• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.13-57
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• 2015

The paper brings together several strands of debate and deliberation in which I have been involved since the early 2000s on the definition of Southeast Asia and the rationale of Southeast Asian Studies. I refer to the relationship between area studies and methodologies as a conundrum (or puzzle), though I should state from the outset that I think it is much more of a conundrum for others than for me. I have not felt the need to pose the question of whether or not area studies generates a distinctive method or set of methods and research practices, because I operate from a disciplinary perspective; though that it is not to say that the question should not be posed. Indeed, as I have earned a reputation for "revisionism" and championing disciplinary approaches rather than regional ones, it might be anticipated already the position that I take in an examination of the relationships between methodologies and the practice of "area studies" (and in this case Southeast Asian [or Asian] Studies). Nevertheless, given the recent resurgence of interest in the possibilities provided by the adoption of regional perspectives and the grounding of data gathering and analysis within specified locations in the context of globalization, the issues raised for researchers working in Southeast Asia and within the field of Southeast Asian Studies require revisiting.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.51-89
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• 2017

Strategically situated between the East-West maritime crossroads, the peoples of Southeast Asia over the centuries witnessed the comings and goings of traders from territories from East Asia, South Asia, West Asia and Europe. There were also those from North America that crossed the Pacific for commercial profits in this region. Foreign traders undoubtedly in the course of their visits and sojourns had liaisons with local women, some engaged in marriages. Offspring of these interracial miscegenation possessed rather unique characteristics. As a community, they were identified with the Malay term, peranakan, from the root word, "anak" meaning "child," hence "offspring" or "descendent". Specific terms - Baba Nyonya, Tionghoa-Selat, Chitty, Jawi Pekan, Pashu, Kristang - referred to particular groups. Although socially they appeared 'neither here nor there', members of mixed parentage were able to carve an especial niche in the local environment throughout Southeast Asia, conspicuously in urban, port-cities where trade and commerce predominated. Following in the footsteps of their progenitor, the Peranakan acted as intermediaries, comprador between foreign and indigenous enterprises, profiting financially and socially from trade and commerce. Tapping on the author's personal experiences and first-hand observations, complementing with oral sources, and support from secondary materials, this present essay explores, discusses, and analyzes the eclectic sociocultural practices and traditions of the Baba Nyonya of George Town, Penang. Purposeful intention is to further enlighten our understanding, and in turn, our appreciation, of these ever increasingly diminishing communities and their cultures across Southeast Asia.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.630-655
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• 2022

This paper examines the integrated QR code payment service (QRIS) adoption by retailers in Indonesia. Indonesia started its cashless journey in 2017 by using electric money in card form. As the country keeps developing, Indonesia has planned to integrate its payment towards a cross-border payment using QR codes by 2025 in the South East Asian region. Facing government vision, MSMEs that act as the significant economy wheel in Indonesia was required to be prepared to face the multi-cultural, multi-currency, and the new tech innovation for doing transactions. However, as a developing country, Indonesia faced significant problems with its infrastructure, which made it hard for merchants to access digital payment. As infrastructure was a common problem for developing countries, Indonesia also faced financial inclusion, lack of digital knowledge, a high amount of cash use, and socialization that made low digital payment penetration. Therefore, as there was a need to increase digital payment penetration for ASEAN integrated payment, this study found that merchant compatibility, facilitating conditions, trust, and relative advantages are drivers for MSMEs using this payment method. Further, this research provides propositions for banks, financial institutions, and governments to develop and evolve towards a cashless ecosystem, especially for a country lacking infrastructure.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.157-200
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• 2020

This paper explores critically and historically some of the popular academic views concerning the development of the study of Southeast Asia through the lens of the contributions of particular scholars and institutions. Within the broad field of Southeast Asian Studies the focus is on the disciplines of geography, history and ethnology. There are certain views concerning the development of scholarship on Southeast Asia which continue to surface and have acquired, or are in the process of acquiring "mythical" status. Among the most enduring is the claim that the region is a post-Second World War construction primarily arising from Western politico-strategic and economic preoccupations. More specifically, it is said that Southeast Asian Studies for a considerable period of time has been subject to the American domination of this field of scholarship, located in programs of study in such institutions as Cornell, Yale and California, Berkeley, and, within those institutions, focused on particular scholars who have exerted considerable influence on the directions which research has taken. Another is that, based on the model or template of Southeast Asian Studies (and other area studies projects) developed primarily in the USA, it has distinctive characteristics as a scholarly enterprise in that it is multidisciplinary, requires command of the vernacular, and assigns special importance to what has been termed 'groundedness' and historical, geographical and cultural contextualization; in other words, a Southeast Asian Studies approach as distinct from disciplinarybased studies addresses local concerns, interests, perspectives and priorities through in-depth, on-the-ground, engaged scholarship. Finally, views have emerged that argue that a truly Southeast Asian Studies project can only be achieved if it is based on a set of locally-generated concepts, methods and approaches to replace Western ethnocentrism and intellectual hegemony.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.193-221
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• 2014

