Southeast Asia is notable for the diversity of its political regimes, its political problems, and its patterns of political change. Today Southeast Asia faces uncertainty as to its political future(s) amidst heightened tensions between the United States and China, with democracy and human rights seemingly in decline in some countries and authoritarianism apparently entrenched in others, but popular struggles and violent conflicts remaining largely unresolved across the region, and young Southeast Asians demonstrating strong appetites for political change. Against this backdrop, the panelists bring diverse perspectives and forms of expertise on Southeast Asia’s political futures, with Dr. Sana Jaffrey’s many years of work on violent conflicts in Indonesia complemented by Professor Duncan McCargo’s longstanding expertise on Thailand and Dr. Mai Van Tran’s recent and ongoing research on the democracy movement in Myanmar. Solidly grounded in an in-depth understanding of Southeast Asia’s past and present politics, the panelists are extremely well placed to discuss the region’s political futures. This event was recorded and the video is available here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Prof. Duncan McCargo, Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, is best known for his wide-ranging work on the politics of Thailand. His earlier books include the best-selling The Thaksinization of Thailand (with Ukrist Pathmanand, NIAS Press 2005), and the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008). More recently, he has published Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (with Anyarat Chattharakul, NIAS Press 2020).
Dr Sana Jaffrey is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University's Department of Political and Social Change and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Jaffrey has been a scholar of Indonesian politics over the past 13 years. During her appointment at the World Bank (2008-2013), she led the implementation of the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) data project in Indonesia, the largest publicly available violence dataset compiled for any single country. She has previously served as a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Democracy-PUSAD Paramadina, Jakarta (2015-2017); and a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore (2019-2020). Jaffrey received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 2019. Her dissertation on vigilantism in Indonesia was awarded the 2020 prize for best dissertation fieldwork from the American Political Science Association. She has an MA from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr Mai Van Tran is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Her research has focused on contentious politics and digital cultures in the context of Myanmar. She completed her Ph.D. at Cornell University with a dissertation examining the role of bystanders for activist resilience under repression. She has also worked with civil society in Myanmar to coordinate research on local governance, digital literacy, and online disinformation. Her peer-reviewed works are published and forthcoming at the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Asian Politics & Policy. Other public scholarship works have appeared in an edited book and other outlets, including The Washington Post, Brookings Institution, and New Mandala.
Prof. John Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and a forthcoming book Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia.