After the Kuomintang (KMT) lost control of mainland China in 1949, some of its troops retreated to mainland Southeast Asia, marking the start of a period of mutual interaction between the KMT troops and Southeast Asian states in the context of the Cold War. The objective of this paper is to focus on the KMT troops who retreated to Northern Thailand. The author argues that the KMT troops, as protagonists in border areas, promoted border consolidation in Northern Thailand through war and village building. The Thai government, lacking effective jurisdiction over the border, took advantage of the KMT, using it as the most effective tool for border management and as a military force to counter the Communist threat along border areas. Through years of fighting with the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), KMT troops helped eliminate potential security risks in Northern Thailand. Consequently, border villages with defenses bolstered during the war years epitomized the Northern Thai border being brought under the aegis of state control.

How did the splitting of the Tana Toraja region in 2008 challenge the local aristocrats’ dual role in adat and politics in the new North Toraja? Why and how did these aristocrats fail to secure their dual role after the 2015 election? After 32 years of the New Order regime, adat rights were finally revived through the Return to Lembang regulation in 2001. The law channelled noble families’ hereditary rights back to local political affairs. However, the splitting of the region, or pemekaran daerah, opened a new venue for power contestation in North Toraja District. Following the second direct local head election in 2015, noble families’ role in politics gradually diminished due to the participation of a growing class of wealthy and politically strong non-traditional elites in democratic elections. Using interviews, triangulated with government archives and media resources, I extend previous studies of North Toraja aristocrats’ advantage to reassert their dual role—in adat and politics—after the region’s split. I argue that decentralization policies initiated through democratic elections came with high risks for aristocrats to again secure their traditional hereditary rights. This study was inspired by Lee Ann Fujii’s (2014) accidental ethnography study based on stories and unplanned encounters in Bosnia, Rwanda, and other places. It aims to contribute to an understanding of decentralization and indigenous minority groups’ survival in Indonesia’s multicultural society.

Following Heonik Kwon, this article explores the social and cultural underpinnings of the Cold War (and Cambodia’s stance of neutrality in relation to it) as illustrated through the life of a colorful Cambodian monk, Dharmawara Mahathera. Long resident in India, Dharmawara became a confidant of Norodom Sihanouk as the latter negotiated independence and Cambodia’s new geopolitical realities. Dharmawara was one point of connection between Sihanouk and India at the time Sihanouk was drawn to a position of neutrality and to the Non-Aligned Movement associated with Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai, and his story illuminates some of the cultural interface underlying the politics. He would assume a profile in emerging institutions of international Buddhism, such as the World Fellowship of Buddhists, which in their own way related to developing geopolitics. He subsequently attracted the attention of American diplomats in Cambodia in ways that illustrate something of how the Cold War came to be negotiated on the ground. His tensions with the Cambodian monastic hierarchy help us better understand the latter’s role at a historical conjuncture. I argue that Dharmawara helps us understand Sihanouk’s emerging philosophy of “Buddhist socialism.”

This paper examines the unsettling stories of poverty from rural Indonesia in two films, Siti (2014) and Turah (2016). The concept of structural poverty enables a thorough analysis of these films’ depictions of poverty and the main characters’ reactions to the poverty they experience. This paper also employs the concept of gendered poverty to highlight how gender injustice perpetuates the poverty of women, as depicted in the films. Both structural and gendered poverty are propagated by the interpellation of ideological state apparatuses. This paper argues that the poverty of the rural people depicted in both films results from structural engineering by the elite, not from natural or inevitable conditions. This poverty is further intensified by the patriarchal culture of rural communities, which perpetuates gender inequality and results in deeper poverty for women. Every woman in these two films seems to have accepted, or at least resigned herself to, the patriarchal system and the gendered poverty it produces. The sole exception is Siti, who struggles against the double burden of being both housewife and breadwinner, resisting the naturalization of poverty and thereby revealing the role that ideological state apparatuses play in perpetuating oppression in society writ large as well as in individuals’ minds and souls.

Acacia catechu (Sha)-bearing forests are the primary sources of cutch, a tannin extract from the heartwood of Sha trees. Sha forests in Myanmar are managed for cutch production, and tree harvesting for cutch is regulated by an official diameter limit (ODL, 30 cm DBH [diameter at breast height]). We explored sustainable Sha forest management for cutch production through stand inventory surveys and informal interviews with locals and forest managers. We compared Sha forests with six different official harvest histories and assessed seedlings and saplings as well as the size and species of harvested stumps and remaining trees. We found that the forest understory was disturbed by surface fire, and all Sha seedlings and saplings < 1.7 m in height showed post-fire marks. We observed a regeneration gap between 1.7 m and 2.7 m, which might indicate the flame height of the surface fire. The “illegal” harvest exceeded the official harvest; only 5% of the harvested stumps were found to be larger than the ODL. Local harvesting of cutch appeared to be limited by the stem diameter required for heartwood formation (15 cm DBH). Stump data revealed that the forests were utilized not only for cutch but also for other purposes, including fuel and timber. Despite fire and local harvesting, local forest utilization patterns appear to be reasonable, although they are illegal. Implementing fire control and community management of forests along with clear definition of property rights could help in sustainably managing Sha forests for cutch production.

The New Economic Policy has transformed Malaysia since 1971. Pro-Bumiputera affirmative action has been intensively pursued and continuously faced pushback. This paper revisits three key junctures in the NEP’s fifty-year history that heightened policy debates—and the ensuing persistent polarization and stalemate in policy discourses. First, at its inception in the early 1970s, despite substantial clarity in its two-pronged poverty alleviation and social restructuring structure, the NEP was marred by gaps and omissions, notably its ambiguity on policy mechanisms and long-term implications, and inordinate emphasis on Bumiputera equity ownership. Broader discourses have imbibed these elements, and they tend to be more selective than systematic in policy critique. Second, during the late 1980s, rousing deliberations on the successor to the NEP settled on a growth-oriented strategy that basically retained the NEP framework and extended ethnicity-driven compromises. Third, since 2010, notions of reform and alternatives to the NEP’s affirmative action program have been propagated, which despite bold proclamations again amount to partial and selective—not comprehensive—change. Affirmative action presently drifts along, with minor modifications and incoherent reform rhetoric stemming from conflation of the NEP’s two prongs. Breaking out of the prevailing polarization and impasse requires a systematic and constructive rethink.