Archipeligiality, a concept continuously being developed by the scholar, is one that attempts to articulate the Filipino sense of place as discoursed in/through its literatures. As a country composed of 7,107 islands, the very fragmentation and division of the country, as well as its multiculturality and multilinguality, have become the very means by which Filipino writers have "imagined" so to speak-that is, also, constructed, into a singular, united frame-the "nation." This, the author supposes, is an important aspect to explore when it comes to discoursing the larger Southeast Asian imagination, or poetic, as similar situations (i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore), may soon compel for a comparative critico-literary perspective. This paper continues this exploratory "geoliterary" discourse by looking at a Filipino canonical work in English by Cirilo F. Bautista, the epic The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, the title of which already signals a geographic allusion to the first map-name granted by the Spanish colonizer to the Philippines in the region, and consequently the first signification of the country's subjected existence in the colonial imagination. The work, published between 1970 and 1998, is composed of three parts: The Archipelago, Telex Moon, and Sunlight on Broken Stones, which won the 1998 Philippine Independence Centennial Literary Prize. In these epics, notions of Philippine history and situation were discoursed, and Filipino historical figures were engaged in dialogue by the poet/the poet's voice, with the end of locating the place [where history and time had brought it; or its direction or trajectory as a nation, being true to the Filipino maxim of ang di lumingon sa pinanggalingan, di makararating sa paroroonan (the one who does not look back to his origins would not reach his destination)]. of the Philippines not only in the national imagination, but in this paper, in the wider regional consciousness. The paper proposes that the archipelagic concept is an important and unique characteristic of the Southeast Asian situation, and thus, may be a means to explicate the clearly connected landscapes of the region's imagination through literature. This paper focuses on Sunlight on Broken Stones.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.27-56
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• 2015

How should we conceptualize regions? What is the context in which new approaches to regional study take place? What is the role of historical change in the reconceptualization of regions or areas? This article addresses this issue by using two case studies to shed light on the history of regional study by comparing some of the ways in which the Middle East and Southeast Asia have been conceptualized. Accordingly, the discussion traces the ways in which these areas were understood in the 19th century by highlighting the ideas of a number of influential Victorian thinkers. The Victorians are useful because not only did British thinkers play critical roles in the shaping of modern patterns of knowledge, but their empire was global in scope, encompassing parts of both Southeast Asia and the Middle East. However, the Victorians regarded these places quite differently: Southeast Asia was frequently described as "Further India" and the Middle East was the home of the Ottoman Empire. Both of these places were at least partly understood in relation to the needs of British policy-makers, who tended to focus most of their efforts according to the needs of India-which was their most important colonial possession. The article exhibits the connections between the "Eastern Question" and end of the Ottoman Empire (and the political developments which followed) led to the creation of the concept of "Middle East". With respect to Southeast Asia, attention will be devoted to the works of Alfred Russell Wallace, Hugh Clifford, and others to see how "further India" was understood in the 19th century. In addition, it is clear that the successful deployment of the term "Southeast Asia" reflected the political needs of policy makers in wake of decolonization and the Cold War. Finally, by showing the constructive nature of regions, the article suggests one possible new path for students of Southeast Asia. If the characterization of the region is marked by arbitrary factors, it may actually point to a useful avenue of enquiry, a hermeneutic of expedience. Emphasis on the adaptive and integrative features of lived realities in Southeast Asia may well be a step beyond both the agendas of "colonial knowledge" and anti-colonial nationalism.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.181-212
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• 2018

