From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Indonesia’s development strategy was famously shaped by the influence of the “Berkeley Mafia”, a group of US-educated technocrats—including Widjojo Nitisastro, ...

Siraphop Phumpuengphut, known by his nickname “Khanun”, which means jackfruit in Thai, is a political prisoner currently serving a two-year sentence in the Bangkok Remand Prison. Khanun was convicted ...

As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, patterns of resource extraction and violence are intensifying globally amid skyrocketing demand for the “critical minerals”—including cobalt, lithium, ...

Open your fridge, pantry, or bathroom cabinet, and you’re likely to find a product containing carrageenan, a gelling substance derived from red seaweed. It is an essential part of modern daily life, ...

There’s a notorious stretch of road in Indonesia, by the border of North Sumatra and Aceh provinces, that passes through kilometres and kilometres of oil palm plantations. There are few people there, ...

At the end of 1992 after the dissolution of powerful friend the Soviet Union, the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy, a major organ of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) with responsibility for ...

Nick Cheesman’s recently published book, Myanmar: A Political Lexicon, examined particular Burmese words and phrases as they are applicable in the current sociopolitical context. It stressed the need ...

The Chinese philosopher Kong Fuzi (“Master Kong”, or “Confucius” to Western audiences) is reported to have said about 2,500 years ago that: If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with ...

This post is an adapted version of an article that appears in a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary Asia on “Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar” (Vol 54 No 5). Before the 2021 military ...

One of the legacies Joko Widodo leaves Indonesia is a dramatically changed relationship between government and civil society. For the first decade and a half of the post-Suharto period, pro-democracy ...

This post is an abridged version of an article that appears in a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary Asia on “Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar” (Vol 54 No 5). Not surprisingly, ...

The motivations behind these reforms—the renewed emphasis on language learning, a desire to see more Australian students up in the Indo-Pacific for longer duration experiences, and a rebalancing of ...