Chapter 6 focuses on the British Straits Settlements and the Malay States. At the edge of the imperial frontier, where Chinese organizations and their attendant customs had long held sway, British laws and institutions struggled to gain a foothold. From its precarious state in the early 1870s, in the course of a few decades, Britain’s toehold on the Malay Peninsula would solidify in the Straits Settlements and extend to encompass the Malay States. The rapid extension of state control over labor transformed one of the empire’s most strategically vital cities and some of its most inaccessible and unruly territory from, or so British officials would claim, locales of lawless immorality to models of civilized behavior, orderly governance, and stable prosperity. As the overseer-state struggled to establish its political supremacy against highly resilient cultural and economic systems established previously by the Chinese Secret Societies and kongsi, its success or failure hinged increasingly on its ontological power to define moral governance and just rule. In this sense, British colonial authority in the Straits Settlements was synonymous with regulation of the Chinese workforce.

The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

Why should we take visual sources more seriously in our study of global diplomacy? The innovative approach presented in this volume involves using a wide range of visual sources, such as photographs, paintings, films, and material culture, to reveal how these sources can help to illuminate symbolic aspects of diplomacy that textual sources alone may not be able to do. Visual sources can reveal hidden stories and, importantly, help to de-centre the prevailing preconceptions about the nature of global diplomacy and its power dynamics. The unravelling of symbolisms can add cultural depth to the staging of global diplomacy. The approach introduces a host of diplomatic actors often neglected by scholars, including Southeast Asian leaders, female personalities, and crowds of onlookers. Each chapter, which includes examples of intra-Asia diplomacy as well as Asian diplomacy with Western societies, demonstrates the critical role played by visual sources to the field of diplomatic culture.

Diplomatic images are not mere visual archives of past encounters; they are complicit in how the past is framed, memorialized, and reproduced in the service of contemporary raison d’état. This chapter is about one such instance of complicity. It tracks the afterlife of an image of five ministers from Cold War Southeast Asia – all male, in Western business suits, and bespectacled – signing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into existence in Bangkok in 1967. More than any other, this image has been reproduced and disseminated to symbolize ASEAN: from book covers and commemorative stamps to television reports and even a commissioned painting. This image gives contemporary ASEAN a satisfying origin myth – of five ‘founding fathers’ forging diplomatic reconciliation in the aftermath of militarized inter-state conflict in a region marked as exceptionally diverse along racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic registers. But the image – and the props and performance it captures – contains within it the seeds of an alternative reading that puts this origin myth to lie. The chapter argues that far from embodying such exceptional and heroic diversity, the image tells us what was profoundly (and problematically) similar among these diplomatic performers than what the contemporary discourse on ASEAN reveals.

Despite an international legal and normative framework and other global efforts to prevent childhood statelessness, an estimated 70,000 stateless children are born each year in the countries that are home to the twenty largest populations of stateless persons. Children continue to be born stateless, largely due to the inheritance of statelessness from one generation to another. In Southeast Asia, the various causes of statelessness revolve around discriminatory nationality laws premised on race, ethnicity, gender, religion and many other grounds. This chapter examines the different forms of discrimination that engender and perpetuate childhood statelessness in this subregion. It argues that many hereditary and protracted cases of statelessness experienced by children result from direct and indirect discriminatory laws, policies and practices. Case studies from Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia are discussed to illustrate the dynamics of discrimination that arbitrarily deprive children of their right to a nationality. In addition, the chapter draws on the perspectives of the applicable international norms and their limitations, as well as presents some insights into potential solutions for countering this phenomenon.

This chapter explores the role of the monarch in facilitating political transition and in the constitutional governance of contemporary Malaysia. It sets the historical context for Malay kingship and its eventual form as a constitutional monarchy after Malaysia’s independence from British colonial rule. It then tells the story of the role played by the King – the Yang di-Pertuan Agong – during the country’s political transitions in 2018 and 2020. Following royal interventions between 2018 and 2021, the monarchy has emerged as a key actor in the formation and functioning of Malaysia's government. The chapter concludes with observations on some features of monarchy in Malaysia and the region and raises broader questions about the role of non-electoral institutions in safeguarding against incumbent capture or accelerating democratic erosion.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

Chapter 10 begins by summarising the conclusions from the case studies in terms of the model of ruler conversion, but its main aim is to adopt a global perspective on ruler conversions and on conversion more generally at times. It first underscores how vanishingly rare ruler conversions between Islam and Christianity are in the historical record and yet how open to monotheism immanentist regions, such as the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, Africa have been. Some scholars have already noticed the resilience of Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian societies to the proselytising drives of Christianity and Islam. The chapter summarises why this makes sense in terms of the mechanism of transcendentalist intransigence. It then offers a brief overview of how this affected Eurasian history by reference to the Ottoman, Mughal, Manchu and Mongol empires. The second half of the chapter offers a more detailed appraisal of the fortunes of Christianity and Islam in attempting to secure ruler conversions in South Asia, East Asia and both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Even though missionaries developed some of their most sophisticated strategies in these regions, the result was largely a failure. The conclusion to the chapter, and the book, reflects on the role of culture and the question of scale in historical analysis.

This chapter introduces the electric guitar in Southeast Asia through its history, cultural and political significance, and signature within locally popular genres of music. For more than seventy years, the electric guitar has been a technology for aesthetic innovation and cultural exchange, inspiring new genres and intraregional scenes, and new playing techniques, instrumentation, and instrument manufacturing and trade. It has also been an agent of transformation for musicians, audiences, and even nations, attending to colliding epochs of decolonization, nation-building, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. It has inspired youth reverie and dissent, and censorship and oppression—a maligned symbol of Western imperialism and an essential tool of expressive freedom. The electric guitar has much to tell us about what Waksman calls “a deeper shift in the cultural disposition toward sound” and noise, as Southeast Asian guitarists have broadened their tonal and timbral palettes with new possibilities in electronic signaling, amplification, and distortion. But it has an equally important role in helping us understand the residual impacts of colonization, the rise of nations and youth cultures, and Southeast Asia’s past, present, and future.