• 수완나부미
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.157-180
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• 2018

Area studies, including Asian and Southeast Asian studies, in the post-Cold War era have been facing an epochal challenge that is rooted in two conditions: on the one hand, the end of the Cold War and the fading geopolitical rationale, and on the other, the emergence of the technology-driven transformation of the global economy and society. The consequences thus far are paradoxical: 1) While the technology-led transformation needs a workforce with critical and innovative abilities, higher education becomes more hyper-utilitarian; 2) While the transformation instigates increasing diversity of identities in global cultures, many countries thrive for STEM education at the expense of learning languages and cultures, including area studies which are essential for diversity. Southeast Asian studies programs need to change in response to these new conditions. These changing conditions and paradoxes, nevertheless, take different forms and degrees in the American, European and Asian academies, thanks to their different histories of higher education. The prospects for Southeast Asian Studies in these various academies are likely to be different too.

• 수완나부미
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.57-85
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• 2018

The debates continue on the conceptualization of Southeast Asia and the ways in which those of us who are concerned to attempt scholarly interventions in the region define, conceive, understand and engage with it. But, in an important sense, the region has now been defined for us by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and whatever academic researchers might wish to impose on Southeast Asia in regard to their priorities and interests, it may make little difference. Given the politically-derived, nation-state definition of Southeast Asia, are all our problems of regional definition resolved? In some respects, they have been. ASEAN has constructed and institutionalized a regional organization and an associated regional culture. But in certain fields of research we still require academic flexibility. We cannot always be confined by an ASEAN-derived regional definition. The paper will explore other configurations of 'region' and its sub-divisions and propose, that in the spirit of academic freedom, we can continue to generate imaginative depictions of Southeast Asia and its constituents both within and beyond the region.

• 수완나부미
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.159-186
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• 2019

Southeast Asia accounts for nearly a tenth of total worldwide cross-border movements of migrant workers. Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, and Philippines make up the sending countries while Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand are the major destinations. Migrant worker movements are predominantly in production process and low- to medium-skilled sectors. It is not unusual for irregular or undocumented movements to take place. In not a few instances, migrants work under harsh and exploitative conditions. In recent years, however, ASEAN has taken steps to manage labor migration at the regional level. The paper argues that ASEAN has not managed these cross-border labor flows as well as it should particularly in terms of protecting and promoting the human rights of migrants. It will be difficult to establish the genuine building blocks for a regional human rights mechanism unless there is a diffusion of alternative universal norms and standards to what ASEAN already embodies. As long as states resist any attempt to weaken or question or deligitimize their capacity to determine who gets to enter, stay, and leave their jurisdictions, it will be difficult to establish an effective migrant rights framework for the region.

• 수완나부미
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.169-184
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• 2019

In recent years, Vietnamese literature has seen the rise of women writers in a genre traditionally dominated by men-travel writing. Phuong Mai, Huyen Chip, Dinh Hang, among others, are just a few who have introduced innovations to this genre. This paper investigates the practice of contemporary Vietnamese women travel-writers and how they differ in perception compared to their male counterparts. One of the most crucial differences is that women perform cultural embodiment, employing their bodies instead of their minds. An encounter of the woman writer with other cultures is, therefore, an encounter between the body and the very physical conditions of culture, which leads to a will to change, to transform, more than a desire to conquer, to penetrate the other. Utilizing the concept deterritorialization developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper argues that despite being deemed fragile and without protection, women's bodies are in fact fluid and able to open new possibilities of land and culture often stripped away by masculinist ideology.

• 수완나부미
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.117-147
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• 2018

Only a few researchers highlighted the implementation of Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification. These neglected the importance of analyzing the different trajectories of the relations of production in Indonesian palm oil development. As a result, there is a prevailing doubtful attitude on ISPO legitimation. This paper aims to identify how independent smallholder pilot projects give meaning to ISPO legitimation and implementation. It explores production relations in a smallholder community, focusing on land ownership, the formation of a cooperative, and response capability in cases of failure. This paper reveals that the project brought greater understanding to the community with regards to sustainability, as well as strengthened cooperation between the company and the cooperative. This, despite the community's confronting the same problems of land legality as other independent farmers, as the community is located inside the company concession (Hak Guna Usaha, HGU).

