New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

This year sees the publication of the fourth edition of the book, A History of Thailand (Cambridge UP, 2022), by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Remarkably, the Thai language translation of the book, ประวัติศาสตร์ไทยร่วมสมัย, is now in its 13th edition. This makes A History of Thailand arguably the most successful general book on Thai history of the modern period for both Thai and international readers. In this substantially revised and updated edition, Baker and Pasuk make sense of Thailand’s tumultuous modern politics, and its society and economy, by placing it within a longer-term historical narrative. The theme of the book is the formation of the modern nation-state, and how different social forces have attempted to gain influence over it.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

With the upcoming G20 summit this November, all eyes should be on Indonesia – the fourth largest country in the world and current holder of G20 presidency. How has Indonesia reacted so far to the war in Ukraine? Why are so many Indonesians sympathetic to Russia, despite Indonesia’s historical tendency to favour the underdog in international disputes? What does all this have to do with the price of instant noodles in Jakarta? And why exactly have some people suggested that Indonesian president Joko Widodo might be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?In this episode, Saskia Lilli Lehtsalu, an intern at University of Tartu Asia Center, takes a look at Indonesian perspectives on the war in Ukraine together with Radityo Dharmaputra. Radiyo is a junior research fellow in Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia and a lector in international relations at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia.Radityo has written a number of commentaries about Indonesian perspectives on the Ukraine war, which can be accessed through the links below:Why do so many Indonesians back Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?Why many Indonesian experts are pro-Russia and ignoring Ukraine’s perspectiveHow will Indonesia deal with Russia and Ukraine at the G20?Jokowi’s visits to Russia and Ukraine are more about domestic gains than the global interestThe Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Duy Lap Nguyen's book The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam (Manchester UP, 2019) proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that has been largely excluded from historical accounts of the conflict, that of the South Vietnamese. Challenging the conventional view of the conflict as a struggle on the part of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and its puppets, the study presents a wide-ranging investigation of South Vietnamese culture, from political philosophy and psychological warfare to popular culture and film. Beginning with a genealogy of the concept of a Vietnamese "culture," as it emerged as a product of modern print media in the context of European imperialism, the book concludes with a reflection on the rise of urban mass culture during the period of the American intervention. In addition, the study provides an extended analysis of one of the most remarkable, but least understood aspects of this particular history of imperialism and culture: the attempt by the early South Vietnamese state to overcome the Communist Revolution by carrying its own "Personalist revolution" in the countryside. Contrary to the conventional view of Vietnamese Personalism as a religious and authoritarian ideology, the study contends that the latter was in fact an anticolonial form of communitarian socialism, derived from the Marxist theology developed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier. Reexamining the war from the South Vietnamese perspective, The unimagined community pursues the provocative thesis that the conflict, in this early stage, was not an anti-communist crusade, but a struggle between two competing versions of anticolonial communism.Duy Lap Nguyen is Assistant Professor at the University of Houston in their School of World Cultures and Literatures and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine. His research interests include Critical theory, visual Studies, Vietnamese studies, world cinema and literatureThomas Kingston is an incoming Berkeley Fellow in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His PhD research looks at the intellectual history and political economy of Southeast Asia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2018) by Ethan Mark draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex non-Western Asian societies – one a colonizer and the other colonized. The book places this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis.Japan's occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a 'Greater Asia.' The book is not only the first transnational study of Japan's wartime occupation of Java, but the first to focus on the Second World War experience in transnational terms 'on the ground' anywhere in Asia.Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically, and narratively, Mark's monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history.Ethan Mark is a Senior University Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He specializes in modern Japanese history, with a particular expertise in Japanese imperialism and the social and cultural history of the 1920s-1940s. He is also a scholar of modern Indonesia.Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On 9 May 2018, an ideologically diverse opposition alliance called Pakatan Harapan (PH) defeated the long-ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition which had dominated politics in Malaysia since the 1980s. This was the first regime change in Malaysia’s history. This outstanding development was shortly followed by a series of defections culminating in the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government in February 2020, after just 22 months in power. A new government was sworn in in March 2020, led by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, but only lasted until August 2021, when another new government led by Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yakoob was formed.As Malaysia gears up for its 15th general elections to be held in the second half of 2022, Professor Elvin Ong joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss the tumultuous state of Malaysian politics. Drawing on his book Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies (University of Michigan Press, 2022), Professor Ong reflects on the numerous challenges—structural, perceptual, and strategic—that can often undermine the opposition, and offers insights into what may happen at the upcoming ballot in Malaysia.About Elvin Ong:Elvin Ong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is also Chair Elect of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei (MSB) Studies Group. