New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

December 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the Second World War. In fact, this interview was recorded on December 12th: the 80th anniversary of Japanese troops landing on the Philippine island of Luzon.That invasion marked the four-year war over the Philippines: the surrender of American forces on May 8th, 1942; the invasion of Leyte by MacArthur on October 20th, 1944; and the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945.But what happens in between these major dates? How did Filipinos live their lives under the occupation—and how did some choose to fight back? What did resistance, whether carried out by Americans who stayed behind, or Filipinos seizing their country’s future for themselves, look like?War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942–1944 (Naval Institute Press: 2021) by James Kelly Morningstar is one of the first attempts to repair our understanding of the war in the Philippines, showing how American, Filipino and Japanese actions influenced each other.James Kelly Morningstar is a retired U.S. Army armor officer and decorated combat veteran with degrees from West Point and Kansas State University, a master's degree from Georgetown University, and a PhD from the University of Maryland. He currently teaches military history at Georgetown. He is also the author of Patton’s Way: A Radical Theory of War (Naval Institute Press: 2017).Today, we talk about the Philippines: the Japanese invasion and occupation, the nature of resistance, and American grand strategy. We’ll also discuss what makes the resistance movement important to our understanding of today’s geopolitics.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of War and Resistance in the Philippines: 1942-1944. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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

The United States is the world's largest donor of foreign aid, and in this profound analysis, Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. demonstrates the links between human rights protections and the provision of US strategic aid in recipient countries. In Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Professor Regilme puts forward a "theory of interest convergence" which draws out the way that shared strategic interests between donor and recipient countries have the power to strengthen the legitimacy of domestic recipient governments, but not necessarily in ways that protect physical integrity rights of citizens. Presenting two case studies from The Phillipines and Thailand during the post-cold-war period and also during the global war on terror periods, the book provides a richly researched, intricate understanding of the way that authoritarian governments have continued to benefit from the provision of US aid, while not necessarily improving their human rights records.Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. is a Tenured University Lecturer of International Relations at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Find him on twitter @santinoregilme, check out his latest book @AidImperiumJane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHKSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In April 2021, three months into Myanmar’s most recent and increasingly more violent coup d’état, local residents managed to obstruct the junta by refusing to cooperate with military appointed officials. The junta had attempted to replace all local level administrators with those loyal to the military. But in one town in Shan State, the junta-appointed administrators were socially ostracized by the community to the point of resigning. With no one daring to take their place, every ward administrator position in town went unfilled. Across the country, Myanmar residents supported each other, and striking civil servants, by setting up donations of basic foodstuffs such as rice, oil, and onions.In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jayde Lin Roberts to discuss how these locally initiated direct actions are part and parcel of the ordinary practices of everyday life in Myanmar. In providing a space for informal, intimate, and relational economies, nalehmu not only fosters community-building, says Dr Roberts, but it also has the power to disrupt conventional power structures.About Jayde Roberts:Dr Jayde Lin Roberts is a senior lecturer in the School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and an interdisciplinary scholar of Urban Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research on Myanmar focuses on urban informality, heritage-making, and the influence of transnational networks. Her monograph, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese was published by the University of Washington Press in 2016. She was a Fulbright US Scholar in Yangon, Myanmar between 2016-2018.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

