Using the notion of an emerging development problematique in Southeast Asia, this paper uses Thailand to argue that the development challenge is not being solved by economic growth, but reworked. Furthermore, while the policy aims of the early development era could be quite easily identified, measured and addressed, those that have emerged since the Millennium have proved to be more difficult to specify and less amenable to resolution. Drawing on village studies in northeast Thailand, this paper argues that the social adjustments and perturbations engendered by development have created second-order, often more intractable problems and challenges. In this way, the development traction of the early development decades has frequently turned into friction, with the state and its planning and development agencies increasingly struggling to meet both their own objectives and the aspirations of those for whom development was intended. It is also argued that Thailand's problematique is reflected in three emerging gaps: a development gap between what the Thai government is attempting to achieve and the willingness of the Thai population to join in that journey; a political gap reflected in Thailand's Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt conflict; and an aspirational gap between what has been achieved and what is aspired to.

This article synthesizes and links together evidence published thus far in secondary literature, in order to highlight the contribution of Nusantara to the genesis and circulation of various forms of Sanskritic Buddhism across Asia from the fifth to the fourteenth century. It places particular emphasis on its expansion via maritime routes. Archaeological vestiges and textual sources suggest that Nusantara was not a periphery, but played a constitutive, Asia-wide role as both a crossroads and terminus of Buddhist contacts since the early centuries of the Common Era. Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula hosted major centres of Buddhist worship and higher learning that were fully integrated into the trans-Asian maritime network of trade, diplomacy, and pilgrimage. Frequented by some of the most eminent Buddhist personalities of their times, who prompted doctrinal and cultic developments in South and East Asia, Nusantara may have exerted an influence on paradigms of Sanskritic Buddhism across Asia, rather than being a passive recipient of ideas and practices.

As ‘emerging donors' push alternative paradigms of development cooperation ‘beyond aid' onto the global agenda, some scholars discuss those from Asia as presenting culturally specific approaches. These observations echo the claims that aid practitioners and policy makers themselves make about, for example, Japanese forms of development. In this article, I caution against scholars repeating these culturally essentialising arguments that promote certain political interests. Instead, I propose that we ‘take seriously' these aid actors’ instrumental culturalist views as ethnographic artefacts—that is, as logics and practices that our interlocutors use. By taking what I call instrumental culturalism as the object of study, rather than the analytical frame, this article shows that the work of comparisons plays a central role in producing culturalist worldviews. In short, culturalism is performative, creating that which it names. If we are to understand the “beyond aid” agenda, we need to attend to the ways that the production of culturalisms through the work of comparisons informs development actors’ understandings of social organisation and global interaction.

Most scholars think that the generic name ‘Golden Land’ (Sanskrit, Suvarṇabhūmi; Pali, Suvaṇṇabhūmi) was first used by Indian traders as a vague designation for an extensive region beyond the subcontinent, presumably in Southeast Asia. Some Pali sources specifically link Suvaṇṇabhūmi with the introduction of Buddhism to the region. The locus classicus is the Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa chronicle (fifth century AD) which states that two monks, Soṇa and Uttara, were sent there for missionary activities in the time of King Asoka (third century BC). However, no Southeast Asian textual or epigraphic sources refer to this legend or to the Pali term Suvaṇṇabhūmi before the second millennium AD. Conversely, one may ask, what hard archaeological evidence is there for the advent of Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia? This article re-examines the appropriation of the name Suvaṇṇabhūmi in Thailand and Burma for political and nationalist purposes and deconstructs the connotation of the term and what it has meant to whom, where, and when. It also carefully confronts the Buddhist literary evidence and earliest epigraphic and archaeological data, distinguishing material discoveries from legendary accounts, with special reference to the ancient Mon countries of Rāmaññadesa (lower Burma) and Dvāravatī (central Thailand).

Existing analyses of the Islamic turn in regional Islamic politics in Indonesia have overlooked the possibility that these politics – often critiqued for their negative implications for minorities and vulnerable segments – are to some extent reflections of indigenous cultural dispositions. Drawing on the author's long-time ethnographic work in West Java, as well as recent anthropological theorising about public ethics in Islamic societies, the article identifies a significant correlation between, on the one hand, the practical forms and legislative outputs of the regional Islamic turn, and on the other, a characteristic notion of public decorum that is asserted in routines of embodied Islamic observance. The article notes that this extension of an embodied, practice-based public ethics into the political regimes of national life has created conflict with the disembodied civic order established in Indonesia's constitution and state ideology.

The article explores the process behind the construction of the Chao Phraya Dam, the first World Bank-funded water infrastructure project in Thailand, developed during the 1950s. Employing Andrew Pickering's ‘dance of agency’ concept in examining the process of turning financial and technical assistance into a workable project, I argue that development infrastructure, like the Chao Phraya Dam, provides a space to explore the dialectic operations – accommodation and resistance – of agency and the unstable associations among diverse actors, expertise, institutions, and materials, as well as practices. Recounting the history of the dam in the making, I explore a series of entanglements through different dances of agency, namely initiation, assessment, mobilisation, negotiation, adjustment, confrontation, and settlement. Such a multiplicity of dances inside and in the making of infrastructure reflects the techno-political entanglement encompassing the manifold negotiation and adjustment of conflicting goals, interests, recognition, and cooperation among different agencies. The dam, often portrayed as an engineering achievement of the state, is in fact the result of unanticipated relations and the responses to the temporal emerging forms of practices.

