Migration, mobility, and movement are the inter-linked processes which provide the empirical scaffold for this paper. The paper uses this empirical framing to reflect on a series of methodological, conceptual, and theoretical challenges for scholars of Southeast Asia. Mobility and associated geographical (spatial) boundary crossings have raised questions about the analytical units employed in research; the unsettling of these analytical units has challenged whether conceptual categories still have explanatory purchase; and the fracturing of conceptual categories has implications for the theoretical frameworks that scholars have traditionally deployed. Drawing on field research undertaken in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam the paper argues that evolving mobilities in the region, particularly in rural areas, require a degree of explanatory ‘catch-up’ on the part of scholars as we try to keep pace with the rate of change in the countryside. Instead of focusing on households in space, we should be trying to map out the networked relations that link lives and individuals across national and transnational space. The paper further argues that we should focus our attention on local-level dynamics associated with societal change, settlement dynamism and sustainability, population turbulence, and evolving cultural preferences which operate partly independently of the rural development project, thus highlighting the shifting web of mutual dependencies and interdependencies that shape lives and living patterns.

Previous decades' celebrations of the triumph of democracy were frequently based on mainstream analyses that displayed two major theoretical problems. First, conceptualisations of democracy based on ‘minimal pre-conditions’ commonly conflated the formal establishment of democratic structures with the far more complex and historically challenging creation of substantive democracy. Second, a deductive and generally ahistorical model asserting fixed stages of ‘democratic transition’ diverted attention from deeper and more substantive examination of struggles for power among social forces within specific historical contexts. By adhering to minimalist conceptions of democracy and simplistic models of democratic change, mainstream analysts quite often chose to overlook many underlying limitations and shortcomings of the democratic structures they were so keen to celebrate. Given more recent concerns over ‘authoritarian undertow’, those with the normative goal of deepening democracy must begin by deepening scholarly conceptualisations of the complex nature of democratic change. This analysis urges attention to the ‘source’ and ‘purpose’ of democracy. What were the goals of those who established democratic structures, and to what extent did these goals correspond to the ideals of democracy? In many cases throughout the world, ‘democracy’ has been used as a convenient and very effective means for both cloaking and legitimising a broad set of political, social, and economic inequalities. The need for deeper analysis is highlighted through attention to the historical character of democratic structures in the Philippines and Thailand, with particular attention to the sources and purposes of ‘democracy’ amid on-going struggles for power among social forces. In both countries, albeit coming forth from very different historical circumstances, democratic structures have been continually undermined by those with little commitment to the democratic ideal: oligarchic dominance in the Philippines, and military/bureaucratic/monarchic dominance in Thailand. Each country possesses its own set of challenges and opportunities for genuine democratic change, as those who seek to undermine elite hegemony and promote popular accountability operate in very different socio-economic and institutional contexts. Efforts to promote substantive democracy in each setting, therefore, must begin with careful historical analysis of the particular challenges that need to be addressed.

Thailand's on-going political crisis began with agitation against the Thaksin Shinawatra-led government, saw a military coup and a spate of street-based protest and violence. Drawing on Marx and Weber and using the categories of class, status and party, it is argued that Thailand has reached a political turning point. Subaltern challenges to the hierarchical institutions of military, monarchy and bureaucracy appear to have resulted in political patterns of the past being set on a new trajectory. The social forces that congregate around old ideas associated with status honour – hierarchy, social closure and inequality, ‘Thai-style democracy’ and privilege – are challenged by those championing equality, access, voting and populism. While the balance of forces would suggest that an historical turning point has been achieved, reaction and unexpected outcomes remain possible.

Over the last two decades, research on world cities and global cities has unsettled the nation-state as the default unit of analysis in many disciplines in Anglophone social science. Rather than seeing the world as comprised of a mosaic of national political and social units, alternative geographies of networks connecting cities and urban regions have risen to prominence. In this paper, I consider the implications of such alternative mappings for Southeast Asia, bringing urban studies and area studies into critical conversation with each other. Geographies of urban networks extending across national borders challenge the ingrained methodological nationalism of conventional area studies, not least in Southeast Asia. However, to what extent do framings of trans-national urban connections among Southeast Asian or Asian cities mean that methodological nationalism has simply been up-scaled to methodological regionalism? In the first of the two main sections of the paper, I look in detail at the network spatialities brought into view by global and world cities scholars and consider their implications for regional urban systems frameworks. Flows of people, money and ideas extending from cities in Southeast Asia to cities beyond that region, and even trans-continentally, arguably imply that areal framings melt into network geographies which are global in scope. In the second section of the paper, I consider three types of regional formations that have been identified in research on globalization: the global triad regions, region states, and inter-Asia flows of capital; models and people which I examine do not map onto conventional cartographies of Southeast Asia. Together, these two sections of the paper serve as a reminder that in future research regions need to be specified empirically rather than assumed to exist as a priori framings for research, and that the geographies of ‘actually existing’ regionalizing processes are often very different from area studies mappings of the world.

