Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-05T13:31:19.522Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Southeast Asia and Everyday Political Economy

from Part I - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2016

By
Juanita Elias  and
Lena Rethel
Edited by
Juanita Elias  and
Lena Rethel
Juanita Elias
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Lena Rethel
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Juanita Elias
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Lena Rethel
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Southeast Asia is an increasingly interdependent, globalized and urbanized region of the world. The eleven countries that are generally understood as comprising modern-day Southeast Asia are now ever more closely linked together via flows of trade, investment and migration, in addition to traditional state-led processes of regional integration – most notably the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – as well as ever closer, and overlapping, bilateral economic and security ties. In the nearly two decades since Thailand floated the baht, an event commonly held to mark the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8, the region has become more closely integrated than ever before. The launch of the ASEAN Economic Community marks – at least rhetorically – the high point of a period of state-led economic development, market reform and regional integration. Indeed today, we see a region that while not unified is certainly deeply interconnected. In the shadow of Asia's two giants, India and China, the Southeast Asian region has been somewhat sidelined within debates about and discussions of the looming ‘Asian Century’.

Much analytical effort has been put into understanding the respective influences of state and market forces in driving the region's economic transformation. Nonetheless, Southeast Asia provides an important site for considering how processes of economic transformation are refashioning – and refashioned by – the lives and daily routines of ordinary people: their decisions to migrate across borders; their experiences of growing affluence as well as of inequality, poverty and associated forms of violence and destitution; their activities as activists, citizens and workers; and the ways in which economic and social relations, responsibilities and activities are being transformed. Southeast Asia is, and will remain, a heterogeneous region of the world. And yet, this very diversity of culture, politics, religion, society and economics – intersecting with divisions of race, class, gender and even age – provides important insights into how economic transformation takes shape. If we are entering an Asian Century, then we need to remain attentive to how this transformation is taking shape in the lives of Asia's people and their engagement in changing economic practices, with Southeast Asia providing an important terrain for initiating this focus.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia , pp. 3 - 24
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acharya, A. (1998) ‘Culture, Security, Multilateralism: The “ASEAN Way” and Regional Order’, Contemporary Security Policy 19(1): 55–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aguilar, F. V. (1999) ‘The Triumph of Instrumental Citizenship? Migrations, Identities and the Nation-State in Southeast Asia’, Asian Studies Review 23(3): 307–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aitken, R. (2007) Performing Capital: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amoore, L. (2002) Globalization Contested: An International Political Economy of Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Bello, W., Cunningham, S. and Li, K. P. (1998) A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand. London: Zed.Google Scholar
Berger, M. T. (2009) ‘The End of Empire and the Cold War’, in Beeson, Mark (ed.) Contemporary Southeast Asia, Second Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 29–45Google Scholar
Best, J. and Paterson, M. (eds.) (2009) Cultural Political Economy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brenner, N., Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2010) ‘Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways’, Global Networks 10(2): 182–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brickell, K. (2011) ‘The “Stubborn Stain” on Development: Gendered Meanings of Housework (Non-)Participation in Cambodia’, Journal of Development 47(9): 1353–1370.Google Scholar
Briones, L. (2009) Empowering Migrant Women: Why Agency and Rights Are Not Enough. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Brown, A. (2004) Labour, Politics and the State in Industrializing Thailand. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bunnell, T. G. (2004) Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super Corridor: A Critical Geography of Intelligent Landscapes. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caraway, T. L. (2007) Assembling Women: The Feminization of Global Manufacturing. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Carroll, T. (2010) Delusions of Development: The World Bank and the Post-Washington Consensus in Southeast Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Case, W. (2005) ‘Malaysia: New Reforms, Old Continuities, Tense Ambiguities’, Journal of Development Studies 41(2): 284–309.Google Scholar
Case, W. (2009) ‘After the Crisis: Capital and Regime Resilience in the ASEAN Three’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 39(4): 649–672.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chin, C. B. N. (1998) In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Chong, T. (2011) ‘Filling the Moral Void: The Christian Right in Singapore’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 41(4): 566–583.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chua, B. H. (2003) Life Is Not Complete without Shopping: Consumption Culture in Singapore. Singapore: Singapore University Press.Google Scholar
