Episodes

  • Talking Thai Politics: Kunthika Nutcharut, Defending Disruptors

    Talking Thai Politics: Kunthika Nutcharut, Defending Disruptors
    Oct 11 2024
    What is it like to be a human rights lawyer in Thailand? How does the new generation of 2020s political activists differ from those of previous eras? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, we talk to Kunthika Nutcharut about her work with Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. Kunthika comes from a political family – her lawyer father Krisadang Nutcharut was a student activisit in the 1970s – and she studied and worked in Germany before deciding to return to Thailand to taken on the challenging work of defending outspoken figures in the post-2020 student-led protest movement. Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Chayata Sripanich is a research associate with the Generation Thailand project. Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant is Li Xinruo. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    32 mins
  • James Villanueva, "Awaiting MacArthur's Return: World War II Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines" (UP of Kansas, 2022)

    James Villanueva, "Awaiting MacArthur's Return: World War II Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines" (UP of Kansas, 2022)
    Oct 8 2024
    Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan's occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrillas never possessed the combat strength to overcome the Japanese occupation on their own, they disrupted operations, kept the spirit of resistance alive, provided important intelligence to the Allies, and assumed frontline duties fighting the Japanese. By examining the organization, motivations, capabilities, and operations of the guerrillas, James Villanueva argues that the guerrillas were effective because Japanese punitive measures, along with a strong sense of obligation and loyalty to the United States, pushed most of the population to support the guerrillas. Unlike their predecessors opposing the Americans in 1899, the guerrillas during World War II benefited from the leadership of US and Filipino military personnel and received significant aid and direction from General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) Headquarters, conducting one of the most effective and sophisticated resistance campaigns in World War II. Awaiting MacArthur's Return: World War II Guerrilla Resistance against the Japanese in the Philippines (UP of Kansas, 2022) is the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the major World War II guerrilla groups across the Philippine Archipelago, providing a fuller picture of the nature of the war in the Southwest Pacific and revealing the extent to which the guerrilla movement affected operations for both Allied and Imperial Japanese forces. Analyzing the organizational effectiveness of the guerrillas resisting the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, this book alternates narrative chapters with thematic chapters examining the guerrillas' organization, logistics, administration, intelligence gathering, and the support they received from Allied forces and provided the Allies in turn. Villanueva offers the most in-depth analysis of the guerrillas' military organization and effectiveness in the context of existing theories of insurgency and counterinsurgency while using an extensive body of memoirs, archival guerrilla and US Army and Navy records, and translations of Japanese documents and interviews with Japanese officers. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    34 mins
  • Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

    Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
    Oct 7 2024
    Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known about the Manila trade. The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) offers the first reconstruction of the capital market of Manila using new archival sources that have never been used in the economic history of Pacific trade. The book explains how trade between Asia and Spanish America across the Pacific, which lasted for 250 years (1571 – 1815) was financed from the city of Manila.The book analyses the political economy and institutional structures of the Manila capital market in the context of the global silver trade, as well as addressing key similarities and differences with European trade routes and differing approaches to colonialism and commerce in Asian waters. It traces how the Manila capital market emerged in a bottom-up process with a redistributive aspect that tied the interests of citizens with the fortunes of trade, using institutions familiar to the public like legacy funds, brotherhoods and lay religious orders to pool liquidity, originate working capital, and internalise the risk of loss at sea. It challenges the notion that there is a normative model for the development of capital markets and introduces an industrial organisation analysis to the broader structure of Early Modern trade in the Spanish Empire. Sitting at the intersection of economic and financial history, global history, imperial history and political economy, this book will be a cutting-edge and valuable resource for a broad range of scholars: This book is based on the dissertation entitled: AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL FOR EARLY MODERN LONG-DISTANCE TRADE FINANCE: THE CAPITAL MARKETS OF MANILA, 1680-1838, London School of Economics, University of London, 2023. Winner of the Coleman Prize, 2024. Juan Jose Rivas Moreno is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He has previously held an Economic History Society Fellowship affiliated with University College London (UCL), and was the recipient of a short-term fellowship at the Newberry Library of Chicago to conduct archival research during his PhD. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    53 mins
  • Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives

    Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives
    Oct 6 2024
    This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, global commodity chains or supply chains, exploitation of labour and environmental degradation, and resistance. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dr. Alyssa Paredes, an environmental and economic anthropologist who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Paredes received her PhD in Anthropology (with distinction) from Yale University in 2020. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Antipode, Ethnos, Gastronomica, and the Journal of Political Ecology. She is a contributor to the edited volume Multispecies Justice and the Feral Atlas website, and she is co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i Press in April 2025. She is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism from Philippine Mindanao, which traces the afterlives of externalities in the making and unmaking of an industrial agricultural crop, drawing on approaches from such fields as anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography, and critical food studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    46 mins
  • Prabowo Subianto and the Decline of Indonesian Democracy