Discontent simmers within social science over states and nation-states as units of analysis. Disputes over what even constitutes a state, whether simply an organizational apparatus, albeit with unique legitimacy, or a broader complex of social relations, have never been resolved. But it is not just its murky delineation with which the state is afflicted. It has lately come under attack from above and below, with causality seen to be draining away to transnational and sub-national forces. This paper begins by rehearsing the economic and social vectors along which assaults on the state and the nation-state are conveyed. It then turns to Southeast Asia, a part of the developing world in which the state would seem especially vulnerable, its powers having been usurped by transnational firms and corroded internally by connected rent-seekers and provincial “men of prowess.” However, this paper tries also to show that in Southeast Asia, national states and territorial borders have remained quite intact. Neither globalized markets, regional formations, local identity construction, administrative decentralization or migration have shaken the standing of the state and the nation-state as appropriate units of analysis. This is especially the case when addressing major questions about regime types and change in the region.

This article investigates the emergence of new partisan identities in Thailand. Using data from Thailand's last several elections I trace the emergence of partisanship over the last 15 years, particularly in the north and northeast. The change in the nature of partisanship has helped turn long-simmering tensions into an increasingly intractable political conflict. This mass partisan alignment has upset the equilibrium of Thai politics, transforming what was once an inefficient but modest-stakes game of political horse-trading into a zero sum game with extremely high stakes.

The article argues for the utility of infusing the literature on Islamic politics in Southeast Asia with insights that may be gained from the literature on Islamic politics in North Africa and the Middle East. It suggests that such infusion, particularly of more explicitly historical sociology and political economy concerns, could reinvigorate the study of Islamic politics in Southeast Asia, which has been mostly dominated by cultural politics approaches and a concern for issues of doctrinal interpretation. Though this sort of literature has a rich and established tradition, it has lately succumbed to a more superficial security-oriented approach that has grown in influence since the advent of the War on Terror, in which Southeast Asia supposedly acts as a second front. Ironically, security-oriented analysts draw much of the material for their observations about Islamic ‘moderation’ and ‘radicalism’ from cultural politics analyses of Southeast Asian Islamic politics. Analyses based on historical sociology and political economy may provide alternative ways of understanding the evolution of Islamic politics in Southeast Asia by integrating such matters as post-colonial state development, Cold War era conflicts and the transforming effects of capitalist development on its social bases.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Borneo – supposedly one of the most isolated islands on the planet – became a trans-national site of growing importance. Instead of being imagined as a site of endless forests, inaccessible mountains, and undisturbed nature, Borneo became a place to extract and move objects, many of them spinning off into international circuits. The British and Dutch, who became the dual colonial overlords of the island, became the primary actors in facilitating these movements. Yet Asian actors – such as the Chinese, Malays, and various Dayak peoples – also were heavily involved in these transits. The first part of this essay looks at the role of geology and minerals in effecting these transitions. The second part of the paper examines the movement of biota, especially vis-a-vis Chinese networks, in connecting Borneo to other shores. Finally, the third part of the essay looks at contraband cargoes of diverse origins in also facilitating these connections. I argue that far from being an isolated and ‘off-the-beaten-track’ locale, Borneo became central to new ideas of trans-national connection in Southeast Asia, linking people, commodities, and trade circuits into an ever-tightening embrace.

‘Trends’ in the field of Southeast Asian history have a way of being unresolved satisfactorily before ‘new’ ones emerge to take their place. Part of the reason is that older scholarship is not only considered passé, but each new generation of Southeast Asianists wants to ‘make its mark’ on the field in original ways. Yet, when one scrutinizes some of these ‘new’ issues carefully, they often turn out not to be entirely so; rather, they appear to be different ways of approaching and/or expressing older ones, using different (and more current) operating vocabulary. ‘Angle of vision’ and ‘perspective’, popular in the 1960s, have become ‘privileging of’ or ‘giving agency to’ in current usage, while their methodological intent is exactly the same, bearing the same (or nearly the same) desirable consequences. Older, seminal scholarship is often only given lip-service without much in-depth consideration, so that some of the ‘new’ scholarship begins ‘in the middle of the game’, scarcely acknowledging (or knowing) what had transpired earlier. This unawareness regarding the ‘lineage’ of Southeast Asia scholarship fosters some reinvention and repetition of issues and problems without realizing it, in turn protracting their resolution. So as not to lose sight of this ‘scholarly lineage’ that not only allows a better assessment of what are genuinely new trends and what are not, but also to resolve unresolved issues and move on to really new things, this essay will analyse and discuss where the field of Southeast Asian history has been, where it is currently, and where it might be headed. Although focused on the discipline of history, it remains ensconced within the context of the larger field of Southeast Asian studies.

