Drive almost anywhere in rural Indonesia now and it’s hard to miss them: prominent red-and-white buildings, based on a uniform 30 by 20 metre layout, all with the same centrally-designed features and ...

In Thailand, the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps program (Ruk Sa Din Daen—หลักสูตรรักษาดินแดน [ร.ด.]) is something ordinary people are intimately familiar with. Roughly 15% of Thai high ...

In Southeast Asia today, consumer choices are becoming increasingly linked to questions of identity, heritage, and even political expression. This connection, however, is not new. Its roots extend to ...

This post appears as part of New Mandala’s ARTSEA series on art, design and architecture in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, renewal is not merely an urban strategy; it is a moral and temporal ...

Garda Ramadhito is an Associate Research Fellow with the Indonesia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He holds a Master ...

A textbook might define anarchism s a political philosophy that rejects hierarchies of domination, especially the state and capitalism. Anarchists, accordingly, advocate for horizontal forms of social ...

Caught between eviction and embrace, residents of Jakarta’s informal settlements are finding new ways to assert their rights and reshape their city from the ground up. “They treated us like animals!

One of the legacies Joko Widodo leaves Indonesia is a dramatically changed relationship between government and civil society. For the first decade and a half of the post-Suharto period, pro-democracy ...

The motivations behind these reforms—the renewed emphasis on language learning, a desire to see more Australian students up in the Indo-Pacific for longer duration experiences, and a rebalancing of ...

Ask the average Indonesian voter what they believe it takes to be a winning legislative candidate and you’re likely get the response: “harus punya duit”—“[they] must have money.” All of these ...

On 13 June 2024, a nickel smelting furnace at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi caught fire and exploded, sending two workers to hospital. A year earlier, on 24 ...

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.