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Southeast Asia in Political Science

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................xiiiContributors.................................................................................................................................xv1. Introduction: The Contributions of Southeast Asian Political Studies Erik Martinez Kuhonta, Dan Slater, and Tuong Vu.....................12. Studying States in Southeast Asia Erik Martinez Kuhonta..................................................................................303. Democracy and Dictatorship Do Not Float Freely: Structural Sources of Political Regimes in Southeast Asia Dan Slater.....................554. Developing Democracies in Southeast Asia: Theorizing the Role of Parties and Elections Allen Hicken......................................805. Contentious Mass Politics in Southeast Asia: Knowledge Accumulation and Cycles of Growth and Exhaustion Tuong Vu.........................1026. In-Depth Research and Knowledge Accumulation About Agrarian Politics in Southeast Asia Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet........................1297. Civil Society and Close Approximations Thereof Meredith L. Weiss.........................................................................1448. Beyond Doctrine and Dogma: Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia Kikue Hamayotsu.......................................................1719. The Study of Political Ethnicity in Southeast Asia Jamie S. Davidson.....................................................................19910. Southeast Asia and the Political Economy of Development Regina Abrami and Richard F. Doner..............................................22711. The Missing Countryside: The Price of Ignoring Rural Political Economy in Southeast Asia Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung.......................25212. Southeast Asia and Globalization: The Political Economy of Illiberal Adaptation Greg Felker.............................................27413. Southeast Asia in Political Science: Terms of Enlistment Donald K. Emmerson.............................................................30214. Concluding Remarks Erik Martinez Kuhonta, Dan Slater, and Tuong Vu......................................................................325Notes........................................................................................................................................333Bibliography.................................................................................................................................361Index........................................................................................................................................423

Chapter One

ERIK MARTINEZ KUHONTA, DAN SLATER, AND TUONG VU

After a post–Vietnam War hiatus of nearly a quarter-century, Southeast Asia has recaptured the attention of the world. In 1997 the sudden devaluation of Thailand's national currency (the baht) triggered a financial crisis that swept throughout Asia and threatened for a time to engulf the world's richest economies. This "Asian Contagion" had its most devastating economic effects in Indonesia—the world's fourth-most-populous country—where financial implosion helped induce the dramatic collapse of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998 amid swelling public demands for democratic reform. The terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 brought heightened attention to Southeast Asia for quite different reasons, as the region's large Islamic populations and loosely governed territories led pundits to dub it "the second front in the global war on terror." When the SARS epidemic and bird flu outbreaks struck Southeast Asia starting in 2003, they raised the specter of global pandemics from which no country would be immune. And when Indonesia and Thailand bore the brunt of the most cataclysmic natural disaster in modern history—the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004—Southeast Asians' unspeakable suffering not only inspired an unprecedented outpouring of emergency assistance; it also inspired unprecedented calls for international coordination in preventing and limiting the destruction caused by environmental and public-health crises, which respect no boundaries in an increasingly interdependent world.

To be sure, the eleven countries of Southeast Asia—Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—may still seem geographically peripheral to Western eyes. No other region is so distant from both North America and Europe, where global institutions are primarily housed and global images are primarily shaped. Yet these dramatic (and mostly tragic) recent events should show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Southeast Asia's diverse political systems are far from peripheral to the most momentous global trends. It is a region that the rest of the world can ill afford to ignore or misunderstand.

Thankfully, scholars of Southeast Asian politics have been accumulating valuable knowledge on this complex and crucial region for decades. Southeast Asia may have been relatively neglected in the study of comparative politics (especially regarding Europe and Latin America), but it has by no means been neglected absolutely. This volume's first mission is to compile and display some of the extensive knowledge that scholars of Southeast Asian politics have produced on pressing global topics such as political Islam, state building, economic globalization, democracy and dictatorship, ethnic conflict, rural development, and civil society. Although students of Southeast Asian politics have produced an impressive range of scholarly works, Southeast Asianists still lack a systematic inventory and synthesis of the wealth of political knowledge that has been accumulated. This book's first goal is to fill this considerable void.

Our second purpose is somewhat broader and bolder. Beyond examining what we have learned about Southeast Asian politics, we also ask this: What can Southeast Asia tell us about the wider political world? This question ineluctably draws us into considerations of how theory, method, and region interact. As political scientists, we wish to consider whether the qualitative analysis of Southeast Asian politics has gone beyond generating particular, fragmented bits of empirical knowledge and whether it has produced more general theoretical insights for our discipline as a whole. We will argue that Southeast Asianists have indeed accumulated theoretical as well as empirical knowledge but that these general, portable insights are often easily missed when scholars refrain from framing their arguments in theoretically self-conscious terms, or from discussing the potential comparative implications of their arguments.

In sum, this book calls for concerted efforts to improve and invigorate the scholarly synergy between region and discipline. We see this endeavor as long overdue. In the last two decades, fresh theoretical perspectives and qualitative methodological approaches have emerged in political science, and there is much room for Southeast Asianists both to contribute to and gain from these new developments. Rather than approaching these theoretical and...