• 수완나부미
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.149-174
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• 2018

Southeast Asians participate in elections eagerly, a fact indexed by the high electoral participation rates across a range of political conditions in the region. What gives elections in Southeast Asia such high legitimacy? Using data from Indonesia and the Philippines, this article emphasizes the need to understand peoples' rationalities, which are informed by meanings generated by prevailing cultural practices. From this perspective, electoralism can be understood as a cultural phenomenon that conforms to the structure of a ritual. Despite the democratic deficit in many electoral exercises, elections share the attractiveness and fun of traditional community festivities. Voters participate in elections as a testament to membership in a community. Although they do not always transform the existing social arrangements, elections embed contradictory impulses in the same way that cockfights do. A procedure of formal democracy authored elsewhere, electoralism has been localized in Southeast Asia and invested with indigenous significance.

• 수완나부미
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.71-100
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• 2019

The region between mainland China on the east and the Indian sub-continent on the west is referred to as Southeast Asia since the conclusion of the Pacific War (1941-1945). As a region, Southeast Asia appears as a hodgepodge of disparity and diversity, but a closer scrutiny reveals numerous common attributes and characteristics. This study attempts to identify and examine the cohesive and shared characteristics across the Southeast Asian region from a historical and sociocultural perspective. The intention is to differentiate an identity borne of the underlying commonalities of shared characteristics whether physical, experiential, emotive, and/or in terms of heritage. Subsequently, Southeast Asia has more grounds to claim itself as a distinct region, and an "area of study," besides the political expediency of ASEAN.

• 수완나부미
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.101-132
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• 2019

Why do some local rebel groups choose to form asymmetric alliances with large transnational terrorist organizations? This paper examines asymmetric terrorist alliance patterns by studying the international ties of domestic insurgencies in Southeast Asia. It uses data from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand to construct a theory defining the determinants of the choice of alliance strategies by terrorist groups. The findings conclude that rebels with limited aims prefer to act alone out of fear of entrapment. They are cautious of becoming associated with the struggle of transnational radical groups and provoking organized response from international and regional counterterrorism authorities. Local groups are more likely to seek alliance with an established movement when they have ambitious final objectives, challenging the core interests of the target state. In this case, the benefits of training and logistic support provided by an experienced organization outweigh the costs of becoming a target for coordinated counterterrorist campaign.

• 수완나부미
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.89-114
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• 2018

In this paper, I argue that while area studies in the United States has declined since the end of the Cold War, its area impulse of has emerged in other fields of inquiry, particularly Asian-American Studies. Accordingly, I explain how the collective reflections of Filipino-American scholars on empire, migration, diaspora, and identity point to the consolidation and viability of the transpacific as an area, which spans both the United States and the Philippines. Addressing several problems with this straddling-mainly as criticisms of Filipino-American Studies-I show how the transpacific serves as a bridge between Philippine Studies and Filipino-American Studies, and helps define the boundaries and overlaps between both fields of inquiry.

• 수완나부미
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.85-105
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• 2019

Investigating the clash among different forms of international relations has been a frequent issue in modern research and attracts interest in the fields of history and politics. In the nineteenth-century, Asia witnessed a fierce struggle between traditional relations in Asia that existed during the feudal period, that of "The Heavenly Dynasty, China and its vassal states"; and a the new form of relations introduced by the West, that of relations between "colonial powers and colonized countries." As a result, the formation of "colonial societies" in Asia with very specific features was established. However, as stated by Vu (2015), for many reasons, which include the lack of material resources, the politically sensitive nature of the object, and the focus on gains and losses in previous studies, there were little studies on the process of demarcating the Tonkinese border between Franco and Chinese in Vietnam, especially from a globalization perspective. This study thus aims at examining the issue of the demarcation of the Tonkinese Border between Franco and Chinese (1885-1895), in view of globalization, as a case study for the transition process of the modern history of Vietnamese society.