There’s a notorious stretch of road in Indonesia, by the border of North Sumatra and Aceh provinces, that passes through kilometres and kilometres of oil palm plantations. There are few people there, ...

Nick Cheesman’s recently published book, Myanmar: A Political Lexicon, examined particular Burmese words and phrases as they are applicable in the current sociopolitical context. It stressed the need ...

The Chinese philosopher Kong Fuzi (“Master Kong”, or “Confucius” to Western audiences) is reported to have said about 2,500 years ago that: If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with ...

This post is an adapted version of an article that appears in a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary Asia on “Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar” (Vol 54 No 5). Before the 2021 military ...

In the days following his inauguration on 20 October, President Prabowo Subianto moved quickly to appoint a total of 136 coordinating ministers, ministers and their deputies, agency chiefs and their ...

One of the legacies Joko Widodo leaves Indonesia is a dramatically changed relationship between government and civil society. For the first decade and a half of the post-Suharto period, pro-democracy ...

This post is an abridged version of an article that appears in a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary Asia on “Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar” (Vol 54 No 5). Not surprisingly, ...

Observers in the West have largely interpreted the devastating violence that has engulfed Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup as a “battle between democracy and authoritarianism”. This ...

The motivations behind these reforms—the renewed emphasis on language learning, a desire to see more Australian students up in the Indo-Pacific for longer duration experiences, and a rebalancing of ...

Have you recently completed, or will you soon complete, a PhD program in the social sciences or humanities, with a thesis topic related to Southeast Asia? Are you looking to bring the insights of your ...

With the passing of James C. Scott—or Jim Scott as he was known to me and to many others—Southeast Asian studies has lost a real giant, a major touchstone for the field. But his legacy will live on in ...

On 13 June 2024, a nickel smelting furnace at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi caught fire and exploded, sending two workers to hospital. A year earlier, on 24 ...