There’s a notorious stretch of road in Indonesia, by the border of North Sumatra and Aceh provinces, that passes through kilometres and kilometres of oil palm plantations. There are few people there, ...

Louis Plottel is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. His current research looks at methamphetamine consumption among young men in Aceh, Indonesia, examining the impact of labour and economic ...

Defying expectations and previous patterns, in the midterm elections held on 12 May the Filipino electorate generated neither dominance to any single political bloc nor a clear two-way split between ...

Observers in the West have largely interpreted the devastating violence that has engulfed Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup as a “battle between democracy and authoritarianism”. This ...

Visiting troops of the 14th Army along the World War II India–Burma frontiers, Lord Mountbatten, then in charge of South East Asia Command, gave speeches acknowledging that they were called “the ...

For the first time, a resistance movement against military rule is welcoming and aiding soldiers who choose to join the ‘people’s side’. This post is an abridged version of an article that appears in ...

This piece is co-published with AcademiaSG, a scholarly site promoting scholarship of/by/for Singapore. Singapore’s public housing program is sui generis, un-replicable in its entirety anywhere.

Readers who received the email notification of the new post “Indonesians want a more diverse legislature” should know that this piece was published under the wrong byline. The piece wasn’t authored be ...

Editor’s note: this article is based on the author’s Political Update paper presented at the 2023 ANU Indonesia Update Conference, the full version of which appears in the December 2023 edition of the ...

Before the election of Joko Widodo as Indonesia’s president in 2014, Indonesian politics was regarded by many observers as being marked by relatively negligible levels of polarisation. This ...

On 23 May it will have been six years since the Maute group waved the Islamic State (IS) flag over the Islamic city of Marawi in the Philippines. The Maute group was a radical militant group, led by ...

The works in this exhibition by Indonesian artists, Bulan Fi Sabilliah and Fitri DK, comment on the Indonesian New Order’s legacy of the primacy of prescribed beauty ideals and women’s domestic and ...