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 ...

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, ...

Observers in the West have largely interpreted the devastating violence that has engulfed Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup as a “battle between democracy and authoritarianism”. This ...

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 ...

Large parts of Phnom Penh still showcase French colonial ideas about urban design that were in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French introduced European architectural styles, ...

For the first time, a resistance movement against military rule is welcoming and aiding soldiers who choose to join the ‘people’s side’. This post is an abridged version of an article that appears in ...

This piece is co-published with AcademiaSG, a scholarly site promoting scholarship of/by/for Singapore. Singapore’s public housing program is sui generis, un-replicable in its entirety anywhere.

Beginning today New Mandala will be taking a break for the Australian Christmas and New Year holidays and will be back in early January. On behalf of myself and our ARTSEA series’ editor Dr Elly Kent ...

Before the election of Joko Widodo as Indonesia’s president in 2014, Indonesian politics was regarded by many observers as being marked by relatively negligible levels of polarisation. This ...

After years of debate, protest, and delay, the Indonesian parliament passed a new criminal code (Undang Undang Kitab Hukum Pidana, or KUHP) that gives the state new tools to punish a wide range of ...