To historians of Southeast Asia, the Bandung conference of 1955 presents itself as one of the most striking international initiatives undertaken by newly-independent Indonesia. For historians of Indonesia, it marks the emphasis on foreign as against domestic policy that was associated with Sukarno's growing dominance. To biographers of Sukarno it appears to be both a strategic device in domestic politics and a farsighted perception of a shift in international relations. Internationally it was both to demonstrate the influence of India and to show its limits. Even more it was to mark some kind of success for the People's Republic of China and for Chou En-lai in developing the foreign policy line associated already with Geneva and the five principles of co-existence.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Chinese gunpowder technology spread to the whole of Southeast Asia via both the overland and maritime routes, long before the arrival of European firearms. The impact of Chinese firearms on northern mainland Southeast Asia in terms of warfare and territorial expansion was profound.

The title of this paper is influenced by that of Lee Soo Ann's book, Singapore Goes Transnational. However, the subject matter of this paper though related, is quite different. By Singapore “going transnational”, Lee was referring to how Singapore's economy became dominated by foreign transnational corporations (TNCs). During that process and period, local Singaporean companies declined in importance. This paper deals with the resurgence of Singaporean companies to the extent that some have spread their operations to other countries and have attained the status of TNCs.

This paper aims to discuss the issue of problem-solving at the national level by focusing on the concept of social discipline. The development of a new nation-state, i.e. contemporary Singapore, will provide the empirical basis for the analysis.

The paper is divided into three sections. The first section deals briefly with relevant conceptual approaches to the solution of social problems, and the definition of social discipline. The second section presents an illustration of social discipline in action. The final section attempts a critical assessment of the approach used in Singapore for the solution of social problems.

In the past many of us have been accustomed to visualizing developmental analysis as taking an inventory of physical resources, distributing them (or merely imagining them) in different fields of production, and then, according to preconceived ideas of technical coefficients, calculating future output. This might be termed the “skeleton” of economic theory. But the real meat of development lies in the efficiency of implementation of decisions, whether planned or laissez-faire. The efficiency of implementation depends on the quality of entrepreneurship; again, whether in publicly or privately owned establishments. This quality of entrepreneurship is determined by the attitude of management and labour leaders to supervision, morale and workers, breakdowns in machinery, commercial risks, and all uncertainties which cannot be effectively programmed. We believe it is taking an inadequate and misleading view of economic development to regard technical coefficients as reliable indicators of the fruitfulness of investments. For instance, a $10 million investment in steel in China might have quite a different impact on a range of economic indicators than the same investment in India.

In 2010, La Galigo, a Bugis mythological epic describing the founding of the human world, was included in UNESCO's Memory of the World register. This accolade again brought La Galigo into the international spotlight, as had occurred when Robert Wilson's stage play I La Galigo, based on this epic, debuted in Singapore in 2004. Wilson's production received acclaim and critique, with reviews primarily focusing on his ability to achieve an authentic representation of Bugis identity and their past. These responses raise questions around the presupposition that there is an authentic Bugis identity and past that can be publicly recreated. This article analyses the concept of authenticity through reviews of Wilson's production and the work of key theorists to show that for many people, authenticity is achievable and of critical importance in underpinning any sense of a unified and singular ethnic identity, while for others, identity is always already a mix of different global influences and as such is either irrelevant, or liberated from a sense of a singular heritage.

A biography of Prince Phetsarath highlights how a specific idea about Laos and its culture was formed under French colonial rule and nurtured under the Japanese occupation and its aftermath. During these periods, Phetsarath's understanding of Lao cultural nationalism was transformed into a political and anticolonial nationalism. While ultimately a study of failure, Phetsarath's activities show that anticolonial nationalism did not always have to be linked to Communist movements to be ‘revolutionary’, and suggests the importance of taking into account non-revolutionary and non-Communist actors – even members of royal blood – in order to better understand the complexity that went into the making of modern postcolonial states.