In 2017, the government of Duterte, in the second year of the ruling, more strongly promoted peace and order policies and expressed independent diplomacy as the chairman of ASEAN. He continued to fight against drugs and tried to increase his political legitimacy through the punishment for corrupt officials. He also declared martial law in the Mindanao region because of the dissolution of the Maute group, a Muslim terrorist organization, and strengthened counterterrorism cooperation externally. In addition, as to Communist militants, he took the initial reconciliation gesture and promoted peace negotiations, however, concluded the peace tide and started the suppression operation due to a series of bloodshed. He still has a strong drive in peace and order issues, backed up by high support rate, but it is becoming a factor of anxiety as the socioeconomically underprivileged and minority groups are increasingly alienated. As the chairman of ASEAN, Duterte has a certain distance from the United States, which is a firm ally, but has turned to increase familiarity with China and Russia, which can take substantial economic benefits. Through diversifying the external economic support and increase of tax revenue, the priority task was to establish the infrastructure. Although the Philippines, which has a high economic growth rate, has a strong expectation that it can establish a solid infrastructure, tax reforms should be successfully completed in order not to repeat the previous failures, which has traditionally increased foreign debt burden by relying on external resources. It seems that it is necessary to find the meeting point of the foreign policy of Duterte and new Korean government's New Southern Policy, and to find possible economic cooperation policies to improve Philippine infrastructure.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.189-196
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• 2008

This paper proposes a way of designing of a global logistics system for "the international cooperative global complementary production system" (ICGCPS) constructed in ASEAN region. ICGCPS is a global production system with several production bases located in a number of countries. In order to assemble the final products and sell them in the domestic market, each production base produces only special kinds of components and parts with the total demand required all the participating countries, and supplies them to the other production bases each other. In the ICGCPS, there are a number of important decision-making problems such as identifying which countries are suitable to produce specified components and parts, and deciding how to transport components and parts between the production bases. In the initial period of this system, each production base focused on its domestic market so that the final products it produced were sold only in the country where the base was located. Recently, some production bases have expanded sales to overseas markets. Taking this fact into account, we propose a production and transportation planning model in this paper that takes into account the export quantity of the final products, formulating it into a mathematical programming problem. Using this, we propose a way for managing the supply chain processes of the ICGCPS in order to improve performance measurements such as the total lead-time, the inventory quantity at the depot and the average rate of loading. A numerical example is presented to clarify the procedure proposed in this paper.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.19-38
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• 2020

Purpose - The Korean government has been promoting the New Southern Policy (NSP) prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which damage global value chain (GVC). The purpose of this paper is to emphasize that the NSP should be developed to provide tangible support in corporate GVC adjustment, away from diplomatic activities in order to offset GVC losses due to COVID-19 and expand export capabilities. Design/methodology - Two research methodologies are combined for this paper: A computational general equilibrium (CGE) model is used to estimate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and NSP on Korea's exports, and the decomposition methodology (Wang, Wei and Zhu, 2013) to evaluate the stability of GVC. The conventional CGE model was modified to obtain an estimate for decomposition. The research methodology adopted in this study was attempted for the first time, and it can be widely used in future GVC research. Findings - Results found the effects of COVID-19 reduced Korea's total exports by 27% and GVC by more than 30%. In particular, VA in Korea's exports to the NSP region was found to have a huge impact in heavy industries and textiles, and its exports to Vietnam seemed to suffer the largest loss in GVC among ASEAN countries. If the NSP is implemented properly, it appears that it could offset much of the negative impacts of COVID-19, implying the importance of the effectiveness of the NSP. Originality/value - Many papers have assessed the NSP descriptively, and the GVC has been a topic for many publications. However, the impact of COVID-19 on Korea's GVC with the NSP countries has not been quantitatively studied. This paper emphasizes that the NSP should be pursued based on the results of quantitative analysis. In addition, the research methodology of this paper can be used for other GVC research with relevant modifications.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.127-144
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• 2022

Recently, Korea is promoting cooperation with various countries, centering on ASEAN countries, with the aim of exporting Korean smart cities for the globalization of smart cities. The purpose of this study is to select excellent smart city technologies through analysis of smart city technologies owned by domestic companies and company status, and to prepare a plan for revitalization of companies with smart city technologies. Through prior research, the implications were derived through research on the existing smart city. Next, established a smart city policy analysis and smart city technology classification criteria through Korea and Overseas smart city policy and Korea smart city technology status DB. And the big data of smart city technology possessed by Korea companies and a plan for selecting a smart city export technology was prepared through analysis by region and company. As a result, to activate the technology possessed by Korea companies and to export overseas, it seems to need financial support and tax incentives that secure a pathway to export specialized smart technologies of SMEs, along with citizen participation and institutional supplementation. The smart city technology fields with the highest utilization in Korea were traffic, green energy, e-government, crime prevention, and construction, and the service types were platform, IoT, AI, big data, and GIS/GPS. These technologies are expected to contribute to building a platform for overseas smart city technology exports.