Imagining Southeast Asia: Power and Knowledge in the Formation of a Southeast Asian Politics Studies Discourse

Abstract

‘Southeast Asia’ has become so commonplace in postwar international political discourse as to be quite unremarkable. It is a bifurcated region divided into mainland and maritime spheres. With the exception of Thailand, each of the countries of Southeast Asia was formally colonized and even Thailand’s autonomy was more apparent than real. It incorporates the world’s major religions; Islam, Buddhism (Theravada and Mahayana), Christianity and Hinduism. The majority of its people live in its low, wet and fertile areas, but there is also a substantial populationof so-called tribal or indigenous peoples who inhabit more rugged and less accessible areas, including cooler upland regions. Many of these peoples have an ambiguous, even hostile, relationship with Southeast Asia’s postcolonial governments. Up until the crash of 1997–98, capitalist Southeast Asian states industrialized, urbanized and ‘developed’ at such a pace that they were called ‘miracle economies’ or ‘tiger economies’. In contrast, socialist Southeast Asia languished and was more or less bypassed by the economic boom times until socialist orthodoxies were replaced by capitalist market economics. A wide variety of regime types are found in the region. The precise nature of regime and state form in Cambodia and Indonesia are currently uncertain. Thailand has a history of alternating between military and democratic forms of government. Malaysia’s system is difficult to characterize being neither fully authoritarian nor fully democratic. In Burma, the generals seem to be in control notwithstanding the challenge of Aung San Suu Kyi. The Philippines seems to be returning to a stable democratic form of government after the abuses of the Marcos era. Singapore remains firmly in the hands of the authoritarian People’s Action Party. In Vietnam and Laos communist parties maintain political control while presiding over a transition to market oriented economics. Brunei is a sultanate.

Most Southeast Asianists… would sooner consider themselves botanists of the real, writing science, than zoologists of the unreal writing fiction. But each self-image is incomplete. To combine the two is to understand that those who first named and depicted the region as a whole wrote, without realizing it, a kind of science fiction, in which ‘Southeast Asia’, like ‘spaceship’, labeled something that did not exist — but eventually would.

(Emmerson, 1984a, p. 1)

To define, or to name, is to conquer.

(Dirlik, 1992, p. 76)