New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Conventional accounts of the Cold War focus on competition between the United States and Soviet Union as key to shaping world events. In focusing on the agency of Indonesia’s Suharto regime during its first decades, Matthias Fibiger casts new light on how the Cold War was experienced elsewhere. Based on extensive analysis of state archival records, Fibiger shows how Suharto navigated risks as he took power, constructed a counterrevolutionary New Order regime with foreign aid and investment, and projected its ideologies in other countries of Southeast Asia. By situating views from Jakarta in the broader context of international relations between superpowers and the non-aligned movement, Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World (Oxford University Press, 2023) deepens understanding of political and diplomatic history in Southeast Asia and the World.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia is of vital importance to Australia. As a nation, Australia’s prosperity, security and economic future are intimately connected to the region. According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Southeast Asia is expected to be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2040, with its middle class already numbering close to 200 million people. Recognising the crucial significance of Southeast Asia to Australia, the Federal Government released Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040 in September 2023, which provides a roadmap to deepening our economic engagement and increasing two-way trade and investment with the region. Natali’s guest on SSEAC Stories is Nicholas Moore who Lead the development of this national strategy, and who was appointed as Australia’s Special Envoy for Southeast Asia in November 2022.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Visual Anthropology of Indian Films: Religious Communities and Cultural Traditions in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films.Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal of Indian religious communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. The themes covered include unique Indian feminism and male chauvinism, environment and climate issues, international locations and diaspora tourism, religious harmony and conflict, the India-Pakistan relationship, asceticism, and renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Unlike many recent studies of Indian films, these chapters do not distinguish between popular and serious cinema. Many chapters focus on Hindi films, but others bring insights from films made in other parts of India and its neighbouring countries.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527.Today, the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit is an important source of national pride in today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia: Even the Indonesian coat of arms, with its garuda and the motto “Unity in Diversity”, is rooted in the Majapahit era.But the tale of Majapahit–as told in Herald van der Linde’s book, Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Monsoon Books: 2024)–is a story of mythical kings, conquest, betrayal, and intrigue, as Indonesian royals jostled for position…and at times fought off external enemies like the Mongols.Herald van der Linde has travelled, lived and worked in Indonesia and Hong Kong since the 90s. He is also the author of Jakarta: History of a Misunderstood City (Marshall Cavendish International: 2022)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Majapahit. 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

How exactly were Thailand’s new slate of 200 Senators selected? What is it like to be an independent member of the Senate, when the chamber is now dominated by members closely associated with one of the government parties? Now that the Thai senate plays no role in selecting the prime minister, is it anything more than a talking-shop? What is the atmosphere like inside Thailand’s contentious upper house?In this episode, senator Pornchai Witayalerdpan discusses the extraordinary process by which he and the 199 other new senators were selected in July 2024. He also explains how a small group of independent-minded senators are trying to promote democratic agendas, despite being consistently outvoted by the conservative majority.Here is a link to the BBC Thai article mentioned by Pornchai in the interview, which provides some critical analysis on how the majority ‘blue group’ of senators dominated key votes in their first parliamentary session: https://www.bbc.com/thai/articles/cy4nkvx99kroIndependent Thai senator Pornchai Wiyayalerdpan is a former simultaneous interpreter, who did graduate work in international relations and political science at Waseda University in Japan.Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant is Li Xinruo.Website: https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/podcasts/Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Cambodian history most people have heard of the great Khmer empire of Angkor, and the radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. But who has heard of the famous story of the sweet cucumber farmer who became king of Cambodia in the fourteenth century? In this original book, Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970 (U Hawaii Press, 2024), Theara Thun traces the development of Cambodian historiography, from the royal chronicle tradition of premodern times to modern histories based on Western historical methods introduced by French colonial scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theara discusses the intellectuals – Khmer, French, and maybe surprisingly even Thai - who helped shaped modern Cambodian history writing. He shows that indigenous Cambodian historiographical traditions survive in the present in surprising forms. This is an important contribution to an emerging scholarship on Southeast Asian intellectual history.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why are dubious power-sharing deals on the rise across Southeast Asia? What effects do they have on the region’s prospects for democracy? And are they going to be tolerated? Join Petra Alderman as she talks to Duncan McCargo and Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa about their recent Journal of Democracy article ‘Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances.’ They discuss the factors that underpin the rise of these toxic alliances among Southeast Asian elites, their characteristics, and their effects on democracy by focusing on three countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs at the Nanyang Technological University. He works mainly on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. His dozen books include the best-selling The Thaksinization of Thailand (co-authored, NIAS Press 2005), and the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008); and more recently Fighting for Virtue: Politics and Justice in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (co-authored, NIAS Press 2020).Rendy Pahrun Wadipalapa is a researcher at National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) in Jakarta, Indonesia. He earned his PhD from the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK (2022). His research focuses on Southeast Asian and Indonesian politics.Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_BhamSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How do we confront difference and change in a rapidly shifting environment? Many indigenous peoples are facing this question in their daily lives. Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest (U Nebraska Press, 2024) explores the lives of Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds.Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. Anthropology’s traditional dictum to “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange” creates a binary between the familiar and the Other, often encapsulating Indigenous lives as the archetypal Other to the “modern” worldview. Yet living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. Sensing Others reveals that when looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.Alice Rudge is a Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. She works at the intersection of environmental anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and science and technology studies. She focuses on themes of alterity, ethics, Indigenous justice, plantation agriculture, and sustainable scientific practice to explore conflicting questions of what it means to live a good life in conditions of environmental breakdown.Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Today’s episode focuses on the policy challenges and politics of public healthcare in Southeast Asia, a topic which has become increasingly visible and important in Southeast Asia and in the study of the region over the past decades in the context of expanding public healthcare programs in many countries across the region and the recent experience of the global pandemic.To discuss these issues, we are joined by Professor Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, who has been conducting research on public healthcare in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past several years. Sarah Shair-Rosenfield is a Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York here in the UK. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina and then taught at Arizona State University and the University of Essex before taking up a professorial chair at the University of York. She is the author of Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies: Lessons from the Indonesian Case (University of Michigan Press, 2019) and co-author of Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016), and she has published articles in leading political science and other specialist journals. She is a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Political Studies and a co-founder of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS) network.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this discussion, Petra Alderman, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, explores the complexities of Thai politics and its relationship with global powers like the US and China. She reveals that liberal Thais often lean toward pro-US sentiments, yet conservative views don’t automatically favor China. The conversation highlights Thailand's role as a diplomatic buffer and presents survey results showcasing surprising preferences for the US. Alderman emphasizes a nuanced understanding of domestic political attitudes, urging against simplistic analyses.