Presents a multidimensional perspective of globalisation in Southeast Asia. Looks at political, economic, security, social, and cultural dimensions of globalisation and local responses, showing evidence of complex interfacing between the global and the local, championing the need for a multidisciplinary approach to globalisation studies.

Focuses on the globalization-democratization nexus and shows how governance is being restructured and democracy sometimes deepened in this new global era.

No part of the world has been affected more by globalization in recent decades than Southeast Asia. This has led many observers to believe that the region’s present experience with globalization is at once unprecedented, inevitable, and irreversible. Professor Peter A. Coclanis challenges such beliefs, and, in so doing, provides a history of globalization in Southeast Asia over the past two millennia. Employing Stephen Jay Gould’s famous temporal metaphors — time’s arrow and time’s cycle — Coclanis traces the trajectory of globalization, arguing that globalization has ebbed and flowed in the region over the centuries, that globalization is best viewed as a process rather than a permanent condition, and that its effects have differed considerably across space and over time. Professor Peter A. Coclanis is Associate Provost for International Affairs and Albert R. Newsome Professor of History and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was Raffles Visiting Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore in 2005.

This book questions why Southeast Asian nation states are struggling to adopt full-fledged liberal democracy and attempts to better understand the relationship between globalization and models of democracy. Country studies are covered mostly by native Southeast Asian scholars who analyse recent developments as well as specific concerns that have arisen from political crises, citizen uprisings, ethnic identity politics, political reforms, social justice and inequality, and the persistence of the political elite. The collection highlights factors which have impacted the different regional and national paths taken such as: the legacy of the Cold War, rapid economic development and liberalization, external economic globalization, the important role of informal politics, powerful elites, and weak but emerging middle classes. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of regional studies of Southeast Asia, Democracy, Sociology, Politics and Globalization Studies.

The rapid postwar economic growth in the Southeast Asia region has led to a transformation of many of the societies there, together with the development of new types of anthropological research in the region. Local societies with originally quite different cultures have been incorporated into multi-ethnic states with their own projects of nation-building based on the creation of "national cultures" using these indigenous elements. At the same time, the expansion of international capitalism has led to increasing flows of money, people, languages and cultures across national boundaries, resulting in new hybrid social structures and cultural forms. This book examines the nature of these processes in contemporary Southeast Asia with detailed case studies drawn from countries across the region, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At the macro-level these include studies of nation-building and the incorporation of minorities. At the micro-level they range from studies of popular cultural forms, such as music and textiles to the impact of new sects and the world religions on local religious practice. Moving between the global and the local are the various streams of migrants within the region, including labor migrants responding to the changing distribution of economic opportunities and ethnic minorities moving in response to natural disaster.

This third volume of three accepts that globalization is both the context within which Southeast Asian countries must function and is a process which governments and businesses have embraced. The focus of this text is on how the phenomenon of globalization has affected individuals' well-being and the community security.

As an academic field in its own right, the topic of border studies is experiencing a revival in university geography courses as well as in wider political commentary. Until recently, border studies in contemporary Southeast Asia appeared as an afterthought at best to the politics of interstate rivalry and national consolidation. The maps set out all agreed postcolonial lines. Meanwhile, the physical demarcation of these boundaries lagged. Large slices of territory, on land and at sea, eluded definition or delineation. That comforting ambiguity has disappeared. Both evolving technologies and price levels enable rapid resource extraction in places, and in volumes, once scarcely imaginable. The beginning of the 21st century's second decade is witnessing an intensifying diplomacy, both state-to-state and commercial, over offshore petroleum. In particular, the South China Sea has moved from being a rather arcane area of conflict studies to the status of a bellwether issue. Along with other contested areas in the western Pacific and south Asia, the problem increasingly defines China's regional relationships in Asia, and with powers outside the region, especially the United States. Yet intraregional territorial differences also hobble multilateral diplomacy to counter Chinese claims, and daily management of borders remains burdened by a lot of retrospective baggage. The contributors to this book emphasize this mix of heritage and history as the primary leitmotif for contemporary border rivalries and dynamics. Whether the region's 11 states want it or not, their bordered identity is falling into ever sharper definition, if only because of pressure from extraregional states. This book aims to provide new ways of looking at the reality and illusion of bordered Southeast Asia.

"Malaysia has long had an ambivalent relationship to globalization. A shining example of export-led growth and the positive role for foreign investment, the country's political leadership has also expressed skepticism about the prevailing international political and economic order. In this compelling collection, Nelson, Meerman and Rahman Embong bring together a group of Malaysian and foreign scholars to dissect the effects of globalization on Malaysian development over the long-run. They consider the full spectrum of issues from economic and social policy to new challenges from transnational Islam, and are unafraid of voicing skepticism where the effects of globalization are overblown. Malaysia is surprisingly understudied in comparative context; this volume remedies that, and provides an overview of a country undergoing important political change." – Stephan Haggard, Krause Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego

'Local Responses to Global Challenges in Southeast Asia — A Transregional Studies Reader' is a collection of multidisciplinary essays, predominantly derived from papers presented at EuroSEAS 2019, the leading academic conference on Southeast Asian Studies, hosted by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. It brings together a variety of scholars from Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, allowing for multiple flows and directionalities of knowledge productions and exchanges, be it between the Global South and North as well as within the Global South. The reader presents empirically-oriented, theoretically grounded analyses of local responses to global challenges such as knowledge-productions; notions and practices of building diverse communities; neo-populisms and contentious politics; resources and sustainability; urbanization; labor, livelihoods and mobilities. Each section starts with an introduction reviewing the state of the art. Authors will take cue from a transregional perspective understood as a distinct and alternative perspective on multi-lingual and transcultural spaces of contact, exchange and transfer. This includes a contextualization of phenomena in terms of diverse (cross) linkages and entanglements, including motilities on different scales, i.e. ranging from the local, regional to national and/or global levels. Container-based notions of place and space are addressed in a critical manner, where space and area are understood as notions beyond established systems of ordering and meta-geographies. A key goal is to allow for a consistent conceptual advancement of New Area Studies, which are critical, decentred, decolonial, diversified, and multi-disciplinary in nature.

This book critically examines the impact of globalization, changing power dynamics, migration, and evolving rights regimes on regional order, discourse of national governance, state and society relations, and the development of civil society in East Asia. Providing a textured, critical reading of East Asia as an economically, socially, and politically dynamic region, this book also presents the region as one shaped simultaneously by progressive as well as regressive pulls. Attentive to prevailing issues as well as to states’ and civil societies’ responses to them, it focuses on changing societies and politics in East Asia, particularly on shifting notions of citizenship, nationhood, and peoplehood. The contributions feature new and timely conclusions drawn from multidisciplinary fields including law, public policy, sociology, Asian studies, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies and include direct testimonies from citizens of East and Southeast Asia. Globalization and Civil Society in East Asian Space will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, political science, and Asian studies more broadly.