women, are weak or ineffective. Rather, they are probabilists: they point out that women and men are basically the same, but because of the activities women engage in or fail to do, they tend not to become prominent and powerful (Errington 1990:40). …

Transcending Borders

This collection of essays is a spin-off of a workshop held in December1997, which was jointly organized by the venerable Koninklijk Instituutvoor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (the Royal Institute of Linguistics andAnthropology) and the more recently established International Institute ofAsian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. Both are important resource centersfor the study of Islam in Southeast Asia and are closely connected withLeiden University, which has a formidable reputation as a centuries-oldcenter of learning in Islamic and Asian studies. Publications like the presentone show that academic institutions with roots in the colonial past andwhich were once part of the now much-criticized scholarly tradition of“Orientalism” can reinvent themselves and continue to make valuable contributionsto the study of non-western cultures.Transcending Borders focuses on the phenomenon of Arab settlementin Southeast Asia. Although the role of these migrants in the Islamizationof the Malay–Indonesian archipelago has long been acknowledged, questionspertaining to their integration into Southeast Asian society and theresulting impact on their ethnic identity have received far less attention. Infact, the upsurge in research into these aspects is barely a decade old.However, the most recent developments in Muslim Southeast Asia will certainlykeep that interest alive, because some of the more militant key playersin Southeast Asian Islamic revivalism are themselves of Hadrami orsouthern Arabian descent.The book’s 10 articles approach the study of Arab migration and settlementfrom historical, sociological, anthropological, and Islamologicalperspectives. However, the editors have taken care to ensure that these differentapproaches provide intersecting images of the Arab presence in ...

The Tapestry of Language and Theory

Since the collapse of Marxism as the dominant tradition of radical critique in the 1980s, varieties of post-structuralism have emerged as the most influential form of critical analysis in Thai studies, both in Thailand and the West. However, like previous generations of Marxist-inspired analysts, contemporary post-structuralists need to address epistemological questions about the validity of using theory derived from the Western cultural and intellectual tradition in studying a South East Asian society. Issues regarding the translation, transculturation and localization of theory are just as important for twenty-first-century post-structuralist Thai studies as they were for twentieth-century Marxist Thai studies. This study is a critical review of Rosalind Morris's post-structuralist analyses of modern Thai culture. Through an assessment of the work of a prominent advocate of post-structuralist approaches to interpreting modern Thai culture, it highlights the interrelationship between the practice of translation between languages/discourses, on the one hand, and the epistemological status of Western theory in Thai studies, on the other.

Extending Lenski's Schema to Hold up Both Halves of the Sky—A Theory-Guided Way of Conceptualizing Agrarian Societies that Illuminates a Puzzle about Gender Stratification

This paper suggests that Lenski's classification of agrarian societies into simple versus advanced, based on the use of iron in the latter, obscures important variations in the gender division of labor and the level of gender stratification. In particular, his categories lump the gender egalitarian irrigated rice societies of Southeast Asia with the great majority of agrarian societies, which are strongly patriarchal. Based on my general theory of gender stratification and experience coding and analyzing gender stratification in the ethnographic databases and fieldwork in 39 countries worldwide, I propose a three-category alternative. First, agrarian societies are divided according to the technological criterion of irrigation into dry (rain-fed) and wet (irrigated rice) categories. This distinguishes two gender divisions of labor: a male farming system in dry agrarian and an “everybody works” system in labor-intensive rice cultivation, in which women are important in production. Second, irrigated rice societies are divided into patri-oriented-male advantage and those neutral to positive for women, based on the nature of the kinship system. This distinguishes the gender egalitarian Southeast Asian wet rice societies from the highly gender stratified majority of irrigated rice societies. Furthermore, these distinctions in gender equality are predicted by my gender stratification theory.

