The recent incursion into Sabah of more than 200 armed groups styling themselves as the Royal Army of the Sultan of Sulu has put another challenge to ASEAN’s claim to its centrality in the region.

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 ...

“Fake news” has become a buzzword in the contemporary political lexicon around the world. In Indonesia, there has been significant concern about the so-called rise of berita hoax (“hoax news”) in the ...

The last week has seen a wave of huge protests around Indonesia against the new so-called omnibus law—a massive law that amends 79 existing statutes and is touted by the government as easing ...

Photo courtesy of Akshay Mahajan (Creative Commons licence) After a long period of relative silence, the most tragic period in Cambodia’s history has experienced a renaissance of interest. Spurred by ...

Are Indonesia’s political parties all alike? Are some more in favour of political reform than others? Do some favour business interests while others see themselves as siding with the poor? And does it ...

In 1967, Operation Merdeka was initiated by the late President Ferdinand Marcos. The main objective was to annex Sabah for the Philippines. The legal basis of the operation was the claim of the Sultan ...

Nurses wearing the starched white caps and uniforms long abandoned for utilitarian scrubs in much of the world volunteer to check the temperatures of migrant workers who are returning to Myanmar from ...

Islam, the religion of the vast majority of Indonesian citizens, is a site of contestation in envisioning Indonesia’s future. Gender equity as a democratic value has been a strong claim since the fall ...

The 10 th of August 2020 will be remembered as either a key date in Thailand’s transition to democracy or as a precursor to yet another coup carried out by a military pledging itself to the defence of ...

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 ...

Over recent decades, the nature of Indonesia-related expertise in Australian universities has changed dramatically. During the late 1980s the arts faculty in which I was an undergrad included many ...