Episodes

  • Prabowo Subianto and the Decline of Indonesian Democracy

    Prabowo Subianto and the Decline of Indonesian Democracy
    Oct 2 2024
    Today’s episode focuses on Indonesia, the presidential election held in February 2024, and the impending inauguration of the winner of that election, former Army general and current defence minister Prabowo Subianto, in a few weeks’ time. Prabowo’s victory in February, events over the past several months, and the imminent transition to a Prabowo presidency have heightened concerns about the state of democracy in Indonesia. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Ed Aspinall, one of the world’s leading specialists on Indonesian politics and someone who has been writing about worrying trends in Indonesian politics for many years. Edward Aspinall is Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Corall Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU). He is the author of Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2005), Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2009), (with Ward Berenschot) Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019), and (with Allen Hicken, Paul Hutchcroft, and Meredith Weiss) Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Networks in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University press, 2022). He is the co-editor of a book series with National University of Singapore Press and co-editor of the Southeast Asian Politics and Society Elements series published by Cambridge University Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    42 mins
  • Charles Keith, "Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France" (U California Press, 2024)

    Charles Keith, "Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France" (U California Press, 2024)
    Oct 1 2024
    When we think of the history of French colonialism in Indochina, we tend to think of the French in Indochina. Yet during the colonial period about 200,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao travelled to France to study, work, or plan revolution. While we may be familiar with the most famous of these Indochinese sojourners in France, Nguyen Ai Quoc, aka Ho Chi Minh, the stories of these other Indochinese sojourners have never been told – until now. In this highly original, exhaustively researched book, Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France (University of California Press, 2024), Charles Keith reconstructs the lives of these Indochinese sojourners, and shows how living in France changed them, and how they, in turn, changed Indochina. The book contributes to a booming area of historiography that emphasizes the interconnections between people in different parts of the world, including peoples in colonized states and the colonial metropole. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    49 mins
  • James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)

    James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)
    Sep 30 2024
    From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China’s relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority. Rulers and high officials at the Chinese court valued commerce in the region, where rare commodities could be obtained and vassal kingdoms showed less belligerence than did northern ones. Trade routes along this Southwest Silk Road traverse the homelands of numerous non-Han peoples. In The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation (University of Washington Press, 2024), James A. Anderson investigates the principalities, chiefdoms, and market nodes that emerged and flourished in the network of routes that passed through what James A. Anderson calls the "Dong world," a collection of Tai-speaking polities in upland valleys. The process of state formation that arose through trade coincided with the differentiation of peoples who were later labeled as distinct ethnicities. Exploration of this formative period at the nexus of the Chinese empire, the Dali kingdom, and the Vietnamese kingdom reveals a nuanced picture of the Chinese province of Yunnan and its southern neighbors preceding Mongol efforts to impose a new administrative order in the region. These communities shared a regional identity and a lively history of interaction well before northern occupiers classified its inhabitants as "national minorities" of China. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    31 mins
  • Mark Tamthai: Remembering Chaiwat Satha-Anand

    Mark Tamthai: Remembering Chaiwat Satha-Anand
    Sep 27 2024
    Why was the late Ajarn Chaiwat Satha-Anand so passionate about bringing peace to Thailand’s deep south? How did he try to speak nonviolence to Thai power elites? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, Ajarn Mark Tamthai of Payap University talks about his memories of working with Chaiwat, especially their efforts to end the ongoing violent conflict in the Malay-Muslim-majority region that includes Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. Chaiwat Satha-Anand (1955-2024) was a professor of political science at Thammasat University and one of Thailand’s most eminent social scientists. A political philosopher among whose core interests were Islam and non-violence, his numerous books included The Life of this World: negotiated Muslim lives in Thai society (2005) and Imagined Land: the state and southern violence in Thailand (2009). The article by Chaiwat mentioned in the episode is ‘The Silence of the Bullet Monument’, Critical Asian Studies 38, 1, 2006, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672710600556411 The English version of the 2006 National Reconciliation Commission Report (for which Chaiwat was the lead author) may be found here https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/projects/southern-thai-insurgency-2/southern-thai-insurgency/ Mark Tamthai is a former head of the Department of Philosophy at Chulalongkorn University and former director of the Institute of Religion, Culture and Peace at Payap University. 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
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    33 mins
  • Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky, "Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

    Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky, "Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
    Sep 24 2024
    In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global infrastructure production today is focused squarely on Asia. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (U Hawaii Press, 2022) investigates the deeper implications of that pivot to the East. Written by leading international infrastructure experts, it demonstrates how new roads, airports, pipelines, and cables are changing Asian economies, societies, and geopolitics—from the Bosporus to Beijing, and from Indonesia to the Arctic. Ten tightly interwoven case studies powerfully illustrate infrastructure’s leading role in three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower. Combining social science methods with mapping techniques from the design professions, Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia establishes a dialogue between academic research on infrastructure and the professional insights of those responsible for infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation. By applying that mixed method to transport, energy, telecommunication, and resource extraction projects across Asia, the book synthesizes research on infrastructure from six academic fields, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, professionals, and the general public. Max Hirsh is managing director of the Airport City Academy and a research fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a PhD in urban planning from Harvard and is the author of Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia. Max's research investigates the relationship between air travel and urban form. Till Mostowlansky is a Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “Quiet Aid: Service and Salvation in the Balkans-to-Bengal-Complex”. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. 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
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Soraj Hongladarom et al., "Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia" (Springer, 2024)

    Soraj Hongladarom et al., "Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia" (Springer, 2024)
    Sep 21 2024
    The open-access edited volume Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia (Springer, 2023) collects philosophical approaches to Southeast Asian traditions of philosophy and religion. The editors, Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, and Frank J. Hoffman, have produced a volume that treats traditional topics in philosophy of religion, such as the problem of evil and afterlife, as well as religious identity, beliefs, practices, and diversity. Contributions vary in methodology; some focus on empirical data and modern culture, while others engage with philosophical texts. Essays focus on a range of religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and indigenous practices. Despite this variety, the volume's editors present the collection as having a kind of unity, both in the specificity of how Southeast Asia "appropriates" religions and the philosophical nature of the essays included. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    53 mins
  • Beng Huat Chua, "Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation: The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing" (NUS Press, 2024)

    Beng Huat Chua, "Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation: The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing" (NUS Press, 2024)
    Sep 19 2024
    The achievement of Singapore’s national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the People's Action Party began to deliver on its promises in dramatic fashion. By the 1980s, 85 percent of the population had been rehoused in modern flats, and today, decades later, the provision of public housing shapes Singapore's environment. The standard accounts of this remarkable transformation leave many questions unanswered, from the historical to urgent matters of current policy: Why, of all the pressing demands of Singapore's newly enfranchised citizens, was housing such a priority back in the 1960s? How did the provision of social welfare via public housing shape Singapore's industrialisation and development over the last 50 years? Looking ahead, can the HDB continue to be a source of affordable housing for young families, while long-standing appreciation in flat prices provides for the retirement of their parents? How can this be managed as 99-year leases on flats run down? When young people from wealthy families purchase subsidised flats and then resell them for a profit as soon as they can, what does that do for the already pressing issues of inequality in Singapore? Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation: The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing (NUS Press, 2024) is a culmination of Dr. Chua Beng Huat's study of Singapore's public housing system, its dynamics, and the ways it functions in Singapore's politics. Does every great success hold within it the seeds of failure? The book will be of interest to citizens, and scholars of the political economy of Asian development, of social welfare provision, and of Singapore. 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
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Meg Rithmire, "Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Meg Rithmire, "Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Sep 14 2024
    Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between political and business elites fall apart over time? And why do some partnerships produce stable growth and others produce crisis or stagnation? In Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford UP, 2023) (Oxford, 2023), Meg Rithmire offers a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. All three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia's state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation. To understand these developments, Rithmire, a professor at Harvard Business School, presents two conceptual models of state-business relations that explain their genesis and why variation occurs over time. She shows that mutual alignment occurs when an authoritarian regime organizes its institutions, or even its informal practices, to induce capitalists to invest in growth and development. Mutual endangerment, on the other hand, obtains when economic and political elites are entangled in corrupt dealings and invested in perpetuating each other's dominance. The loss of power on one side would bring about the demise of the other. Rithmire contends that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are trust between business and political elites, determined during regime formation, and the dynamics of financial liberalization. Empirically rich and sweeping in scope, Precarious Ties offers lessons for all nations in which the state and the private sector are deeply entwined. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    57 mins