Crisis, States and the Sociology of Southeast Asia: Constructing and Deconstructing 1997

The events of 1997 in Southeast Asia have been largely interpreted as a financial crisis, as a momentary problem in an otherwise smoothly operating development model. This paper takes issue with this interpretation and argues that in fact it indicated the extent of the penetration of globalization in the region and threw into stark relief the underlying sociological transformations that have accompanied and been created by the developmentalist policies of regional states. The paper attempts to indicate what the major sociological issues generated by the crisis are, to argue for the continuing salience of class analysis in interpreting social transformations in contemporary Southeast Asia and to propose the elements of a fresh sociological model for examining post-crisis Southeast Asian societies encapsulated in a pattern of globalization that is having profound but not yet fully mapped cultural and social consequences. The paper in other words attempts a sociological interpretation of what has been mostly read as an economic problem, and indicates necessary linkages between the economic, the sociological and the cultural in the interpretation of social change in the region.

Cultural and Socioeconomic Influences on Divorce During Modernization: Southeast Asia, 1940s to 1960s

The conventional model of a rising divorce rate during the process of modernization is a staple element of the sociological theory of the family. This generalization is challenged, however, by traditional high‐divorce societies, primarily in Islamic Southeast Asia, which have experienced a decline in divorce with modernization. In this study, based on micro‐level survey data, the authors explore the social roots of marital disruption in Indonesia and Malaysia and in another Southeast Asian society, Thailand, which has not been identified as a high‐divorce society. Comparable survey data from the 1970s (from the World Fertility Survey) allow for an in‐depth analysis of traditional patterns of divorce before the rapid modernization of recent decades. Two major findings emerge from the multivariate analysis. First, there is a common pattern across all three societies of higher levels of divorce among “traditional” women—those who live in rural areas, marry at young ages, and have lower levels of education. Second, the authors find significant sociocultural (ethnic, regional, religious) differentials in divorce within each country that cannot be explained by demographic and socioeconomic composition. They present an interpretation of how moderately high levels of divorce were accommodated in traditional Southeast Asian societies.

換金作物を栽培するマヤ系先住民の行動原理に関する事例研究

Many previous studies have explicated the behavior of the people of peasant societies in Southeast Asia by adopting one of the two well known models, either the “moral economy” conceived by James C. Scott or the “political economy” by Samuel L. Popkin. The purpose of this paper is to provide an economical and anthropological discussion on the process of the introduction of coffee cultivation by the indigenous peasants of Guatemala. This paper has chosen the case of the people of San Pedro La Laguna, Sololá province, on the western highland of Guatemala. In chapter 1, as a theoretical position to analyze the case the dispute between “moral economy” and “political economy” is applied to the Guatemalan situation. Also discussed is the “closed corporate peasant community” concept by Eric Wolf, compared to the concept of “penny capitalism” conceived by Sol Tax concerning Panajachel village of Guatemala. In chapter 2, the process of coffee introduction in San Pedro is investigated, and the current situation of this village is presented. In chapter 3, five local habitants give their comments as to what extent their cultivation is based on the reason that “coffee cultivation brings profits”. In the final chapter, the opposing views are discussed and interpreted based on their comments.

