The administrative boundary between Laos and Cambodia is amongst the least studied international borders in Southeast Asia. Since Laos and Cambodia became independent in 1953–54, relatively minor but sustained tensions have characterised border relations. An important reason for disagreements is irredentist feelings. Some ethnic Lao in both Laos and Cambodia believe that part of northeastern Cambodia should be added to Laos, while some ethnic Khmer in Cambodia insist that their border should be extended to include part of southern Laos. Different emphases and framings of history have contributed to irredentism and the development of identities in relation to the border.

This study offers an approach about the nature of peasants and the reasons for their political actions. It examines the views of different parties towards the question on how land should be owned, managed, used, by whom, for whose benefits, and uncovers as well as explains the resulting conflicts over land rights in the Red River Delta since decollectivisation. It postulates that the contending views among parties over decision-making, distribution, and holding of land rights, create dynamics for conflicts, which take place under the form of public resistance, in a number of communities.

This study of the Agricultural Bank of the Philippine Government, which was established in 1908 to provide agricultural loans to local fanners, describes the background of bank, focusing on the active role of the local elite. Then, it discusses to what extent the bank served the needs of landlords, and why it stopped operations in 1916, facing a shortage of capital.

Among the array of pressing development requirements facing East Timor is the need to create a new strategic national management approach for forest resources. This article explores the historical and environmental factors that have contributed to the contemporary pattern of forest lands and discusses policy options to support the development of a sustainable forestry future.

In southern Thailand, monasteries once served as focal points for different communal identities to negotiate shared space and, with it, shared identities. However, since martial law was declared in 2004, Muslims in southern Thailand do not frequent monasteries. Instead, soldiers and police occupy monastery buildings and protect the perimeters from attacks. In addition, there are now military monks, soldiers who are simultaneously ordained monks, who work to protect the monasteries. This article argues that the Thai State's militarisation of monasteries and the role of Buddhist monks fuel a religious dimension to the ongoing civil war in southern Thailand.

The spilling of blood in modern political protest is an exceptional event. This article discusses the deployment of blood as a means of struggle by the members of an extra-parliamentary movement, known as the ‘red shirts’, in March 2010, in the course of their prolonged attempt to topple the government of the Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Two contesting discourses of blood are discussed: the symbolic discourse of blood as a self-sacrificial act deployed by the protesters to curse their enemies, and the medical counter-discourse deployed by the authorities, in an effort to neutralise the protesters' act. Several issues raised by the blood-spilling act are examined: its perceived appropriateness, its ritual roots and its disputed effectiveness as a curse. In conclusion, it is suggested that the blood ritual constitutes a reflective move to counter the prevailing ‘regime of images’ in Thai society.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Southeast Asia's population will have grown from 80 to 530 million. Much of this extraordinary growth is due to the very rapid decline in mortality over the second half of the century, but the socioeconomic and political attributes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southeast Asian societies also contributed to rapid population growth, especially in the settlement of frontier rice-growing regions. Although fertility transitions are underway in almost every country in the region, the population of the region will probably double in size before growth ceases sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century.

How did Indian influence spread in Southeast Asia during the opening centuries of our era? The following quotations give some idea of the extent to which authorities are agreed:

It seems almost to be a universal law, that when an inferior civilization comes into contact with a superior one, it gradually tends to be merged into the latter, the rate and extent of this process being determined solely by the capacity of the one to assimilate, and of the other to absorb. When the Hindus first settled in Suvarnabhumi and came into close association with her peoples, this process immediately set in, and produced the inevitable result.

The article suggests that the development of Chinese capitalism in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia was intimately connected to the participation of Chinese merchants in the financing and operation of opium revenue farming concessions. It examines the development and structure of the opium farming system as it operated in the region.

“This consuming cancer”, wrote Governor-General Camba of gambling in the preamble to an edict dated 7 March 1838, “that destroys the fortune of many families, encourages sloth, hinders the sources of public wealth, perverts good faith, corrupts the people's morals and leads them to degradation and misery. Unfortunately the vice has spread prolifically in this rich soil”. Spanish authorities held gambling to be both morally reprehensible and economically detrimental, yet official recognition was extended to an activity that could not be eradicated and from which the colonial state derived considerable financial benefit. The definition of criminality in respect to gambling, therefore, became dependent on the inability of the state to enforce its own regulations and the exigencies of financial demands. This article will examine the popularity of cockfighting and other forms of gambling in the Philippines, the extent of official ambivalence towards these sports, and the motives behind colonial policy. In the process, Gusfield's concept of the “moral passage”, whereby once tolerated behaviour is redefined as deviant and treated as criminal, will be shown to have application in reverse. Gambling was progressively legalized during the late 18th and 19th centuries as the state profited from such activities.

Colonial engineers and administrators often referred to the pre-colonial Mekong Delta landscape as a vast solitude yet to be reorganised through their hydraulic technology. However, the environmental history of the Delta's waterways is more complex, suggesting that colonial projects were to some extent embedded within an existing infrastructure. This problematises the rhetorical concept of Progress within a colonial context and its value as a metaphor to understand human changes to the landscape.

Once the premier port in colonial Southeast Asia and one of the foremost in the British Empire, Singapore now ranks as the world's fourth busiest port, tonnagewise, with the second highest per capita G.D.P. in Asia. Its post-war achievements rest on solid historical advantages. A broad historical survey of its commercial growth before World War II is therefore not amiss: the more so, as there has been no such panoramic presentation before. With no natural resources, Singapore's economic growth was almost synonymous with its foreign trade. In most historical works, especially those written before World War II, Singapore has been treated as an integral part of the Straits Settlements or British Malaya, for, until its emergence as a separate nation in August 1965, Singapore as the focal point of reference for researches was not part of the historical consciousness.

One of the most widely held views about Indonesia, and especially Java, in the nineteenth century was that such economic growth as occurred did not benefit the mass of the indigenous population, whose living standards almost certainly declined. Many scholars have drawn attention to the evidence that per capita rice production fell after 1880 as proof that living standards were definitely falling in the last two decades of the century, while others have not hesitated to draw the bolder conclusion that living standards declined almost continually after 1800:

One theme stands out most prominently in Javanese society during this time: the theme of involution and reaction…. Despite the promises of the changing colonial policies to further the individual welfare of the Javanese, conspicuously little was done in this regard. Instead the Javanese farmer became gradually more impoverished throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, with a particularly severe drop in living standards in the second half of the liberal period (1885–1900).

The mid-nineteenth century saw the establishment in Java of one of the world's major sugar industries. Indeed, prior to the Great Depression of the 1930's, which reduced it to a shadow of its former opulance, the Java industry was second only to that of Cuba as a producer of cane sugar for the world's markets. It was essentially the creation of nineteenth-century Dutch colonialism. Sugar manufacture on a commercial scale had already been underway in Java a full two centuries earlier. However, the modern industry of large, centralized units of production and a massive ‘peasant’ workforce dated only from the inauguration of the state-sponsored Cultivation System by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in the 1830's. From then on, progress was rapid. Within less than a quarter century, some hundred or so sugar ‘factories’, solid stone places full of European machinery and Javanese ‘coolies’, had been established in the lowlands of Eastern and Central Java, and twenty-seven thousand hectares of peasant farmland requisitioned to provide them with cane. The whole enterprise dug deep into the innards of rural Java. As well as peasant land, the labour of the rural population was commandeered in unprecedented quantities. By the early 1860's, when sugar production under the auspices of the Cultivation System was reaching its peak, some 100,000 Javanese peasants were engaged in growing cane for the industry, and nearly that many again employed for between three and five months of the year, as cane-cutters, carters and factory hands during the manufacturing season or ‘Campaign’.

The history of the state of Nan-chao () is closely interwoven with episodes in the history of Northern South-East Asia. The writings of Pelliot and G. H. Luce have shown the importance of eighth and ninth-century Nan-chao incursions into what is now Burma, while a Nanchao invasion of Tongking in the ninth century, with the help of local tribes, played its part in weakening the Chinese grip and contributing to the independence of Vietnam. There is, moreover, the vexed question of the relationship between Nan-chao and the Thai states of Siam, still far from being solved.

On 29 January 2003, a Cambodian mob burned down the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. This article explores the roots of this violence, arguing that the anti-Thai riots were linked in part to a set of discourses and imagery that have long been central to assertions of ‘Khmerness’ and constructions of the ‘Other’.

The dominant indigenous community of Sabah, East Malaysia, came late to the process of imagining itself as a modern political community. Its difficulties in identifying an acceptable name, boundaries and symbols for itself since entering Malaysia in 1963 provide an interesting case study of identity formation without the benefit of a long written tradition.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Republican Chinese thinkers viewed modern sports and traditional martial arts as important ways of invigorating the Chinese nation and race, and institutions in the ROC used both in attempting to extend the nationalist impulse to the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. These alternative physical culture models provide insights into both the diversity of thinking and the shared modernist assumptions that inspired projects directed toward the creation of “Greater Chinese” communities.

In the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, that is Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and, to some extent, Vietnam, the articulation of secular and religious authority developed in historically particular ways. Scholars have explained these historical changes in terms of religious and political modes of constructing and negotiating power characteristic of the galactic polities of Southeast Asia and their Theravāda Buddhist tradition, such as state-saṇgha relations and the notion that one's position within the social hierarchy is perceived as a function of, and hence validated by, one's ability to engage in merit-making ritual exchange to support the Buddhist dispensation generally and the saṇgha in particular. Trevor Ling has argued that the differences created by country-specific developments in the social history of Buddhism in Southeast Asia are more significant than communalities found in the Pali scriptural tradition.

The Chinese have always been known to have elaborate family and clan systems. In traditional Chinese society, the family was a close-knit group with four or five generations under the same roof. It was a biological and economic unit, and was the nucleus of all important social activities. The clan, which comprised various kinship-bound families, also formed an important part of the social fabric of the traditional Chinese society.