Clammer, J. (2003) ‘Globalisation, Class, Consumption and Civil Society in South-East Asian Cities’, Urban Studies 40(2): 403–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collier, S. J. and Ong, A. (2005) ‘Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems’, in Ong, Aihwa and Collier, Stephen J. (eds.) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 3–21.Google Scholar
de Certeau, Michel. (1986) ‘History Science and Fiction’in de Certeau's Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Massumi, Brian. University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus 129(1): 1–29.Google Scholar
Elias, J. (2004) Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Corporation and Gendered Employment in a Globalizing World. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Elias, J. (2015) ‘Civil Society and the Gender Politics of Economic Competitiveness in Malaysia’, Globalizations 12(3): 347–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enloe, C. (2013) Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered, Berkley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G. (1990) Lao Peasants under Socialism. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Fischer, J. (2011) The Halal Frontier. Muslim Consumers in a Globalized Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Gerard, K. (2014) ASEAN's Engagement of Civil Society: Regulating Dissent. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goh, R. B. H. (2009) ‘Christian Identities in Singapore: Religion, Race and Culture between State Controls and Transnational Flows’, Journal of Cultural Geography 26(1): 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunawardana, S. J. and Elias, J. (2013) ‘Conclusion: The Significance of the Household to Asia's Transformation and to Studies of the Global Political Economy’, in Elias, Juanita and Gunawardana, Samanthi J. (eds.) The Global Political Economy of the Household in Asia. London: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 227–231.Google Scholar
Hadiz, V. (1997) Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hadiz, V. and Robison, R. (2005) ‘Neo-liberal Reforms and Illiberal Consolidations: The Indonesian Paradox’, Journal of Development Studies 41(2): 220–241.Google Scholar
Hall, D., Hirsch, P. and Li, T. (2011) Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press.Google Scholar
Hart, G. (1991) ‘Engendering Everyday Resistance: Gender, Patronage and Production Politics in Rural Malaysia’ Journal of Peasant Studies 19(1): 93–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hedman, E.-L. (2001) ‘Contesting State and Civil Society: Southeast Asian Trajectories’, Modern Asian Studies 35(4): 921–951.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hedman, E.-L. (2006) In the Name of Civil Society: From Free Election Movements to People Power in the Philippines. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Hewison, K. (2000) ‘Thailand's Capitalism before and after the Economic Crisis’, in Robison, Richard, Beeson, Mark, Jayasuria, Kanishka and Kim, Hyuk-Rae (eds.) Politics and Markets in the Wake of the Asian Crisis. London: Routledge, pp. 194–213.Google Scholar
Hewison, K. (2005) ‘Neo-liberalism and Domestic Capital: The Political Outcomes of the Economic Crisis in Thailand’, Journal of Development Studies 41(2): 310–330.Google Scholar
Hewison, K. (2006) ‘Thai Workers in Hong Kong’, in Hewison, Kevin and Young, Ken (eds.) Transnational Migration and Work in Asia. London: Routledge, pp. 90–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hewison, K. and Kalleberg, A. L. (2013) ‘Precarious Work and Flexibilization in South and Southeast Asia’, American Behavioral Scientist 57(4): 395–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hewison, K. and Kalleberg, A. L. (2008) ‘Review of Thailand Human Development Report, Sufficiency Economy and Human Development UNDP’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 38(1): 212–215.Google Scholar
Hewison, K. and Robison, R. (eds.) (2006) East Asia and the Trials of Neo-Liberalism. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hilley, J. (2001) Malaysia: Mahathirism, Hegemony and the New Opposition. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. M. (2007) ‘Eastern Agents and Globalisation: Oriental Globalisation in the Rise of Western Capitalism’, in Hobson, John M. and Seabrooke, Leonard (eds) Everyday Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–159.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. M. and Seabrooke, L. (eds.) (2007) Everyday Politics of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hopgood, S. and Vinjamuri, L. (2012) ‘Faith in Markets’, in Barnett, Michael and Stein, Janice Gross (eds.) Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 37–63.Google Scholar
Huang, S. and Yeoh, B. S. A. (1996) ‘Ties that Bind: State Policy and Migrant Female Domestic Helpers in Singapore’, Geoforum 27(4): 479–493.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hughes, C. (2011) ‘Soldiers, Monks, Borders: Violence and Contestation in the Greater Mekong Sub-region’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 41(2): 181–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, C. and Hutchison, J. (2012) ‘Development Effectiveness and the Politics of Commitment’, Third World Quarterly 33(1): 17–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchinson, J. (2012) ‘Labour Politics in Southeast Asia: The Philippines in Context’, in Robison, Richard (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 40–52.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, J. and Brown, A. (2002) Organizaing Labour in Globalizing Asia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jayasuria, K. (2005) ‘Beyond Institutional Fetishism: From the Developmental to the Regulatory State’, New Political Economy 10(3): 381–387.Google Scholar
Jayasuriya, K. and Hewison, K. (2004) ‘The Antipolitics of Good Governance’, Critical Asian Studies 36(4): 571–590.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayasuriya, K. and Rodan, G. (2007) ‘Beyond Hybrid Regimes: More Participation, Less Contestation in Southeast Asia’, Democractization 14(5): 773–794.Google Scholar