Investigating the communicative practices of indigenous Santali speakers in eastern India, this book examines the overlooked role of script in regional movements for autonomy to provide one of the first comprehensive theoretical and ethnographical accounts of 'graphic politics'.Based on extensive fieldwork in the villages of southwestern West Bengal, Nishaant Choksi explores the deployment of Santali scripts, including a newly created script called Ol Chiki, in Bengali-dominated local markets, the education system and in the circulation of print media. He shows how manipulating the linguistic landscape and challenging the idea of a vernacular enables Santali speakers to delineate their own political domains and scale their language on local, regional and national levels. In doing so, they contest Bengali-speaking upper castes' hegemony over public spaces and institutions, as well as the administrative demarcations of the contemporary Indian nation-state.Combining semiotic theory with ethnographically grounded investigation, Graphic Politics in Eastern India: Script and the Quest for Autonomy (Bloomsbury, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding writing and literacy practices among ethnic minorities and points to future directions for interdisciplinary research on indigenous autonomy in South Asia.Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, exit from coal and ending deforestation. She also reveals some insights from the annual Southeast Asia Climate Survey reports, such as perceptions in the region of the US as a climate leader and the (dis)connects between climate action and COVID-19 responses.Sharon Seah is Senior Fellow and Coordinator at the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. She co-edited 50 Years of ASEAN and Singapore (World Scientific: 2017) and Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans (NUS Press: 2019). Prior to academia, Ms Seah worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore and the National Environment Agency for fifteen years. She may be reached at climatechange@iseas.edu.sg.Quynh Le Vo is a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN.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, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastAbout NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Several months ago, Saskia Wieringa joined her co-authors Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman on the show to talk about their edited volume The International People's Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide.  This time, Wieringa is on the show to talk about another co-edited volume.  Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia (Routledge, 2018) is a kind of companion volume to the first study. Wieringa and Katjusungkana focus here on the way in which propaganda set the stage for, encouraged participation in and offered explanations for the genocide. This campaign portrayed communists as enemies of the Indonesian nation. But more than that, the propaganda leveraged already existing political and gender stereotypes, presenting communists as atheists, hypersexualized and amoral. This propaganda was and remains widely accepted in Indonesia, enabling mass violence in the 1960s and political persecution in the decades since.But the book expands at time from its core focus on propaganda, shedding new light on the events of 30 September and, in particular, on the impacts of the violence on contemporary Indonesian society. Scholars and casual readers will find much of interest in the book. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project.This is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors' study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in "securityscapes."The book puts into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, Paasche and Sidaway develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security-mainstream as well as academic-that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict "from above."Please note: the second half of this podcast includes discussion of combat, death and loss.Till F. Paasche is Associate Professor of political geography at Soran University.James D. Sidaway is Professor of political geography at the National University of Singapore.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

When people think of the “Vietnam War” they usually think of the hugely devastating and divisive conflict between North Vietnam and a United States-backed South Vietnam that finally ended in 1975. We know much less about the earlier conflict, often referred to as the “First Indochina War”, from 1946 to 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule and brought about the division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In his new book, The First Vietnam War: Sovereignty and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Shawn McHale examines this earlier conflict, focussing on the complex and diverse society of south Vietnam. The book begins with a provocative question: why did the communist-led resistance against French colonial rule in Vietnam fail in the south? This is an exhaustively researched book which does a lot to change our understanding of how south Vietnam became independent, and helps explain what came after the end of the “first Vietnam War”.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

What does a cup of coffee tell us about Thailand’s intricate power relations? Where does the country’s monarchy come into this? And why does it matter? Prominent political scientist and NIAS director Duncan McCargo joins Petra Desatova to revisit his famous ‘network monarchy’ concept and explain why Thailand should not be seen as a ‘Deep State.’Duncan McCargo is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Duncan is well-known for publishing a dozen books and over 100 articles and chapters on Asian politics. His latest books are Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and (with Anyarat Chattharakul) Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (NIAS Press, 2020). His 2005 Pacific Review article on Thailand’s ‘network monarchy,’ which is the subject of this episode alongside his 2021 Pacific Affairs article that revisits this concept, has been extremely influential.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, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastAbout NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia is the most tectonically and geologically active region on Earth. These processes have enriched the mountains and basins with world-famous mineral and energy resources, fresh water, and highly productive soils. However, the same geological processes are responsible for incredible destruction – from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These natural hazards, coupled with the effects of human-induced climate change, are driving significant change. To talk us through these changes, Dr Sabin Zahirovic joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, exposing how climate change is amplifying existing vulnerabilities in Southeast Asia. He explains how understanding past and current geological process can help us reduce risks from natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, but also address the huge challenges faced by growing populations and increased vulnerabilities resulting from climate change.About Sabin Zahirovic:Dr Sabin Zahirovic is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sabin's research focuses on global plate tectonics and mantle evolution, and particularly for the Tethyan and Asian regions. He completed his PhD titled “Post-Pangea global plate kinematics and geodynamic implications for Southeast Asia” at the University of Sydney in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Papua New Guinea research stream of the ARC ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub at the University of Sydney. He now leads the Tectonics and Geodynamics stream of a collaborative industry project with BHP. In 2020, Sabin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to explore the rise and demise of massive reefs and carbonate platforms on Australian continental margins. Sabin is a past recipient of the GSA Voisey Medal, the Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award, and the AIPS NSW Tall Poppy award.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