Recent studies of the Chinese in Southeast Asia have tended to deconstruct the hybrid, transnational, diasporic, and de-territorialized attributes of ‘Chinese-ness’, and theorize the politics thereof. In contrast, earlier scholarship on the politics of Southeast Asia's ethnic Chinese raised many questions over the positions, rights, and roles associated with being ‘overseas Chinese’. Hence, many analyses of Chinese politics, from suppressed quietude to militant contestation, tended to ask, ‘Why and how was that politics Chinese?’ This article asks, instead, ‘Why and how were the Chinese political?’ within the larger rubric of Southeast Asian politics. It argues that posing the first question helped officialdom, academia and media to determine who among the ‘overseas Chinese’ were friends or foes. Asking the second question, it is argued, involves a boundary-crossing shift that sees the immigrant Chinese engaged in a full spectrum of Southeast Asian politics under the impacts of colonialism and nationalism, and capitalism and anti-capitalism. After exploring the shift in perspective from ‘being Chinese’ to ‘being political’, the article suggests that politics beyond China-oriented positions, state-bound stances, or preoccupations of ethnic identity, particularly in Malaysia transformed Southeast Asia to the point of ‘creating’ a ‘largely Chinese’ state out of Singapore.

This paper reviews several prominent journals to identify key trends and issues in Southeast Asian geography. The review identifies the locus of articles' geographical scholarship, the balance between issue-based versus other types of articles, and the trends in the subject matter of the issue-based publications. The paper considers the meaning of an ‘issue-based’ approach to geography in local and non-local geographical scholarship on and in Southeast Asia. Geography as taught and practiced in Southeast Asia has followed a largely idiographic tradition based on description of landscapes, regions, settlement patterns, and so on. At an applied level, geography in some Southeast Asian countries has tended toward regional planning rather than engaging more centrally with the social sciences. Geography as a critical social science has only a loose purchase in the inherently geographical debates around development, environment, globalisation, and regionalisation in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, geographers from outside the region have engaged in more critical study, and geographical teaching and research on Southeast Asia in Australasia, North America, and Europe tends to take an issue-based approach and to be situated broadly within the realm of ‘development geography’. The paper also concludes with the question of how the discipline can better serve an issue-based agenda without being dominated by western critical social science.

This paper explains the post-Cold War surge of nationalism in Southeast Asia and discusses its significance for regional peace and cooperation. As argued, the growth of nationalism as a form of mass politics has different causes in each Southeast Asian context where it occurs, but at the regional level the phenomenon can be explained by three factors: the failure of earlier nationalist movements to fully deliver their promises; a shift in the international and regional order (the end of the Cold War and the rise of China); and a change in domestic order (political liberalisation and democratisation) that was also occurring across many countries in the region. While the main mission of the new nationalism is the defence of national territory, the movements have the unintended impact of bringing together national communities once divided by Cold War ideologies. The phenomenon also poses some serious risks to regional peace and cooperation.

This article addresses the question, is there such an entity as a separate field of the anthropology of Southeast Asia? Has the crisis in anthropology in the 1970s and ‘the literary turn’ of the 1980s led to a renewed interest in area studies? A number of topics that originally belonged to the field of anthropology will be discussed: religion, the culture of social class and strategic groups, family and gender relations, developments in tourism, leisure and consumption, material culture, media and performance, and the growing importance of the rapid urbanization in Southeast Asia and its relationship with globalization and localization.

Open nearly any general text on Southeast Asia and you will find that some space is taken up in the introduction assessing the reality and validity of the regional framework on which that text rests. Likewise, with the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), many scholars question whether or not the regional entity amounts to anything of any substance. In this article, I mount a defence of Southeast Asia as a regional framework in scholarship and draw attention to ASEAN as an evolving regional entity. While the concept of Southeast Asia among researchers and the politics of ASEAN are distinct issues, I treat them together in this article to highlight their interrelationship and parallels. My primary objective is to outline the displaced politics – of both academic and realpolitik varieties – embedded in deconstructive and dismissive critiques of both Southeast Asia and ASEAN. Critiques of both are not without value, as they sharpen our attention to processes through which supra-national regionalism is produced. Nevertheless, I argue that regionalism remains a valuable method in both politics and scholarship, in no small part as a counterweight to the hegemony of methodological nationalism in contemporary thought and research.

From its inception, ASEAN has been shaped by the evolving structure of the international system and the activities of more powerful external actors. This is still the case. What is different now is that the nature of the region of which ASEAN is a part has changed in significant ways. Indeed, the entire structure of the international system has undergone a number of profoundly important changes which have forced ASEAN to adjust and recalibrate its own policies. This paper explores this adjustment process and maps the most important forces and actors that are compelling change. By placing the ASEAN experience in a comparative conceptual framework, it becomes possible to identify the key drivers of change and to speculate about their future impact on an organisation that has proved remarkably resilient thus far. The nature of contemporary regional developments and the continuing evolution of the wider international system mean that ASEAN is currently facing major new challenges and questions about its relevance in an era when other regional organisations are emerging to challenge its authority and role.