Johnson, Chalmers. (1982) MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, C. (2010) ‘Materializing Piety: Gendered Anxieties about Faithful Consumption in Contemporary Urban Indonesia’, American Ethnologist 37(4): 617–637.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerkvliet, B. (1990) Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations in a Central Luzon Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kerkvliet, B. (2005) The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khoo, B. T. (2000) ‘Economic Nationalism and its Discontents: Malaysian Political Economy after July 1997’, in Robison, Richard, Beeson, Mark, Jayasuria, Kanishka and Kim, Hyuk-Rae (eds.) Politics and Markets in the Wake of the Asian Crisis. London: Routledge, pp. 214–240.Google Scholar
Kong, L. (2010) ‘Global Shifts, Theoretical Shifts: Changing Geographies of Religion’, Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 755–776.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhonta, E. M. (2011) The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Langley, P. (2008) The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LeBaron, G. (2010) ‘The Political Economy of the Household: Neoliberal Restructuring, Enclosures, and Daily Life’, Review of International Political Economy 17(5): 889–912.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, T. M. (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nair, S. (2007) ‘The Limits of Protest and Prospects for Political Reform in Malaysia’, Critical Asian Studies 39(3): 339–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nevins, J. and Peluso, N. L. (eds.) (2008) Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. New York: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Ong, A. (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pangsapa, P. (2007) Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Paterson, M (2007) Automobile Politics: Ecology and the Cultural Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pereira, A. A. (2005) ‘Religiosity and Economic Development in Singapore’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 20(2): 161–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramasamy, P. (2004) ‘Civil Society in Malaysia: An Arena of Contestations?’, in Guan, Lee Hock (ed.) Civil Society in Southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 198–216.Google Scholar
Rasiah, R. and Dragsbaek Schmidt, J. (eds.) (2010) The New Political Economy of Southeast Asia. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rigg, J. D. (2003) Southeast Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernisation and Development. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rigg, J. D. (2012) Unplanned Development. London: Zed Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritchie, B. K. (2005) ‘Coalitional Politics, Economic Reform, and Technological Upgrading in Malaysia’, World Development 33(5): 745–761.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robison, R. and Goodman, D. S. G. (eds.) (1996) The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonald's and Middle-Class Revolution. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Robison, R. and Hewison, K. (2005) ‘Introduction: East Asia and the Trials of Neoliberalism’, Journal of Development Studies 41(2): 183–196.Google Scholar
Robison, R. and Rosser, A. (1998) ‘Contesting Reform: Indonesia's New Order and the IMF’, World Development 26(8): 1593–1609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodan, G. and Hughes, C. (2012) ‘Ideological Coalitions and the International Promotion of Social Accountability: The Philippines and Cambodia Compared’, International Studies Quarterly 56(2): 368–380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodan, G. and Hughes, C. (2014) The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia. The Dominance of Moral Ideologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodriguez, R. M. (2010) Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labour to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudnyckyj, D. (2009) ‘Market Islam in Indonesia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(s1): S183–S201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudnyckyj, D. (2010) Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Rudnyckyj, D. (2014) ‘Economy in Practice: Islamic Finance and the Problem of Market Reason’, American Ethnologist 41(1): 110–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seabrooke, L. and Elias, J. (2010) ‘From Multilateralism to Microcosms in the World Economy: The Sociological Turn in Australian International Political Economy Scholarship’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 64(1): 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1993) Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J. W. (1991) ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17(4): 773–797.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, K. and Stivens, M. (eds.) (1998) Gender and Power in Affluent Asia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sim, S.-F. (2006) ‘Hegemonic Authoritarianism and Singapore: Economics, Ideology and the Asian Economic Crisis’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 36(2): 143–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slater, D. (2010) Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloane-White, P. (2011) ‘Working in the Islamic Economy: Malaysia and the “Sharia-Ization” of the workplace’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 26(2): 304–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stivens, M. (1996) Matrilinity and Modernity: Sexual Politics and Social Change in Rural Malaysia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. C. (2007) Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. L. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waylen, G. (2010) ‘Book Review’, Signs 36(1): 237–244.Google Scholar
Williams, C. P. (2007) Maiden Voyages: Eastern Indonesian Women on the Move. Singapore: ISEAS Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolf, D. (1994) Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics and Rural Industrialization in Java. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
World Bank (1993) The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×