New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Sinae Hyun, "Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

01 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Historians have tended to view the Cold War as a global ideological confrontation between an expansionist communist Soviet Union and a capitalist Unit...

SSEAC Timor Leste Field School: Disability and Work

23 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the fourth of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from th...

Konstantinos Retsikas, "A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

17 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstanti...

Arupjyoti Saikia, "The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000" (India Allen Lane, 2023)

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow Britis...

Briana L. Wong, "Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023)

15 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverbe...

Eve Warburton, "Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State" (Cornell UP, 2023)

15 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in...

SSEAC Philippines Field School: Disaster Risk and Resilience

14 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the third of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the...

SSEAC Indonesia Field School: Social Justice

08 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the second of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from th...

Gerard McCarthy, "Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality, and Resistance in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2023)

01 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public app...

Chris Stowers, "Bugis Nights" (Earnshaw Books, 2023)

19 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1987, Chris Stowers ditches his dull job in the UK and embarks on a trip throughout the Asia-Pacific, following countless other adventurers traveli...

Hyun Bang Shin et al., "COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World" (Ubiquity Press, 2021)

15 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (Ubiquity Press, 2021) brings together an ensemble of social scientists who offer crit...

Working Children: The Luxury and Complexity of Childhood in Lombok, Indonesia

13 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in un...

Alexandra Kaloyanides, "Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom" (Columbia UP, 2023)

05 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries...

Lynette J. Chua, "The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

01 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers an empirically-grounded approach to understanding the mobilisation of rights in...

Kathrin Eitel, "Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh" (Routledge, 2022)

21 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Kathrin Eitel's book Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh (Routledge, 2022) examines the recyclin...

Piers Kelly, "The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines" (Oxford UP, 2021)

19 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the southern Philippines, the Bohol community speaks a language they say one man, Pinay, created long ago, leaving it for a modern Filipino named M...

Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

16 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to ...

Development and Migration in Contemporary Asia

15 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Is migration good or bad for development? How does migration affect those who leave and those who stay behind? How are rural and urban livelihoods int...

Gregory Cahill, "The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen" (Life Drawn, 2023)

14 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Camb...

A Better Way to Buy Books

12 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...

Inequality as a Leading Cross-Cutting Development Issue: Indonesia and Beyond

11 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Inequality has always been key to understanding Indonesia’s development. But this is a multidimensional issue, and one that has manifested in vastly...

Allan Punzalan Isaac, "Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor" (Fordham UP, 2021)

03 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2...

Digital Repression in Thailand

01 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How serious an issue is digital repression in Thailand? Who is behind it? And what effects does it have on Thai people? Listen to Janjira Sombatpoonsi...

Amy H. Liu and Jacob I. Ricks, "Ethnicity and Politics in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

01 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What explains the varying treatment of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia? Why have some states in the region been far more successful than others in...

Kalyani Ramnath, "Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962" (Stanford UP, 2023)

27 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading g...

Civil Society Elites: Field Studies from Cambodia and Indonesia

18 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What does civil society look like in Indonesia and Cambodia, and who are civil society elites? In this podcast interview, editors of the recently publ...

Edyta Roszko, "Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam" (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press 2021

16 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with s...

What Can We Learn from Indonesian Democracy? A Conversation with Dan Slater

16 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What can we learn from Indonesia about democratic resilience and backsliding? Why should we think of Indonesian democracy as a useful example? And wha...

Van Nguyen-Marshall, "Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954-1975" (Southeast Asia Program, 2023)

13 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The history of South Vietnam (1954-1975) is in the midst of a major revision. Historians such as Van Nguyen-Marshall are rejecting old clichés of cor...

Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia

11 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What does a map of Southeast Asia as a pegasus have to do with translation and Southeast Asia? How can we think of translation as anything other than ...

Why Consumers Choose Private Over Public Health Services in Vietnam

10 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Demographic changes, rise in disposable income, and steady economic growth has led to a growing demand for healthcare services in Vietnam. But the pub...

Traditional Medicine in Laos (with Elizabeth Elliott and Ounkham Souksavanh)

08 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with two guests, Ounkham Souksavanh and Elizabeth Elliott, to talk about community engagement and community health in La...

Cause Lawyering and Human Rights in Indonesia

04 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why have issues of human rights become so contentious in Indonesia, 25 years after the much-heralded post-Suharto democratic transition? What kind of ...

Marnie Feneley, "Reconstructing God: Style, Hydraulics, Political Power and Angkor's West Mebon Visnu" (National U of Singapore Press, 2023)

01 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he uncovered remains of a bronze sculpture. This...

