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Opinion
We arrived in Jakarta two hours late; it could have been worse. Oh that’s right. It was worse. Much worse! We arrived with no more drama than can be expected when travelling with a three-year-old and a one-year-old on a flight scheduled to leave at 2.30am but that does not take off until 4.30am.
The origins of Southeast Asian studies as a field are exogenous to Southeast Asia. It remains deeply embedded within Western academia and has been influenced by all the dominant trends that have shaped Western knowledge production. Its defining trait is that it is determined to a very significant extent by the funding priorities of establishment interests (both internal and external to Southeast Asia) and has no significant independent tradition of critical knowledge production. Where then does this leave Southeast Asian studies? How can the field become relevant to the people of Southeast Asia?
On 26 January 2013, India will celebrate her 64th Republic Day, which commemorates not the birth of the nation (August 1947), but the coming into being of its Constitution (January 1950). The annual Republic Day parade held on Delhi’s Rajpath – a veritable delight to children and adults alike – follows a similar pattern but varied routine from year to year. It has two main recurring themes, namely, India’s ‘unity in diversity’, and its national pride in the armed forces.
Jakarta is dangerous – or, at least, many every day experiences make it feel so. Security guards are prevalent; in uniform, at guard houses, smoking cigarettes, waving mirrors beneath cars as they approach the entrances of malls and hotels. Surveillance is one means of creating both a threatened sense of security and a sense of fear. Part of the contestation and re-configuring of space relates to practices of surveillance, which is an act performed with an intent to trace, track and record the movements of potential and possible suspects. Surveillance, meaning to ‘watch over’, is a somewhat ambivalent practice; it seeks to prevent crime, yet simultaneously casts a suspicious gaze on those who are being watched.
There are big cultural differences in the way leadership is exercised from country to country. In some places, there are historic patterns of strong, personal leadership. Others prefer consensual forms of power, where, if there is a prime minister or president, they are at best only ‘fi rst amongst equals.’ Some political cultures have strong aversions to the kind of rhetoric-loving, ostentatious country heads that one sometimes gets in the west.
ASIA CONTAINS EXAMPLES of almost all of these approaches. The diversity of its political models must be the most extensive in the world. Even the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations encompass liberal democracies, monarchies, and outright dictatorships. The Asian region extends from robust, new democracies like Indonesia, to trenchant one party states like North Korea and China, to any number of systems in between. Democracy in Japan has only recently seen an opposition party gain real power, after almost half a century of dominance by one party. In the Philippines, there remain plenty of questions of just how much benefi t the oldest democratic system in the region has delivered to its people, in terms of economics, accountability and stability.
The reversion to the status quo ante began almost three years ago as Kim Jong Il entered the endgame of selecting his successor and ensuring his legitimacy. Thus, last year’s Party Conference was a final confirmation of this new direction, rather than its herald.
The social benefits expected from academia are generally identified as belonging to three broad categories: research, education and contribution to wider society. Universities and higher education institutions are meant to operate within these fields. However, evaluating the current state of academia according to these criteria reveals a somewhat disturbing phenomenon. It seems that an increased pressure to produce peer-reviewed articles creates an unbalanced emphasis on the research criterion at the expense of the other two. More fatally, the pressure to produce articles has turned academia into a rat race; the fundamental structure of academic behaviour has been changed, resulting in a self-defeating and counter-productive pattern.
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