Revolution Reform And Regionalism In Southeast Asia

Based on research carried out over the three decades, this book compares the post-war political economies of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in the context of their individual and collective impact on contemporary efforts at regional integration. The author highlights the different paths to reform taken by the three neighbours and the effect this has had on regional plans for economic development through the ASEAN and the Greater Mekong Subregion. Through its comparative analysis of the reforms implemented by Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam over the last thirty years, the book draws attention to parallel themes of continuity and change. The author discusses how the three states have demonstrated related characteristics whilst at the same time making different modifications in order to exploit the unique strengths of their individual cultures. Contributing to the contemporary debate over the role of democratic reform in promoting economic development, the book provides a detailed account of the political economies of three states at the heart of Southeast Asia.

Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state. Shedding new light on Southeast Asian religious ethnographic research, the book is a significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.

In Southeast Asia, China’s growing economic and political strength has been accompanied by adept diplomacy and active promotion of regional cooperation, institutions and integration. Southeast Asian states and China engage in ‘strategic regionalism’: they seek regional membership for regime legitimation and collective bargaining; and regional integration to enhance economic development, regarded as essential for ensuring national and regime security. Sino-Southeast Asian regionalism is exemplified by the development plans for the Mekong River basin, where ambitious projects for building regional infrastructural linkages and trade contribute to mediating the security concerns of the Mekong countries. However, Mekong regionalism also generates new insecurities. Developing the resources of the Mekong has led to serious challenges in terms of governance, distribution and economic externalities. Resource-allocation and exploitation conflicts occur most obviously within the realm of water projects, especially hydropower development programmes. While such disputes are not likely to erupt into armed conflict because of the power asymmetry between China and the lower Mekong states, they exacerbate Southeast Asian concerns about China’s rise and undermine Chinese rhetoric about peaceful development. But the negative security consequences of developing the Mekong are also due to the shared economic imperative, and the Southeast Asian states’ own difficulties with collective action due to existing intramural conflicts.

This book examines the emergence of different forms of capitalism in Central-Eastern states in Europe and Mekong states within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). All of them (but Thailand) have historically disappeared from the regional maps for long periods of time due to colonial or imperial rule. Most of them were previously members of a soviet-type economy, and they all joined ASEAN or the European Union in the 1990s or in the 2000s. These states are characterized by a strong urge toward feelings of national sovereignty due to their experiences with colonialism and imperialism. But, due to the regional economic pressures and the globalization dynamic, these states cannot articulate protectionist policies. They are forced to open their economies in order to attract Foreign Direct Investments. This results in less regulated and more political forms of capitalism than in some more developed capitalist countries. This book analyzes forms of capitalism as the arising from a combination of three conditions: the legacy of the foreign occupations, the national construction process of the sovereign state, and lastly, the dynamics of regional integration. These states' claims to national sovereignty and the manner in which they developed suggests a causative link between the forms of political domination that have presided over these transformations and the forms of capitalism that have resulted.

A study of Rizal, his works, and his influence in Southeast Asia; how his contemporaries saw him; the role Rizal played in inspiring Indonesian nationalists; how the Indonesians and Malaysians appropriated him in the movement for independence, and how he figures in the region's intellectual, political and literary discourse.

For students of international political economy, it is hard to ignore the growth, dynamism, and global impact of East Asia. Japan and China are two of the largest economies in the world, in a region now accounting for almost 30 percent more trade than the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined. What explains this increasing wealth and burgeoning power? In his new text, Ming Wan illustrates the diverse ways that the domestic politics and policies of countries within East Asia affect the region’s production, trade, exchange rates, and development, and are in turn affected by global market forces and international institutions. Unlike most other texts on East Asian political economy that are essentially comparisons of major individual countries, Wan effectively integrates key thematic issues and country-specific examples to present a comprehensive overview of East Asia’s role in the world economy. The text first takes a comparative look at the region’s economic systems and institutions to explore their evolution—a rich and complex story that looks beyond the response to Western pressures. Later chapters are organized around close examination of production, trade, finance, and monetary relations. While featuring extended discussion of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Wan is inclusive in his analysis, with coverage including Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. The text is richly illustrated with more than fifty tables, figures, and maps that present the latest economic and political data to help students better visualize trends and demographics. Each chapter ends with extensive lists of suggested readings.

Contributing to the growing discourse on political parties in Asia, this book looks at parties in Southeast Asia’s most competitive electoral democracies of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. It highlights the diverse dynamics of party politics in the region and provides new insights into organizational structures, mobilizational strategies and the multiple dimensions of linkages between political parties and their voters. The book focuses on the prominence of clientelistic practices and strategies, both within parties as well as between parties and their voters. It demonstrates that clientelism is extremely versatile and can take many forms, ranging from traditional, personalized relationships between a patron and a client to the modern reincarnations of broker-driven network clientelism that is often based on more anonymous relations. The book also discusses how contemporary political parties often combine clientelistic practices with more formal patterns of organization and communication, thus raising questions about neat analytical dichotomies. Straddling the intersection between political science and area studies, this book is of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Southeast Asian politics, and political scientists and Asian Studies specialists with a broader research interest in comparative democratization studies.

Social Activism in Southeast Asia examines the ways in which social movements operate in a region characterized by a history of authoritarian regimes and relatively weak civil society. It situates cutting-edge accounts of activism around civil and political rights, globalization, peace, the environment, migrant and factory labour, the rights of middle- and working-class women, and sexual identity in an overarching framework of analysis that forefronts the importance of human rights and the state as a focus for social activism. Drawing on contemporary evidence from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Timor-Leste, the book explores the ways in which social movement actors engage with their international allies, the community and the state in order to promote social change. As well as providing detailed and nuanced analyses of particular movements in specific areas of Southeast Asia, the book addresses difficult questions about the politics, strategies and authenticity of social movements.