A Pathway to Emergent Social Complexity and State Power: A View from Southeast Asia

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-253
Author(s):  
Nam C. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Complexity ◽  
State Power

Islamicate Cosmopolitanism from North Africa to Southeast Asia

2018 ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Bruce B. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
State Power ◽  
Ethical Reflection ◽  
Ibn Khaldun

Lawrence introduces the idea that ‘Islamicate cosmopolitans’ engage in moral introspection to fashion a genuine orientation of openness to religious-cum-cultural difference. Drawing from the work of Marshall Hodgson, Lawrence argues that these cosmopolitans carried a specific conscience, a conscience that precedes Islam yet was reshaped by the Quran and ethical reflection within Muslim empires. The chapter then explores two renowned pre-modern thinkers, the scientific polymath Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī and the legal scholars Ibn Khaldūn, as exemplars of a universal ethos with an Islamicate accent. Yet, Lawrence also acknowledges how notions of cosmopolitan justice could nevertheless sustain coercion by directing Muslim commitment to state power through concepts such as the medieval ‘circle of justice’.

scholarly journals The Volatile State in Southeast Asia: Evidence from Sumatra, 1600–1800

2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 497-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freek Colombijn
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
State Power ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The State ◽  
Central State ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
State Capital

The communis opinio of historians is that early modern, or precolonial, states in Southeast Asia tended to lead precarious existences. The states were volatile in the sense that the size of individual states changed quickly, a ruler forced by circumstances moved his state capital, the death of a ruler was followed by a dynastic struggle, or a local subordinate head either ignored or took over the central state power; in short, states went through short cycles of rise and decline. Perhaps nobody has helped establish this opinion more than Clifford Geertz (1980) with his powerful metaphor of the “theatre state.” Many scholars have preceded and followed him in their assessment of the shakiness of the state (see, for example, Andaya 1992, 419; Bentley 1986, 292; Bronson 1977, 51; Hagesteijn 1986, 106; Milner 1982, 7; Nagtegaal 1996, 35, 51; Reid 1993, 202; Ricklefs 1991, 17; Schulte Nordholt 1996, 143–48). The instability itself was an enduring phenomenon. Most polities existed in a state of flux, oscillating between integration and disintegration, a phenomenon which was first analyzed for mainland Southeast Asia by Edmund Leach (1954) in his seminal work on the Kachin chiefdoms. This alternation of state formation and the breaking up of kingdoms has been called the “ebb and flow of power” and the “rhythm” of Malay history (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 35). In this article, I will probe into the causes of the volatility of the Southeast Asian states, using material from Sumatra to make my case.

scholarly journals Standoffish States: Nonliterate Leviathans in Southeast Asia

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Slater ◽  
Diana Kim
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Power ◽  
Divide And Conquer ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Mobile Populations ◽  
The World ◽  
Indirect Rule ◽  
Fundamental Objective

AbstractUnder what conditions do states strive to homogenise their populations, rendering them ‘legible’ for state-making projects? Virtually all conditions, according to James Scott's landmark treatise,The Art of Not Being Governed. Whereas Scott sees states’ appetites to standardise their populations for purposes of control and extraction as practically universal, we see this appetite as radically and fascinatingly uneven. Much as Scott sees mobile populations as ‘nonliterate’ due to their disinterest in (and not their ignorance of) the purported fruits of civilisation, we see Leviathans as frequently ‘nonliterate’ in their disinclination (and not simply their incapacity) to actively administer their subjects and territory: even in Southeast Asia, the region that has done more than any other to generate Scott's theories of state power and practice. We thus argue that the world is riddled with standoffish states, not just standardising states. Even in the zones where the potential costs of eschewing the pursuit of legibility appear highest – those containing violent insurgencies – states can prove surprisingly disinterested in pursuing centralised governance in a highly administrative manner. We highlight four alternative strategies – indirect rule, divide and conquer, militarised pacification, and forcible expulsion – that states commonly deploy to fulfil what we see as their most fundamental objective: preventing political challenges to the ruling centre.

Beyond Nationalism and Revolution in Southeast Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Power ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Asian History ◽  
New Nation

This chapter offers a composite picture of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Việtnamese revolutions that goes beyond both established understandings of these revolutions as nationalist in nature and the various strands of the growing body of literature on the various cosmopolitan connections cited above. The chapter intends to provide a new descriptive overview of the three major revolutions in Southeast Asian history. In so doing, the chapter provides a critical counterpoint to those understandings and accounts of these revolutions that, consciously or unconsciously, follow official nationalist narratives in which the rise of national consciousness produces nationalists who make national revolutions. It works to undermine efforts to appropriate these revolutions — and the making of these three new nation-states — for the nationalist elites who came to occupy state power in the aftermaths of these revolutions and throughout the postindependence era. By providing alternative narratives, the chapter suggests ways these revolutions might be understood not only in terms of their victories and their victors but in light of their betrayals and their victims, as the diverse and diverging emancipatory energies that helped to fuel revolutionary mobilization were in various ways absorbed, appropriated, and eviscerated by postrevolutionary (nation-)states.

State Power and Private Profit: the political economy of corruption in Southeast Asia

2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Y.C. Lim ◽  
Aaron Stern
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Profit
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