As the title implies, this paper deals with two questions which I believe may be related to one another in significant ways. The first is the rise to power of Sūryavarman I (1002–49), to which the present study is principally devoted; and the second is the dynamics of state and political development in Angkorean Cambodia, which will be illuminated by the discussion of Sūryavarman.

this article analyses the socioeconomic relations of manila cigar-makers, who had strong bargaining power vis-à-vis management during the american colonial period. focusing on a structural economic depression which took place in the mid-1920s, the study considers the evolution of these workers' lives in terms of skills, autonomy, stratification and cohesiveness at their work sites.

By considering the historical significance of a southern Thai policeman, Khun Phantharakratchadet (1898–2006), I aim to shift historical writing away from the court, the aristocracy and the capital even though the social setting is not merely ‘local’ or ‘peripheral’ but an amalgam of elements found throughout the country. I also want to give credit to local historians often dismissed for being parochial, untheoretical and disposed to myth-making, and to show how tantric practices (saiyasat), the arts of self-defence, policing, banditry and masculinity intersect in the career of this policeman, a native of the unique environment in the Songkhla lakes district.

The 2004 tsunami intensified fruitful scientific research into dating past tectonic events in Sumatra, though without comparable work on Java. Geology needs to be informed by careful historical research on documented events, but less such work has been done in Indonesia than in other tectonically endangered areas. This paper examines the historical evidence for two hitherto unknown tsunamis of the seventeenth century. In better-researched Sumatra, Dutch reports that a flood from the sea devastated Aceh in 1660 adds to what the geologists have discovered on the ground. By contrast geological research has barely begun on the south coast of Java. Javanese sources for events before 1800 need careful re-evaluation. The myths around Ratu Kidul, the ‘Queen of the South Seas’, together with more chronologically reliable dated babads, point to a major tsunami in 1618 on the coast south of Yogyakarta.

The Hmong are not passive actors who wait for help from development workers and other authorities. Instead, they actively engage themselves within a process of social negotiation between unequal socio-economic and political groups, a ‘dynamic knowledge system’. Three case studies from a Hmong Thantam community are used to better understand the process of social negotiation with multiple actors within complex power relations. More importantly, their dynamic local knowledge is used as a strategy to struggle against, and reconcile with, more powerful forces; the result of this process is the ‘complexity’ which happens as a response to power

It's possible to find knowledge from any place in the world when we humans learn from one another. Throughout the generations we Hmong have learned from many diverse sources. In order to fulfil our lives, we young Hmong still learn from the whole world. Laoyeng Saehang, A headman of Thantam village, Northern Thailand, 1998.

This article analyses the social implications of the recent mass conversions to Protestantism by one-third of the one million Hmong in Vietnam. The conversions have been condemned by the Vietnamese state, while being understood by international human rights activists as acts of conscience on the part of the Hmong converts. This article focuses on the internal debate and divisions surrounding conversion among the Hmong themselves. The converts believe that Protestantism is the only way to alter the ethnic group's marginal status in Vietnam while the unconverted Hmong see conversion as a betrayal of Hmong ethnicity. Such conflicting views have been causing deep fractures in Hmong society.

In Myanmar, the idea of ‘indigeneity’ has been mobilised in two radically different ways. Ethnonationalist groups such as the Chin National Front and the Karen National Union have utilised the concept to lobby for increased autonomy in international forums such as the United Nations, while the Burmese state has used the idea of indigeneity (or native-ness, typically translated as taingyinthar in Burmese) to exclude certain minorities — most prominently the Rohingya — by explicitly striking them from the official list of Myanmar's ‘national races’. To clarify how this definitional tension has developed, this article will situate the competing Burmese appeals to indigeneity within the history of international indigeneity politics, and compare the Burmese ‘Indigenous situation’ to other Asian countries that have addressed the question of who counts and does not count as Indigenous.

