The Institute of the Malay World and Civilization (ATMA), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, had since April 2000 been holding a series of international conferences involving more than 100 scholars from Southeast Asia and the rest of the world on the theme “The construction of knowledge about the Malay world by Others”. They amount to an effort to understand in a systematic manner the Malay world as an analytical abstraction, a body of knowledge, and, more importantly, as a region that had actually mattered greatly to the rest of the world for more than a thousand years. In other words, ATMA has been developing from its own perspective a notion of “regionalism” that is arguably quite different from those articulated by scholars in the fields of international politics and economics. ATMA's notion of regionalism is informed by the broad sweep of socio-historical analysis introduced by The Annales School in France, with the late Fernand Braudel as its main contributor.

It must be mentioned that the terms “Others” used in the said ATMA conferences refers to mainly non-English speakers and writers. This angle has been chosen because scholars and researchers in the Malay world, especially in Malaysia, have traditionally been too dependent on English sources when they construct/reconstruct and write/rewrite our history and have had very little input from Indian, Chinese, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, French, German, and Nordic sources. Therefore, the series of conferences provides us with a golden opportunity to learn at first hand what others, especially non-English speakers, outside the Malay world have to say about the region and its civilizations in the reports, records and writings of travellers, missionaries, sailors, merchants, scientists, scholars, administrators, and the like who visited or stayed in the Malay world.

The overall result has been an exhilarating one for ATMA, to say the least.

We held two conferences involving the Chinese contribution, with participants both from the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the expansive global Chinese diaspora: first, on “Chinese scholarship and the Malay world”, held in mid-September 2002 (published as Chinese Studies of the Malay World) and, second, on “Building on Our Past and Investing in Our Future: An International Seminar on Multidisciplinary Discourse” held on 16–17 February 2004.