Tentacles of Terror: Al Qaeda´s Southeast Asian Network

Introduction The horrors of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and the ensuing war on terrorism galvanized the global community to come to terms with the reality of international terrorism. While the focus of the war on terrorism has been on Afghanistan and Pakistan, one of the key arenas is now Southeast Asia. This has caught both states and individuals in that region by surprise. Though most states in Southeast Asia have a Muslim population, ranging from 5 per cent in the Philippines to 85 per cent in Indonesia, the fact is that the region has always been considered the Islamic periphery. Muslims in Southeast Asia have long been characterized as secular, tolerant, modernist, and development-oriented. Moreover, many people within and outside Southeast Asia had believed that the violence and terrorism, which is a daily reality in the Middle East, was anathema to Southeast Asia. The disclosure of the extent to which Al Qaeda cells were established, and linkages between militant Muslim organizations in Southeast Asia to Al Qaeda were made, has shocked Southeast Asian governments. Al Qaeda had slowly penetrated the region for more than a decade beginning in 1991, co-opting individuals and groups, establishing independent cells, and finding common cause with local militants for four main reasons. First, whereas there have long been militant Muslim groups who have been fighting for their own homeland in the southern Philippines, Aceh, and to a degree in southern Thailand and Myanmar, these groups were seen to have completely domestic agendas and little interest in linking-up with international Muslim organizations. Al Qaeda emerged in Southeast Asia at a time when state-sponsorship of terrorism, notably by Libya, was waning. Moreover, Al Qaeda was able to build on its personal relationships with veterans of the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan. The leadership of almost every militant Islamic group in Southeast Asia, from the Kumpulan Mujaheddin Malaysia, Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and Laskar Jihad, had fought with the Mujaheddin. By linking their domestic struggles with an international network, the leaders of these groups were able to pool and share resources, conduct joint training, assist each other in weapons and explosives procurement, and engage in money-laundering a nd financial transfers. By working internationally, domestic-oriented groups were better able to achieve their goals. Secondly, although the majority of the populations in Southeast Asian societies are secular and tolerant, radical Islam is growing for a variety of reasons. These include economic dispossession, the lack of political freedom, the spread of Wahhabism and Salafi Islam, the failure of secular education, and an increased number of religious students studying in Middle Eastern and South Asian madrasah (Islamic schools). Although radical Islamicists are a distinct minority in Southeast Asia, in many cases they have shaped the agenda, and secular nationalists have not always stood up to them. Thirdly, Southeast Asian states have been what might be termed countries of convenience for terrorists, with tourist-friendly policies and minimal visa requirements, generally lax financial oversights, well-established informal remittance systems for overseas workers, porous borders, often weak central government control, endemic government corruption, and a vast supply of illicit arms. Finally, Southeast Asia's multi-ethnic, tolerant, and secular societies have actually attracted Al Qaeda to the region. As states focused on other threats, they had dropped their guard in relation to the potential terrorist risk. Although the Philippines raised the spectre of international terrorists operating in the region in the mid-1990s, its cries fell on deaf ears. States saw terrorism as a problem, but not a problem they considered as a direct threat to themselves. …

The Relevance of Confucianism to National Quality Awards in Southeast Asia

The successful implementation of total quality management (TQM) in an organization requires adopting the right cultural approach. In many Southeast Asian societies, the influence of Confucianism on leadership style, social values and work attitudes has affected TQM practices. This article examines Confucius' influence on the structure and criteria emphases of Southeast Asian National Quality Awards (NQAs) that have sprung up in the past decade. The framework of the Singapore Quality Award serves as an appropriate comparator. Ten Confucian principles on leadership, organizational culture and work values were analyzed. Their applicability to the development of NQAs and to the long-term success of total quality organizations is discussed.

Globalization and Southeast Asian Urban Futures

In July 2000, a group of urban studies scholars met in a conference orga nized by the National University of Singapore to discuss Southeast Asian Urban Futures. This meeting was convened for a number of reasons. As with the rest of the world, the rate of urbanization in Southeast Asian has been growing at a phenomenal rate. Forty years ago, societies in Southeast Asia were largely rural as the United Nations (2001:133) esti mated that only one in five persons in the developing economies of its ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia Pacific) region resided in urban areas. By 1980, one in four were residents, and by 2000, it was one in three. Table 1 provides more specific country and city data for two groups of countries in Southeast Asia: the ASEAN-5 comprising Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand; and Indo-China com prising Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (see Column 1). Urbanization in Southeast Asia has been influenced by changing national economies. First, drawing on the work of Jones (1991, 1993), the share of primary industry in total output has declined, replaced by a ris ing manufacturing share that tends to have an urban bias. Second, as a result of globalization of the economic system, the presence of indigenous industry has been supplemented by the inflow of foreign direct investments in search of lower cost production sites and emerging markets. Such inflows increased in the 1980s and 1990s, initially from the U.S.A., Europe and Japan, and more recently from East Asia (Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong). Thus, although the processing of raw materials (food, beverages, tobacco) is the largest sub-sector of ASEAN manufacturing, Jones (1993:56) notes that its share has shown a clear decline in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. It is not a coincidence that these three countries are the ones receiving the largest foreign direct investments, and also enjoy the highest GNP per capita (see Table 1, Columns 2 and 3 respectively). While traditional cottage industries have been spread out over smaller cities and towns, this new pattern of economic growth is more likely to be located in larger metropolitan centres because of the need to coordinate production sched ules with subsidaries in other parts of the world. Fuchs and Pernia (1987) and Krongkaew (1996) show that the bulk of foreign direct investments into Southeast Asian countries has been siphoned off into metropolitan regions.