One of the most prevalent and influential themes in the literature on European imperialism has been the dichotomy between conditions in an area threatened by European conquest prior to and following the imposition of colonial rule. Even writers who have disapproved of the extension of European control normally have had little favourable to say about indigenous rulers or the state of kingdoms about to be annexed. Historians have generally pictured the pre-colonial history of these areas as periods of decadence and corruption, of administrative breakdown and social chaos, and of economic stagnation and popular unrest. In contrast, most writers have viewed the early colonial era as a time of recovery and progress. In order to justify this view, they have attempted to show that the establishment of European rule brought peace and order, stable government, educational and legal reforms, public works projects and economic development. Most historians have implicitly assumed that the indigenous peoples accepted European overlords during the first decades after conquest because conditions were far better under alien rule than they had been under the traditional elites.

In his influential edited volume Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid suggests that long-term slave-based systems of production were absent from agriculture in Southeast Asia, and had an ambiguous presence at best in other areas of economic activity. The argument he presents suggests that indigenous slavery in the region merged into a ‘kind of serfdom or household membership’, a situation that continued after the arrival of Europeans whose slave-holding practices were profoundly shaped by the local traditions they encountered: ‘slavery in the European colonies owed more to the Southeast Asian environment than to European legal ideas’. Reid's analysis is insightful and his conclusions persuasive. But he also notes a single exception to this general picture: ‘the Dutch perkenier system for producing nutmeg in Banda with hundreds of slave labourers on large estates’. The nutmeg estates of the Banda Islands, in eastern Indonesia, provide a rare unequivocal example of a slave mode of production in Southeast Asia, and its sole instance in an agricultural context. The islands have a similar status within established accounts of slavery in Asia more generally. While some degree of geographic and historical variation is usually acknowledged, European slavery practices in Asia are regarded as distinct from colonial slavery in the New World, where European systems were imported wholesale. Against this conclusion, the perkenier system in the Banda Islands has been described as a form of exploitation ‘unheard of in Asia’, one that represented a ‘Caribbean cuckoo in an Asian nest’. In other words, Dutch nutmeg cultivation in the Bandas constituted a New World style system of slavery operating in an Asian context.

The philosophical basis of the Indonesian state, first framed in 1945, is the Panca Sila or Five Principles. Since 1985 all political and social organizations including religious ones have had to subscribe to the Panca Sila as their sole philosophical principle (Azas Tunggal). The first of the Five Principles is belief in Tuhan Yang Maha Esa, normally, though not entirely satisfactorily, translated as the One Supreme God. The founders of the state had accepted this principle rather than a more specific statement of belief in the God of Islam, the religion of the majority of the people. Its formulation was clearly a compromise, aimed at stressing the importance of religion in the state, but avoiding declaring Islam as the state religion. As it stood, the principle was generally acceptable to followers of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, and all religions which did acknowledge the existence of God, in one form or another.

The trend to portray Indonesian presidents as punakawan (clown servants) in wayang (shadow puppetry) was started under the former President Soeharto. Whereas Soeharto chose to be conveyed as Semar, a clown but also a former god, greater artistic freedom post-Soeharto led to a more farcical depiction of Habibie and Gus Dur as Semar's sons, Gareng and Bagong.

This article discusses the significance of religious diversity for a minority ethnic group (the Karen) in the midst of integration into the Thai nation state, addressing both the historical and cultural momentum of initial acceptance, and the subsequent diversifying reformulation and redefinition of identity and community through the adopted religions.

This paper examines Japanese attitudes toward the independence movement in Vietnam, the Japanese idea of “independence”, and Japanese relationships with the Vietnamese nationalists during the period between 1940 and 1945.

The Japanese used French Indochina, one constituent of which was “Vietnam”, as a supply base and a stepping stone for their troops on their way to other battle grounds such as Burma, Singapore, Indonesia, or the Philippines. The defeated units were returned to Vietnam, rested, and reorganized into new military units. Coal and rice and other foodstuffs used by the Japanese in these battlefields often came from Vietnam. For these objectives, the Japanese kept the political and administrative structure of French Indochina intact under the French. But on 9 March 1945, the 30, 000-man Japanese military attacked the 50, 000-man French Indochinese Army in a surprise attack under the command of Lieutenant General Tsuchihashi, commanding general of the 38th Army. (This operation is identified in Japanese military terms as “Meigo Sakusen” [Bright Moon Action].)