New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

In this episode, host SEAC Director John Sidel talks with Dr Qingfei Yin, SEAC Associate and Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. Dr Qingfei Yin talks about her new book State Building in Cold War Asia Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (due out with Cambridge University Press in August 2024), explains how she became interested in her research on China and Vietnam relations and the borderlands between the two countries, and discusses other projects she has begun working on beyond her forthcoming book.Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building in marginal societies. Her book State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2024. Subsequent projects focus on how capitalist Southeast Asian countries shaped China during the latter’s early reform era in the 1980s and the historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Dr Yin is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degree and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute. She also serves as the Book Review Editor of Journal of Military History and on the Editorial Board of Cold War History.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippine islands. Drawing on the rich archives of Spain’s Asian empire, Dr. Kristie Patricia Flannery reveals that Spanish colonial officials and Catholic missionaries forged alliances with Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers in the Southeast Asian archipelago to wage war against waves of pirates, including massive Chinese pirate fleets, Muslim pirates from the Sulu Zone, and even the British fleet that attacked at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Anti-piracy alliances made Spanish colonial rule resilient to both external shocks and internal revolts that shook the colony to its core.This revisionist study complicates the assumption that empire was imposed on Filipinos with brute force alone. Rather, anti-piracy also shaped the politics of belonging in the colonial Philippines. Real and imagined pirate threats especially influenced the fate and fortunes of Chinese migrants in the islands. They triggered genocidal massacres of the Chinese at some junctures, and at others facilitated Chinese integration into the Catholic nation as loyal vassals.Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain’s Asian empire, which, unlike Spanish colonial rule in the Americas, survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it offers important new insight into piracy’s impact on the trajectory of globalisation and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries.In this podcast the presenter of the Malaysia update, Prof. Dr. Mohd Azizuddin Mohd Sani, discusses the political situation in Malaysia.Mohd Azizuddin Mohd Sani is a Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of International Studies at Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). He is currently Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic and Internationalisation at UUM. Previously he was a Visiting Fellow for the Yusof Ishak Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore, and Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Development and Administration (NIDA), Bangkok, Thailand. He has published widely on democratisation, political expression and Malaysian politics, and has conducted public advocacy through international and local Malaysian media. He is a columnist for Berita Harian (Malay newspaper) and Sin Chew Jit Poh (Mandarin newspaper).Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2023), Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts. Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential.Viren Murthy is a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous book include Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness and The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future. His current project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures.Nick Zeller is a senior program associate for The Carter Center's China Focus initiative and managing editor of the English-language U.S.-China Perception Monitor. Prior to joining China Focus, Nick was a Visiting Assistant Professor of World History in Kennesaw State University’s Department of History and Philosophy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian History in the University of South Carolina’s Department of History, and an NSEP Boren Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries.In this podcast the presenter of the Singapore update, Dr Kenneth Paul Tan, discusses the political situation in Singapore.Kenneth Paul Tan is a tenured Professor of Politics, Film and Cultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He teaches courses at the Academy of Film and Department of Government and International Studies, and conducts interdisciplinary research at the School of Communication, Global Communication and Power Research Cluster, and Smart Society Lab. His most recent books include Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars: Ideologies, Narratives, and Lived Experiences (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Movies to Save Our World: Imagining Poverty, Inequality and Environmental Destruction in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2022) and Singapore’s First Year of COVID-19: Public Health, Immigration, the Neoliberal State, and Authoritarian Populism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) He was the founding chair of the Asian Film Archive’s Board of Directors and the chair of the Board of Directors of theatre company, The Necessary Stage.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Does Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”?Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history from way back in prehistory, through its time as Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the introduction of Islam and Theravada Buddhism, and ending in the present day.Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (NUS Press: 2006) co-author of Attitudes and Awareness Towards ASEAN: Findings of a Ten-Nation Survey (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies: 2008) and Do Young People Know ASEAN? Update of a Ten-nation Survey (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute: 2016), and co-editor of Southeast Asian Anthropologies: National Traditions and Transnational Practices (NUS Press: 2019) and Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam University Press: 2019).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Story of Southeast Asia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City (NUS Press, 2024), historian Tim Barnard and his colleagues offer an edited volume of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into the development of Singapore as a modern, urban nation-state, highlighting some of the challenges of planning and development. The book asks the reader to see Singapore's myriad creatures not as mere objects of human action, but as active participants in the making of Singapore’s urban future and will be of interest to scholars of environmental history and lovers of Singapore's nature. Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries.In this podcast the presenter of the Vietnam update, Dr Kesone Kanhalikham, discusses the political situation in Laos.Dr Kesone Kanhalikham is the Deputy Head of Division of the National University of Laos Council, Office of Post- graduate Studies, National University of Laos. She is also a lecturer in the International Development Studies Master program. Her primary areas of interest are development studies in urbanisation in Laos, urban-geography, livelihood adaptation, resilience and urban-environment, and the regionalisation of development in the Mekong sub-region. She has researched on urbanisation, foreign direct investment and the Laos-China Railway, and has promoted the intersection between social science and development. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in civil engineering from the National University of Laos, and a doctorate in social science from Chiang Mai University.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia.Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land.Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past.As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped.Our guest today is Erin Lin, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University.Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Politics in Action is an annual forum in which invited experts provided an analysis of the current political situation in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, and discussed the broader implications of events in these countries for the region. After the event, each of the six speakers sat for a podcast to chat with Dr Natali Pearson and delve further into the political situation of their respective countries.In this podcast the presenter of the Vietnam update, Mr Layton Pike, who spoke on behalf of the Australia Vietnam Policy Institute at Politics in Action, discusses the political situation in Vietnam.Layton Pike has been Executive Director, International at RMIT University since December 2022, overseeing the university’s global strategy and partnerships in the Asia Pacific region. Previously he was the Chief Global Adviser and Director Global Strategy at RMIT where he played a key role in enhancing the institution’s international engagement. Mr Pike co-founded the Australia Vietnam Policy Institute in 2022, a pioneering public policy hub fostering collaboration and impact in the Australia-Vietnam relationship. His expertise spans policy, development cooperation and legal affairs, supported by his legal qualifications and memberships in advisory boards. He also contributes to the University of Melbourne and the Australia Vietnam Young Leadership Dialogue.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies