Analyses discourses pertinent to democratic politics in Malaysia, including the political elite's interpretation of 'Asian values' and 'Asian democracy', contending Islamic views on democracy, the impact of developmentalism on political culture, and the recovery of women's voice in everyday politics.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:0700711619

Analyses discourses pertinent to democratic politics in Malaysia, including the political elite's interpretation of 'Asian values' and 'Asian democracy', contending Islamic views on democracy, the impact of developmentalism on political culture, and the recovery of women's voice in everyday politics.

This book examines five countries in South East Asia that are instructive case studies of how the region has had to negotiate pathways of development beyond crises and traps. At two ends of just one decade, 1997-2007, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam all had to weather the shocks of an East Asian financial crisis and a global financial crisis. Some economies might have buckled completely under those shocks and been condemned to long-term stagnation. Yet these five economies, part of the larger Asian region, emerged with continued if slower economic growth. An important theme of this book is that their resilience has been partly derived from the pursuit of growth and competitiveness along less known or recommended pathways. The chapters of this book take a novel approach to South East Asia's search for growth and improvement. They do not begin by evaluating how far macro-level performances would take a particular country towards high-income status. Instead they provide original insights into actual cases of intermediate ways of achieving growth, upgrading and income improvement in non-privileged sectors. Such cases may hold more relevant lessons for the majority of developing countries than the experiences of highly developed economies.

With contributions from leading scholars in their field, this collection of fourteen essays offers wide-ranging but incisive perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Studies. Apart from informing and enlightening the reader, the essays offer a tribute to Professor Takashi Shiraishi, the renowned Japanese scholar, for his many contributions across continents and disciplines as well as his personal qualities as a long-time colleague, teacher and friend. Now Professor Emeritus of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, Shiraishi-sensei has had an outstanding career as a teacher, scholar, administrator and policy advisor, his many roles including Deputy Director of the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University and president both of GRIPS and the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan. Often with Japan at their nexus, the essays speak to three enduring themes in the research interests that spanned Shiraishi's half-century career, namely, political movements in Southeast Asia; national and regional politics in China and Japan; and the links between ideology, networks and policies at critical junctures of state formation. An introduction by the editors reviews Shiraishi's contributions to many areas of scholarship (these are documented in the back matter, in a bibliography of his publications and writings in English and Japanese). Among authors of the fourteen essays that follow are Patricio Abinales, Chris Baker, Caroline Hau, Peter Katzenstein, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Thongchai Winichakul. In a concluding lengthy interview Shiraishi speaks for the first time, in a frank if light-hearted tone, of his diverse experiences in academia, as student, faculty and administrator, his thoughts on area studies and their connections with official policy-making, and his initiatives for building regional networks of research and intellectual exchange. A festschrift in English being a rarity for a Japanese scholar, this collection offers valuable if indirect insights into the links and influences that have animated a burgeoning community of international academic exchange and expert cooperation. This has been facilitated by Shiraishi's position, time and again (even if an accidental one, as he likes to say), as a transnational intersection point for colleagues, students and friends in their many various research pursuits. A rich and rewarding collection.

Anwar Ibrahim, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1993-98, and Opposition Leader, 2008-15 and since March 2020, is associated with two lasting, seemingly contradictory images. Those were of the young Anwar as a radical Islamist for whom economics seemed not to matter, and as a pro-market reformer during the 1997 East Asian financial crisis for whom Islam no longer mattered. Yet there was economics in the young Anwar's Islam and, conversely, Islam in the mature man's economics. Between them lay certain "moral ambivalences" that occupied Anwar during the pre-crisis period when economic growth, prosperity and ambitions were dogged by rent-seeking, corruption and institutional degradation. Anwar had expressed various thoughts on "Islam and economics", notably when he was President of Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM, or Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement), Minister of Finance (1991-98), and leader of the post-Reformasi opposition. His thoughts formed the core of a "humane economy" that he envisioned and advocated upon his return to active politics from 2006 onwards. The vision of a "humane economy" holds personal, ideological and political significance at a specific political juncture in Malaysian history.

In late February 2020, the Mahathir Mohamad-led Pakatan Harapan (Harapan, or Pact of Hope) government ended abruptly. Amidst ensuing confusion, Muhyiddin Yassin led defecting Harapan Members of Parliament, joined by UMNO and PAS, in an ad hoc Perikatan Nasional (PN, or National Alliance) coalition to form a "backdoor government". The PN protagonists cast themselves as a "Malay-Muslim front" for preserving Malay dominance. Yet they unwittingly exposed the parlous state of their "Malay politics", as shown by an absence of "Malay unity", strongly contested claims to represent the Malays, intense party factionalism, and subverted leadership transitions. The parlousness of Malay politics emerged from the failure of the Malay political class to meet many challenges between 1997 and 2018. As the New Economic Policy and Vision 2020 political orders shed their combined twenty-five-year hegemony, Malay politics could not recover its declining popular support and legitimacy, or craft a fresh, broadly supported settlement. The present is an unsettled conjuncture: the old order is passing while Harapan's experimental regime has been subverted. Yet Malay politics is unable to reform or tackle current issues authoritatively. Instead Malay politics has turned inwards and precipitated a disorder of the political system.

"Beyond Mahathir" is a timely response to the planned retirement in October 2003 of Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and poses vital questions about "Malaysian politics after Mahathir." It examines Malaysia's long-term social transformation, the global disruptions of July 1997 and September 11, 2001, key leaders' calculations of power, and the pitfalls of leadership transition that intersected to produce the political dramas of Mahathir's final decade in power. Organizing arguments around the critical but unstable fortunes of a thirty-year nationalist-capitalist project, it brings to life Mahathir's predicaments, contradictions in Anwar Ibrahim's career, Reformasi's creative dissent, and the cultural imperative behind the Alternative Front's "rainbow coalition." The result is an instructive guide to the momentous events that ultimately revolved around competing conceptions of what the future portends or should portend for Malaysia, and the bitterly contested ways of getting there.

The unrealized transitions were a setback for a "reform agenda", which Anwar Ibrahim articulated, but which emerged from dissident movements for diverse reforms. These movements helped the multiethnic, socially inclusive, opposition to win the 14th General Election. They are only seemingly dormant because of the pandemic. The Pakatan Harapan regime had the best chance to supply a fresh vision, deeper social understanding, and commitment to reform. The present Perikatan Nasional regime's fixation on "Malayness" overlooks twenty years of intense intra-Malay conflicts that began with the failure of the first transition. As the "7th Prime Minister", Mahathir had a rare chance to redeem himself from major errors of his first twenty-two-year tenure. He squandered his chance by not honouring the Pakatan Harapan transition plan. Anwar Ibrahim's opponents mock him for being obsessed with wanting to be prime minister. Yet they obsessively fear his becoming prime minister. Anwar may be twice loser in political succession but "the spectre of Anwar" still haunts Malaysian political consciousness.

With contributions from leading scholars in their field, this collection of fourteen essays offers wide-ranging but incisive perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Studies. Apart from informing and enlightening the reader, the essays offer a tribute to Professor Takashi Shiraishi, the renowned Japanese scholar, for his many contributions across continents and disciplines as well as his personal qualities as a long-time colleague, teacher and friend. Now Professor Emeritus of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, Shiraishi-sensei has had an outstanding career as a teacher, scholar, administrator and policy advisor, his many roles including Deputy Director of the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University and president both of GRIPS and the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan. Often with Japan at their nexus, the essays speak to three enduring themes in the research interests that spanned Shiraishi's half-century career, namely, political movements in Southeast Asia; national and regional politics in China and Japan; and the links between ideology, networks and policies at critical junctures of state formation. An introduction by the editors reviews Shiraishi's contributions to many areas of scholarship (these are documented in the back matter, in a bibliography of his publications and writings in English and Japanese). Among authors of the fourteen essays that follow are Patricio Abinales, Chris Baker, Caroline Hau, Peter Katzenstein, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Thongchai Winichakul. In a concluding lengthy interview Shiraishi speaks for the first time, in a frank if light-hearted tone, of his diverse experiences in academia, as student, faculty and administrator, his thoughts on area studies and their connections with official policy-making, and his initiatives for building regional networks of research and intellectual exchange. A festschrift in English being a rarity for a Japanese scholar, this collection offers valuable if indirect insights into the links and influences that have animated a burgeoning community of international academic exchange and expert cooperation. This has been facilitated by Shiraishi's position, time and again (even if an accidental one, as he likes to say), as a transnational intersection point for colleagues, students and friends in their many various research pursuits. A rich and rewarding collection.