Helen Ting M. H. and Donald L. Horowitz, "Electoral Reform and Democracy in Malaysia" (NIAS, 2022)

21 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why is Malaysia in need of electoral reform? How can we explain recent changes including the anti-party hopping law and the successful UNDI18 campaign...

Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)

15 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Ph...

Callie Wilkinson, "Empire of Influence: The East India Company and the Making of Indirect Rule" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

14 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Indirect rule is widely considered as a defining feature of the nineteenth and twentieth century British Empire but its divisive earlier history remai...

Ethnicity and Nation-Building in Myanmar

14 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Did the bloody 1 February 2021 military coup in Myanmar produce an unexpected ‘solidarity dividend’ by unifying opponents of the new regime from a...

Is Laos a Criminal State?: Kearrin Sims on the Current Status of Laos

13 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

There is a growing list of human rights abuses and acts of violence against those who have sought to promote political transparency and freedom in Lao...

Anne Giblin Gedacht, "Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan" (Brill, 2022)

11 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Anne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in i...

Radhika Seshan and Ryuto Shimada, "Connecting the Indian Ocean World: Across Sea and Land" (Routledge, 2023)

02 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Indian Ocean world has a rich history of socio-economic and cultural exchanges across time and space. Connecting the Indian Ocean World Across S...

Allan E. S. Lumba, "Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines" (Duke UP, 2022)

01 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and c...

Nayanjot Lahiri, "Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand" (SUNY Press, 2023)

29 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels...

Alexandra Kaloyanides, "Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom" (Columbia UP, 2023)

21 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in the Buddhist kingdom of Burma to preach the gospel. Although Burmese Buddhists largely re...

Lin Poyer, "War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

17 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative ...

Can Thailand Move Forward?

16 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why was the May 2023 Thai election such a historic election? What does the surprising Move Forward victory tell us about the state of Thai politics? A...

Michael Magcamit, "Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts" (Oxford UP, 2022)

15 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford UP, 2022) lays bare the causal mechanisms that lead state and non-state actors to identify...

Agricultural Shocks and Social Conflict in Southeast Asia

12 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In lower–income economies, a small change in people’s wellbeing may trigger a suite of behavioral responses, some of which may be unlawful as well...

Creating Sustainable Value in Social Enterprises in Philippines

09 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

re there ways to tackle pressing social, environmental and economic problems at once? In this episode, Professor Assunta Cuyegkeng from Ateneo de Mani...

Patrick Jory, "A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

02 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

If you’ve visited Thailand even for a short time you’ve probably been given, or have come across, some basic instructions on dos and don’ts — ...

Amitav Acharya, "Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed" (Penguin Random House, 2023)

27 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What went wrong with Burma’s democratic experiment? How are we to understand the country’s turbulent politics in the wake of the 2021 coup? In thi...

Aarie Glas, "Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America" (Oxford UP, 2022)

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despit...

Tamas Wells, "Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Tamas Wells' book Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers (Amsterdam UP, 2021) analyses w...

Matthew Jagel, "Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from ...

Locating Human Dignity in Cambodia: Prospects for Human Rights Education

13 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The concept of human dignity is a foundational one within human rights discourses, and is commonly used in the context of human rights and sustainable...

Global Asia

12 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Cheryl Narumi Naruse talks about the transformation of Singapore over the past decades into a site of postcolonial promise, with economic prosperity a...

Amitav Acharya, "Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed" (Penguin Random House, 2023)

04 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In mid-April, Myanmar’s military bombed a village in the country’s northwest, killing over a hundred people in what’s been considered the deadli...

Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk, "A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942" (SEA Program Publications, 2022)

30 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

I was very excited to chat with Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk as we share some obsessions, namely rats and plague in colonial Southeast Asia. His A Histo...

Kaamil Ahmed, "I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers" (Hurst, 2023)

27 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Rohingya population, from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, are a community almost living entirely in exile, whether in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or w...

Nicole Constable, "Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations" (U California Press, 2022)

23 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passp...

George Black, "The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam" (Knopf, 2023)

23 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny ...

The Promise of Multispecies Justice

21 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How might we imagine justice in times of ecological harm? How are human struggles for social justice entangled with the lives of other beings includin...

Mai Nardone, "Welcome Me to the Kingdom: Stories" (Random House, 2023)

20 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mai Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom (Random House, 2023) opens with two migrants from Thailand’s northeast who travel to Bangkok to make a n...

Sylvia Ang, "Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

19 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The question of who is Chinese and how Chineseness as an identity is constituted has been a recurring question, particularly in the context of the ext...

Mina Roces, "Gender in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

15 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Gender in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how gender norms are constructed and contested in a region the book describes as ‘a fertile...

Lachlan McNamee, "Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop" (Princeton UP, 2023)

12 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United State...