GLOBALIZATION AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN URBANISM

In the competitive environment under globalization, Southeast Asia has developed rapidly and its cities have been spearheading a physical and economic transformation. New forms of urbanism have characterized the emerging processes of urbanization and globalization in the region. These include mega-urban regions, growth triangles and world cities. Examples of these are highlighted. Globalization has led to societies in Southeast Asia going through rapid changes. The rise of the middle class and persistent poverty pose sharp contrasts. New communication technologies have also brought new cultural values into societies. Rural-urban dynamics are evolving as the telematics revolution has radically changed the relations between city and countryside. The question of the sustainability of recent development in Southeast Asia is raised against the recent financial crisis.

Chinese Populations in Contemporary Southeast Asian Societies: Identities, Interdependence and International Influence

Chinese Populations in Contemporary Southeast Asian Societies: Identities, Interdependence and International Influence

The Dual Narrative of “Good Governance”: Lessons for Understanding Political and Cultural Change in Malaysia and Singapore

The narrative of good governance has become particularly relevant in understanding political and cultural change in Malaysia and Singapore. This study shows that the narrative of good governance is a double-edged sword -- that is, it can be used in rather contradictory ways. In the case of Malaysia, good governance assumes the role of a reformist discourse adopted by opposition forces to pressure the ruling regime into introducing liberal democratic reforms. In the case of Singapore, good governance plays the role of a dominant discourse employed by the ruling elite as a defence against liberal democratic reforms. Not only does this seem to suggest that the relationship between democracy and good governance is a complex one, it also puts some of the recent political and cultural developments in both these cases in a new context. Introduction Prior to the Asian financial crisis, scholars were intrigued with the question of whether Southeast Asian societies that had developed the economic requisites for liberal democratic reforms would actually follow through with these political reforms. [1] With the political changes that have swept through Southeast Asia in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, it seems less justifiable now for scholars to label this region as being recalcitrant to liberal democratic reforms. Nevertheless, two cases in this region continue to stand out as puzzles of political development -- Malaysia and Singapore. In the case of the former, while there have been some signs in the past two years of a democratic awakening, it is still too premature to conclude based on these developments that these forces for political change will lead to any sustained liberal democratic reforms. In the case of the latter, the prospects of change towards a more liberal democratic system seem even less so. Malaysia As is well known by now, the Asian financial crisis precipitated a series of fundamental changes to the Malaysian political landscape. This article will focus less on the actual sequence of events and more on the implications of some of the main political developments in this period. [2] The economic excesses and abuses that had accompanied Malaysia's rapid growth in the early 1990s have been well documented by scholars. [3] It was not until the financial crisis of 1997, however, that some of the real costs to Malaysian society of the illicit nexus between political patronage and wealth creation were realized. During the period of accelerated growth in the early 1990s, the middle class was by and large willing to go along with the trade-off between civil and political freedoms and economic goods since the overall economic pie was clearly expanding even though a small minority was benefiting disproportionately. Scholars who were studying this phenomenon at the time had concluded that as long as the middle clas s was still benefiting from the economic policies of the government, they would largely be compliant with the political structure. [4] Yet, when the opposition forces, with the help of the Internet, brought into the full glare of public scrutiny some of the exploitative practices of corruption, collusion, and nepotism at the highest levels of the political and economic elite, the public opposition to the ruling coalition began to grow. [5] Indeed, when the economy showed signs of a slowdown (and even a collapse), the excesses of the government were no longer tolerated as willingly. To make matters worse, in their desperate attempts to contain the economic fallout from the financial crisis, the ruling elite had taken some bold and reckless steps, which included moves perceived by many to be aimed at rescuing some of their closest economic beneficiaries. [6] We will perhaps not know for some time to come all the reasons behind the sudden fall from grace of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's deputy, Anwar Ibrahim. However, it does seem clear that overt attempts by some in the ruling elite to shelter failing beneficiaries from the full thrust of market forces in the wake of the financial crisis largely contributed to the friction between the two leaders, with Anwar commonly believed to have been less willing to acquiesce to the government's financial bail-outs of these cronies. …