    Prabowo Subianto and the Decline of Indonesian Democracy
    Oct 2 2024
    Today’s episode focuses on Indonesia, the presidential election held in February 2024, and the impending inauguration of the winner of that election, former Army general and current defence minister Prabowo Subianto, in a few weeks’ time. Prabowo’s victory in February, events over the past several months, and the imminent transition to a Prabowo presidency have heightened concerns about the state of democracy in Indonesia. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Ed Aspinall, one of the world’s leading specialists on Indonesian politics and someone who has been writing about worrying trends in Indonesian politics for many years. Edward Aspinall is Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Corall Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU). He is the author of Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2005), Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2009), (with Ward Berenschot) Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019), and (with Allen Hicken, Paul Hutchcroft, and Meredith Weiss) Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Networks in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University press, 2022). He is the co-editor of a book series with National University of Singapore Press and co-editor of the Southeast Asian Politics and Society Elements series published by Cambridge University Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    42 mins
  • Charles Keith, "Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France" (U California Press, 2024)

    Charles Keith, "Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France" (U California Press, 2024)
    Oct 1 2024
    When we think of the history of French colonialism in Indochina, we tend to think of the French in Indochina. Yet during the colonial period about 200,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao travelled to France to study, work, or plan revolution. While we may be familiar with the most famous of these Indochinese sojourners in France, Nguyen Ai Quoc, aka Ho Chi Minh, the stories of these other Indochinese sojourners have never been told – until now. In this highly original, exhaustively researched book, Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France (University of California Press, 2024), Charles Keith reconstructs the lives of these Indochinese sojourners, and shows how living in France changed them, and how they, in turn, changed Indochina. The book contributes to a booming area of historiography that emphasizes the interconnections between people in different parts of the world, including peoples in colonized states and the colonial metropole. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    49 mins
  • James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)

    James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)
    Sep 30 2024
    From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China’s relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority. Rulers and high officials at the Chinese court valued commerce in the region, where rare commodities could be obtained and vassal kingdoms showed less belligerence than did northern ones. Trade routes along this Southwest Silk Road traverse the homelands of numerous non-Han peoples. In The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation (University of Washington Press, 2024), James A. Anderson investigates the principalities, chiefdoms, and market nodes that emerged and flourished in the network of routes that passed through what James A. Anderson calls the "Dong world," a collection of Tai-speaking polities in upland valleys. The process of state formation that arose through trade coincided with the differentiation of peoples who were later labeled as distinct ethnicities. Exploration of this formative period at the nexus of the Chinese empire, the Dali kingdom, and the Vietnamese kingdom reveals a nuanced picture of the Chinese province of Yunnan and its southern neighbors preceding Mongol efforts to impose a new administrative order in the region. These communities shared a regional identity and a lively history of interaction well before northern occupiers classified its inhabitants as "national minorities" of China. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    31 mins
  • Mark Tamthai: Remembering Chaiwat Satha-Anand

    Mark Tamthai: Remembering Chaiwat Satha-Anand
    Sep 27 2024
    Why was the late Ajarn Chaiwat Satha-Anand so passionate about bringing peace to Thailand’s deep south? How did he try to speak nonviolence to Thai power elites? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, Ajarn Mark Tamthai of Payap University talks about his memories of working with Chaiwat, especially their efforts to end the ongoing violent conflict in the Malay-Muslim-majority region that includes Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. Chaiwat Satha-Anand (1955-2024) was a professor of political science at Thammasat University and one of Thailand’s most eminent social scientists. A political philosopher among whose core interests were Islam and non-violence, his numerous books included The Life of this World: negotiated Muslim lives in Thai society (2005) and Imagined Land: the state and southern violence in Thailand (2009). The article by Chaiwat mentioned in the episode is ‘The Silence of the Bullet Monument’, Critical Asian Studies 38, 1, 2006, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672710600556411 The English version of the 2006 National Reconciliation Commission Report (for which Chaiwat was the lead author) may be found here https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/projects/southern-thai-insurgency-2/southern-thai-insurgency/ Mark Tamthai is a former head of the Department of Philosophy at Chulalongkorn University and former director of the Institute of Religion, Culture and Peace at Payap University. Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant is Li Xinruo. Website: https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/podcasts/ Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies
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    33 mins