Visibility as Threat: The Targeting of Micro-Sized Groups in Indonesia

07 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why do very small groups, like the Ahmadiyah sect in Indonesia, become targets of mobilization and repression? How do political entrepreneurs play a r...

Oliver Slow, "Return of the Junta: Why Myanmar’s Military Must Go Back to the Barracks" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

06 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Myanmar coup on February 1, 2021 shocked the world, and ended an opening that had fostered hopes for democratization and economic development. The...

Yoshinori Nishizaki, "Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

01 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When scholars analyse Thai politics, they tend to give importance to institutions like the monarchy, the military, the parliament, and political parti...

Eli Elinoff, "Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)

01 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation?  Citizen ...

Trent Walker, "Until Nirvana's Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia" (Shambhala, 2022)

22 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A unique Buddhist tradition, accessible in English for the first time—translations of forty-five Cambodian Dharma songs, with contextualizing essays...

Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation Among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon

18 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Where does the concept of “community” come from? How does it shape the lives of Hindus and Muslims in metropolitan Yangon? And how do these people...

Sango Mahanty, "Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands" (Cornell UP, 2022)

15 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Like other global frontiers, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands are a hotspot for migration, land claims, and markets for newly introduced commodities. ...

Film Chat: Vietnamese Refugee Camps in Penghu

14 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews the Taiwanese movie director Asio Liu on his most recent movie project on the Vietnamese refugee c...

Arve Hansen, "Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life" (Springer, 2022)

10 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Spr...

The Politics of Ethnicity in the Malay World

09 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Malaysia is a classic example of a plural society, with a diverse population consisting of the indigenous peoples, collectively called bumiputera, an...

Eugénie Mérieau, "Constitutional Bricolage: Thailand's Sacred Monarchy vs. The Rule of Law" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

06 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why has Thailand had 20 constitutions since 1932? What accounts for the remarkable veneration Thais often feel towards these short-lived documents? Ho...

Chien-Wen Kung, "Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s" (Cornell UP, 2022)

03 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Ch...

Seiji Shirane, "Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945" (Cornell UP, 2022)

24 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrat...

Helena Hof, "The EU Migrant Generation in Asia: Middle-Class Aspirations in Asian Global Cities" (Policy Press, 2022)

22 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing on an extensive study with young individuals who migrated to Singapore and Tokyo in the 2010s, The EU Migrant Generation in Asia: Middle-Clas...

Michael Schiltz, "Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913" (Oxford UP, 2020)

20 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international...

Kevin Blackburn, "The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory" (National U of Singapore Press, 2022)

17 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role ...

Challenging the Malayan Nationhood: Imaginations and Activism by the Peranakan Chinese

17 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Are there viable alternatives to the ethnocentric model of nation-state in post-colonial societies? How did the Peranakan, a non-Malay community, imag...

Elisabeth Eittreim, "Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and Us Imperial Education 1879-1918" (UP of Kansas, 2019)

16 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them Americ...

Risa J. Toha, "Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

15 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the conditions that inflame ethnic rio...

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock, "The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia" (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022)

11 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 202...

A New Hope? Japanese Retirement Migration to Malaysia

09 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In post-growth Japan, some people are looking to Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, as a source of new hope. A notable change in the recent pattern ...

Mark Eveleigh, "Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Island-Hopping Through Indonesia" (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2022)

09 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

“Kopi Dulu,” means “coffee first” in Indonesian–a common phrase from Indonesians who are happy to have coffee anywhere, anytime and with any...

Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman, "Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

05 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to ha...

Brooke Schedneck, "Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand: Encounters with Buddhist Monks" (U Washington Press, 2021)

01 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand has become the destination for a growing segment of the international tourism market: religious tourism. I...

Matthew Galway, "The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949-1979" (Cornell UP, 2022)

30 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin, and how do they change once they do? The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism...

Myanmar Jewellers in China

27 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

China re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the My...

Shaping Civilisations: The Sea in Asian History

26 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The ocean is more connective device than barrier, bringing together diverse topics, time-periods and geographies. It has linked and connected the vari...

Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar

20 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How do farmers struggle for land and democracy in Myanmar’s hybrid political system? How might a feminist approach to this question look like and en...

Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

15 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of I...

Malaysia’s GE15: Reflections on a Snap Election

13 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Malaysia held its fifteenth general election on 19 November 2022 after it was called at short notice before the end of the last government’s term. W...

Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)

05 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical ...

Magnus Fiskesjö, "Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2021)

01 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade t...

Making Sense of the 2022 General Elections in Malaysia

23 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On 9 November 2022, Malaysia held its 15th General Elections. These elections took place within an unprecedentedly open and fragmented political land...

Annuska Derks et al. "Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands" (NIAS Press, 2022)

23 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade im...