New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

Southeast Asia was home to many of the hot battles of the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union the region has been beset by legacies of political violence. Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia serve as the most obvious examples here. In addition to these ideological conflicts, ethnic conflicts have exploded into ethnic cleansing and genocide. Meanwhile, in the Philippines and Thailand, politicians have used violence as a technique of governance. Throughout Southeast Asia we can find patterns of necropolitical solutions to social, economic, and ethnic conflicts. In this podcast I talk to Eve Zucker and Ben Kiernan about their anthology Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945: Case Studies from Six Countries, published in 2021 as part of Routledge’s series “Mass Violence in Modern History”. The anthology contains 17 essays from scholars in various stages of their careers and a variety of disciplines, but they all specialize in some aspect of the history of political violence in Southeast Asia.