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asia Research (CSEAR) in the Institute of Asian Research (IAR) at the University of British Columbia. His research has been published in various political science disciplinary journals such as Party Politics and the American Journal of Political Science, as well as various regional journals such as Contemporary Southeast Asia and the Journal of East Asian Studies. His book Opposing Power is published by the University of Michigan Press, under the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies book series. His PhD is from Emory University, and his MPhil is from the University of Oxford.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns (Cornell UP, 2022), Elisabeth Kramer tells the story of how three political candidates in Indonesia made decisions to resist, engage in, or otherwise incorporate money politics into their electioneering strategies over the course of their campaigns.As they campaign, candidates encounter pressure from the institutional rules that guide elections, political parties, and voters, and must also negotiate complex social relationships to remain competitive. For anticorruption candidates, this context presents additional challenges for building and maintaining their identities. Some of these candidates establish their campaign parameters early and are able to stay their course. For others, the campaign trail results in an avalanche of compromises, each one eating away at their sense of what constitutes "moral" and "acceptable" behavior. The Candidate's Dilemma delves into the lived experiences of candidates to offer a nuanced study of how the political and personal intersect when it comes to money politics, anticorruptionism, and electoral campaigning in Indonesia.Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports?In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of Asian studies journals discuss the challenges of publishing high-quality articles in the field, in a lively and wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo.Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki. One of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science, until recently Julie was also the editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity.Hyung-Gu Lynn is AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the University of British Columbiaand the longstanding editor of Pacific Affairs.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a "united action" coalition. In the event, Winston Churchill's Conservative government refused to back the plan. Fearing that US-led intervention could trigger a wider war in which the United Kingdom would be the first target for Soviet nuclear attack, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was determined to act as Indochina peacemaker - even at the cost of damage to the Anglo-American "special relationship".In Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2019), Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones revisit a Cold War episode in which British diplomacy played a vital role in settling a crucial question of international war and peace. Eden's diplomatic triumph at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina is often overshadowed by the 1956 Suez Crisis which led to his political downfall. This book, however, recalls an earlier Eden: a skilled and experienced international diplomatist at the height of his powers who may well have prevented a localised Cold War crisis escalating into a general Third World War.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The last few years have brought to the fore the brilliant work of scientists as they worked to find a vaccine for Covid-19. But have you ever stopped to think about the role of biological materials in this and other science- and health-related research?In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Associate Professor Sonja van Wichelen to take a close look at the complex world of global health governance, with a particular focus on biotechnology and bioscience governance in Indonesia. They discuss the crucial role of biological materials exchange for scientific research, what rules govern their use, and the history of inequality that has underpinned scientific use of biological materials. Taking Indonesia’s recent efforts to gain leverage in the uneven space of the global bioeconomy, they explore how bioscience governance mechanisms can perpetuate, or sometimes help address, global power inequalities in the way biological material is used.About Sonja van Wichelen:Sonja van Wichelen is Associate Professor with the School for Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. She researches the social implications of biotechnology and law and has focused on reproductive technologies in previous projects. More recently she is examining bioscience governance in Southeast Asia. Focusing on Indonesia, she is particularly interested in the relationship between regulatory frameworks and global inequality. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Religion, Gender, and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (Routledge, 2010).For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is the relationship between the military and the monarchy in Thailand? How has that relationship changed since King Vajiralongkorn (Rama X) assumed the throne in 2016? Why have recent military coups in Thailand been staged partly in order to defend the throne? And how far can earlier interpretations of Thai politics be adapted to explain the growing influence of the monarchy in recent years?Supalak Ganjanakhundee discusses his new fascinating book A Soldier King: Monarchy and Military in the Thailand of Rama X (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen. Supalak is a former editor of The Nation newspaper, and a visiting fellow at the Pridi Banomyong Institute, Thammasat University, Thailand.“The book is a significant contribution to understanding the important yet shifting patterns of relationship between the monarchy and military in Thailand. It is widely known that the monarchy-military union has played crucial roles in politics throughout modern Thai history. This book: A Soldier King: Monarchy and Military in the Thailand of Rama X offers a comprehensive account and sound analysis about the newly formed monarchy-military network, demonstrating clearly how the new king tightens his grip since late 2016 as well as his different style from his late father King Bhumibol.”-- Charnvit Kasetsiri, Thammasat University, BangkokEnjoyed this episode? You might also enjoy our podcast with Puangthong Pawakapan, on her book Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs https://newbooksnetwork.com/infiltrating-societyDuncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist, and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, at the University of Copenhagen.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies