Description

For decades the study of modern Southeast Asian history has been organized around a nationalist teleology: the rise of nationalist consciousness, the emergence and mobilization of nationalist movements, and the triumphal achievement, through nationalist struggle, of independence for the new nation-states of the region. Recent scholarship on Southeast Asia and other parts of the world, however, suggests that this ‘nationalist’ frame may obscure as much as it illuminates, providing only a partial and biased descriptive account and leaving unexplained the dramatic differences and divergences of historical change observed across the region. A re-examination of modern Philippine, Vietnamese, and Indonesian history reveals that the revolutions experienced in these three countries were in crucial ways enabled by international conjunctures and impelled by transnational ideological currents, mobilizing structures, and social forces lying outside the ‘nationalist’ narrative.

John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford University Press 1999), (with Eva-Lotta Hedman) Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (Routledge, 2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2006), and The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (East-West Center, 2007).