Books in the Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia series

Explores why ASEAN has endured and why members, many of whom remain comparatively weak and poor, continue to invest in the regional project. Argues that ASEAN has and continues to serve state interest through the creation of a shared ritual and symbolic framework.

This Element offers a way to understand the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. The empirical results presented reveal vast differences within and across authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, but also a discernible shift towards sophisticated authoritarianism over time.

Explores the modes by which rulers have exercised power in Timor-Leste. Contrasts coercion under colonial rule and consent expressed through the 1999 referendum on independence. Since the restoration of independence, politics in Timor-Leste are understood in terms of economic constraints, and latterly a ruling strategy based on inducements.

Argues that after twenty years of democratization, Indonesia has performed admirably. Focuses on Indonesia's political regime, political economy, and identity-based mobilizations since democratization in 1998.

Reviews the historical origins, contemporary patterns, and emerging changes in civil-military relations in Southeast Asia. It analyzes military roles in state- and nation-building, political domination, revolutions and regime transitions, and military entrepreneurship.

Explores nation building and international relations in the small multicultural nation state and cosmopolitan global city of contemporary Singapore. Examines the exercise of smart power, or the ability to strategically combine soft and hard power resources.

Focuses on the transformation of the Vietnamese state as it transitioned away from a centrally planned socialist regime. It examines the drivers of socialist-regime change, the nature of the emergent state, and the basis of regime legitimacy in Vietnam.

Argues that following the 1993 United Nations intervention to promote democracy, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) perpetuated a patronage state. They maintained electoral authoritarianism, but saw increased political awareness among the public. This Element explores Cambodia's return to authoritarianism, made possible in part by China's pivot to Cambodia.

Explores issues of global relevance around journalism's relationship with political power using Southeast Asian states. Argues that development of free, independent, and plural media has been complicated by commercialisation, the Internet, and identity-based politics. These open up political space and pluralise discourse, but do not necessarily produce change.

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century.

This Element seeks to make sense of Southeast Asia's numerous armed conflicts, analysing typology, ethnicity, trends and conflict management. Just as ethnicity shapes conflicts, ethnic leaders and traditions can also promote peace. Cultural mechanisms are especially important for managing conflicts, the lone type not declining in Southeast Asia.

Conceiving of populism as the charismatic mobilization of a mass movement in pursuit of political power, this Element theorizes that populists thrive where ties between voters and either bureaucratic or clientelistic parties do not exist or have decayed. This is because populists' ability to mobilize electoral support directly is made much more likely by voters not being deeply embedded in existing party networks. This model is used to explain the prevalence of populism across the major states in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. It extracts lessons from these Southeast Asian cases for the study of populism.

Sexuality and gender diversity rights in Southeast Asia are deeply controversial and vigorously contested. Debate and protest have been accompanied by both legislative reform and discriminatory violence. These contradictory dynamics are occurring at a time when the international human rights regime has explicitly incorporated a focus on the prevention of violence and discrimination in relation to sexuality and gender diversity. This Element focusses on the need for such rights. This Element explores the burgeoning of civil society organisations engaged in an emancipatory politics inclusive of sexuality and gender diversity, utilising rights politics as a platform for visibility, contestation and mobilisation. This Element focusses on the articulation of political struggle through a shared set of rights claims, which in turn relates to shared experiences of violence and discrimination, and a visceral demand and hope for change.