Rethinking Southeast Asia
About the Book Series
Southeast Asia is a dynamic and rapidly-changing region which continues to defy predictions and challenge formulaic understandings. This series will publish cutting-edge work on the region, providing a venue for books that are readable, topical, interdisciplinary and critical of conventional views. It aims to communicate the energy, contestations and ambiguities that make Southeast Asia both consistently fascinating and sometimes potentially disturbing.
Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand
1st Edition
By Petra Alderman
December 18, 2024
Branding Authoritarian Nations offers a novel approach to the study of nation branding as a strategy for political legitimation in authoritarian regimes using the example of military-ruled Thailand. The book argues that nation branding is a political act that is integral to state legitimation ...
The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder
1st Edition
By Jess Melvin
August 14, 2018
For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the ...
Transnational Islamic Actors and Indonesia’s Foreign Policy: Transcending the State
1st Edition
By Delphine Alles
June 28, 2018
The past fifteen years have seen Indonesia move away from authoritarianism to a thriving yet imperfect democracy. During this time, the archipelago attracted international attention as the most-populated Muslim-majority country in the world. As religious issues and actors have been increasingly ...
Politics and Governance in Indonesia: The Police in the Era of Reformasi
1st Edition
By Muradi
October 26, 2017
How does an authoritarian state reform its police force following a transition to democracy? In 1998, Indonesia, the third largest country in the world, faced just such a challenge. Policing had long been managed under the jurisdiction of the military, as an instrument of the Suharto regime – and ...
Reporting Thailand's Southern Conflict: Mediating Political Dissent
1st Edition
By Phansasiri Kularb
May 25, 2017
Since 2004, Thailand’s southern border provinces have been plagued by violence. There are a wide array of explanations for this violence, from the revival of Malay nationalist movements and the influence from the global trend of radical Islam, to the power play among the regional underground crime ...
Civil Society in the Philippines: Theoretical, Methodological and Policy Debates
1st Edition
By Gerard Clarke
May 18, 2017
Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research, this book provides a path-breaking account of civil society in the Philippines. It challenges the widespread belief in political science and development studies literature that civil society in developing countries is an institutional arena in which...
Changing Political Economy of Vietnam: The Case of Ho Chi Minh City
1st Edition
By Martin Gainsborough
July 31, 2015
This book explores the way in which the state has become commercialised under reform as party and government officials have gone into business and considers the impact that this has had on politics within Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The book charts the way in which power has been decentralised to ...
Politics and the Press in Thailand: Media Machinations
1st Edition
By Duncan McCargo
July 31, 2015
This is the first book in the English language to examine the tangled web of relationships linking newspaper owners, editors and reporters, with leading politicians and power-holders. Duncan McCargo has been granted unique access to the editorial meetings of Thailand's leading newspapers, and ...
The Politics of NGOs in Indonesia: Developing Democracy and Managing a Movement
1st Edition
By Bob S. Hadiwinata
July 31, 2015
This book deals with two major issues: how Indonesian NGOs survived under Suharto's authoritarian rule; and how NGOs contributed to the promotion of democracy in the post-Suharto era. If NGOs are to change from 'development' to 'movement' in democratic post-Suharto Indonesia, they must adjust not ...
Decentralization and Adat Revivalism in Indonesia: The Politics of Becoming Indigenous
1st Edition
By Adam D. Tyson
April 10, 2012
This book examines the dynamic process of political transition and indigenous (adat) revival in newly decentralized Indonesia. The political transition in May 1998 set the stage for the passing of Indonesia’s framework decentralization laws. These laws include both political and technocratic ...
Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason, and Lèse-Majesté
1st Edition
By David Streckfuss
April 04, 2011
Since 2005, Thailand has been in crisis, with unprecedented political instability and the worst political violence seen in the country in decades. In the aftermath of a military coup in 2006, Thailand’s press freedom ranking plunged, while arrests for lèse-majesté have skyrocketed to levels unknown...
Living at the Edge of Thai Society: The Karen in the Highlands of Northern Thailand
1st Edition
By Claudio Delang
September 10, 2010
The Karen are one of the major ethnic minority groups in the Himalayan highlands, living predominantly in the border area between Thailand and Burma. As the largest ethnic minority in Thailand, they have often been in conflict with the Thai majority. This book is the first major ethnographic and ...