This paper examines how state and non-state actors govern through pursuing speculative conservation among resource-dependent people who must renegotiate altered livelihoods amidst extractivism in ruptured landscapes. As donor aid declines and changes form, bilaterals, state agencies, and civil society now pursue advocacy in overlapping spaces of intensifying extractivism and speculative governance in the ruptured frontiers of Southeast Asia. In these spaces, bilaterals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) struggle to work with upland farmers who negotiate the contrasting expectations of the abstract, speculative nature of conservation initiatives and the lucrative nature of extractive labour in the face of dramatic transformations of agrarian livelihoods and landscapes. Through a case study of the Philippine uplands, we demonstrate that as speculative conservation unfolds and manifests within and beyond these landscapes, it endeavours to revalue nature monetarily in ways that help reorganise labour and capital in an effort to overcome the exhaustion of capital wrought by rupture. We propose that during moments of rupture speculative conservation coproduces value from ruin by renewing and preserving capital flows.

Malaysian politics has been turbulent over the past two decades, as seen in the damaged tradition of leadership transition, non-violent revolts against successive regimes, and unstable realignments of opposing forces. Two startling symptoms point to disorder. One is the heavy electoral losses and loss of legitimacy suffered by the post-Mahathir regimes. The other is the political re-entry of Anwar Ibrahim and Mahathir Mohamad. The persisting turbulence raises certain questions. Why has the ruling party, the United Malays National Organization, been susceptible to internal fighting, being at once a source of hegemonic stability and systemic instability? Why has the apex of the United Malays National Organization repeatedly jeopardised its traditions of leadership succession? Why has one leader, Mahathir Mohamad, been involved in all the disputes? How did the crisis of the party, not just the regime, become intimately tied to economic crisis? Conventional paradigmatic explanations of Malaysian politics – inter-ethnic rivalry in a plural society, elite solidarity, and regime type (semi-democratic, hybrid, or competitive authoritarian) – are of little help even if ethnicity, elite conduct, and authoritarian rule are relevant. Instead, this essay suggests that the turbulence is part of a long trajectory of oligarchic reconstitution bound to a peculiar nexus of state, ethnicity, and class. The paper does not construct a theory of Malaysian politics. It offers a historically informed exploration of a leitmotif of an unfinished project that runs through much of the past 20 years of political conflict and struggle.

A better understanding of Thailand's contemporary malaise needs a perspective that combines political and economic aspects without losing sight of history. This article applies the concept of path dependence to examine how pre-1997 catch-up industrialisation shaped the post-crisis trajectory. It argues that the catch-up process has left a number of important legacies, especially the symbiotic relationship between the military, banking conglomerates, and technocrats; dominant growth narrative with a focus on macroeconomic stability; and overly centralised and bloated state structures. These legacies have shaped the strategies and legitimacies of today's political actors and rendered the pursuit of growth increasingly contradictory to maintaining order.

This article examines the geographies and politics of the global trade in orangutans in the name of science and entertainment in the first half of the twentieth century, along the background of the growing international nature protection movement. In doing so, it draws attention to historical processes that led to environmental conservation in northern Sumatra. It looks at some of the causes of the wildlife trade, linking animal-human engagement in northern Sumatra in the early twentieth century to large-scale agricultural development. During this period, wildlife traders brought shipments of orangutans from northern Sumatra to Europe and elsewhere around the world. The orangutan trade and the arrival of large numbers of apes in Europe broadly influenced material practices and decisions central to the colonial project. This included the tightening of borders and surveillance in the ports and on land, as well as the creation of wildlife protection laws and policies that regulated human relationships with the environment in colonial Indonesia.

This paper explores the Prayuth regime, which began with a military coup in May 2014. Politically, we indicate how the junta has embedded its power in ways different from the past. It does not pursue a power-sharing governance as in the Prem and Surayud governments, but tries to militarise the cabinet, parliament, and even state-owned enterprises. The new constitution is designed to institutionalise the power of the military and the traditional elite vis-à-vis the electoral forces. Ironically, however, the junta's rule by military decree and discretionary power have weakened the bureaucratic polity, rather than strengthening it. Economically, the Prayuth regime forms a partnership with a group of Sino-Thai conglomerates to establish the Pracharath scheme, with an aim to differentiate its grass-roots development policy from Thaksin's populism (Prachaniyom). Nonetheless, it has become a platform through which the giant firms perform the leading role of ‘Big Brother’ in supervising small businesses in their sectors. Pracharath therefore reflects the collective endeavours of the conglomerates to replace competitive markets with hierarchy, rather than encouraging local firms to catch-up with them.