The actor-dancers of the Kelantanese Thai Nuuraa theatre are often seen by Kelantanese as practitioners of love magic. Theoretically, the Nuuraa can be viewed as an ongoing process of mediation between cultural symbols. A Nuuraa performer inhabits an ambiguous and power-filled socio-ritualistic universe associated with unbridled magical know-how.

British planning for post-war Burma had been set back by the Cabinet's decision in April 1943 not to adopt the proposals put forward by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State. Designed also to meet the need for wartime propaganda, the proposals had envisaged a programme of reconstruction aided by the British, carried forward during a period of direct rule, to be followed by advance towards self-government. There were doubts about the amount of aid Britain could promise. There were also doubts as to the wisdom of the concept of direct rule, though in fact the Cabinet accepted the principle without setting a limit to the period. Above all, the Prime Minister opposed further policy declarations on Burma. The war, Churchill believed, was not the time for them. Amery and Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the Governor, thought that he really believed that no time would be right for them. They were not without hope that he would “come round”. Meanwhile, it was decided that the Burma Government, in exile in Simla, would remain in existence. “I can not help thinking that it would be a bad thing politically actually to do away with the office of Governor of Burma, if only because it would [be] a welcome propaganda point for the Japanese who would doubtless use it to demonstrate either that we have given up all hopes of retaking Burma or that we visualise setting up a Military Government in Burma.…”

At the end of World War II, American Office of Strategic Service (OSS) officers in Bangkok were dismayed to discover that, contrary to their expectations, the Thai showed little animosity toward the Japanese. The OSS unit reported in August 1945 that ‘there has been very little in the way of hostile reaction’. Japanese accounts confirm this, with a Foreign Ministry study, for example, concluding: ‘The general attitude of Thai officials and citizens toward Japan just after the war's end was relatively sympathetic….’

On July 23, 1962, the International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian Question in Geneva came to a close with the formal signature of a Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos and a Protocol to the Declaration. The Conference had been in session for over a year; fourteen governments participated, and all of them became parties to the agreements reached.

Much of the history of the people of the Straits of Malacca in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is still unknown and perhaps unknowable, given the lack of source material. However, some aspects of political history are becoming clearer. It has become apparent that this period witnessed a fundamental change in the political structure of the area; able in the past to support empires and cultures of no small renown, the Malay world by the nineteenth century had disintegrated into a mass of petty states, leaderless and disorientated, a power vacuum that the British Empire was eventually forced to fill. Symptoms of this change first became discernable in the early eighteenth century, during the reign of the last Malay Raja Muda of the Johor Empire (1708–18). Johor was then still a powerful force in the Malay world, ruling a widespread area from Siak in Sumatra, through the coastal areas of the Malay peninsula (roughly, in modern terms, from Selangor south, then north again as far as Trengganu), plus the islands of the Riau–Lingga archipelago and Siantan. The sea was still a connecting, rather than a dividing force in Malay politics. In 1708 the administration of this empire fell to Tun Mahmud, who was to be the last Malay to hold the office of Raja Muda in Johor. He was by all accounts a remarkable ruler, under whose guidance Johor attained, for a while, great power and prestige.

This article discusses the views and attitudes of the Malay-speaking Muslims of Thailand's Far South (henceforth, simply the Malays) about their collective position in Thai politics. Since 2004, the Far South, comprising the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala, has been engulfed in political violence that has claimed several thousand lives. Consequently, the conflict is often the subject of conversations among the Malays. More importantly, the Malays sometimes evoke their collective memory of episodes of past violence involving members of the Far South Malay society and the Thai state in their discussions about contemporary incidents. Why do the Malays hark back to the past when they discuss contemporary political violence? What connections do the Malays make between past and contemporary events? In this article, I discuss Malay collective memory about the Pattani Demonstration of 1975 and the Tomb of Martyrs at the Tok Ayoh Cemetery in Pattani province. I argue that, among the Malays, historic graves in Thailand's Far South are commemorative objects that aid the circulation of stories about collective victimhood pertaining to events such as the Pattani Demonstration. Such stories are central to the maintenance of a shared sense of community among the Malays vis-à-vis the rest of Thai society.

The descendants of Bugis mercenary forces that liberated Riau from east Sumatran invaders became an integral part of the local Malay community by the mid-nineteenth century. At that time Raja Ali Haji and Haji Ibrahim, two Malay authors of Bugis descent, wrote various tracts to legitimise their presence in Riau and to facilitate Bugis integration into the Malay community, but may have led to continuing divisions along ethnic lines in later years.

One of the recurring problems that emerged during the height of European expansion into Southeast Asia was the encroachment of European enterprises into indigenous lands. In most cases, problems existed especially in the manner that landholdings were understood by the natives vis-à-vis the new land laws introduced by the colonial powers. This often led to disputes which resulted in the natives being deprived of their rights. This paper looks into a case where the Dusun in Papar, North Borneo — an indigenous people — took the European colonial government to court over land rights which involved land encroachments by European enterprises and railways. The event took place barely 30 years after the first contact with European civilisation took place. The paper will examine the nature of the case and also investigate the role played by the Dusun and their fight against the government. The paper will also investigate the role of an English lawyer retained by the Dusun for the case, and that of the Roman Catholic Mission in championing the affairs of the indigenous people.

The 2005 launch of a large-scale rubber plantation in Bachiang district, one of several in southern Laos, caused serious discontent among the local villagers whose traditional farming and foraging lands were seized and leased to a rubber company. This and other similar rubber developments based on land concessions in the south have drawn criticism from various quarters, including scholars and nongovernmental organisations. This study highlights how the locals’ views, livelihoods and lifestyles have been changing since the plantation was established, especially since rubber tapping began, and focuses on desires that may have directed their actions. Through an ethnographic approach tracing these changes over time, this study demonstrates that differentiation and diversification within the village have become increasingly apparent owing to both the recent shift to plantation work and other impacts and changes brought about by wider society.

This article attempts to illuminate Duncan McCargo's influential yet ambiguous concept of ‘network monarchy’ — the source of political power wielded by Thailand's royalist establishment. Drawing on Thai-language primary sources, especially cremation volumes, I argue, first, that many individuals who have made up various institutional components of the network monarchy come from a constellation of traditional royalist families that have intermarried with each other. Contrary to what McCargo suggests, these people are not just bound by their devotion to the monarchy alone, but also by their families’ pervasive intermarriage ties forged over many decades. These ties have given the network monarchy additional resilience, even though not all its members toe the ideological line all the time. My second argument concerns the temporal context in which the network monarchy has come into being. Although McCargo makes it seem that the late King Bhumibol developed the network monarchy — his personal patronage network — as a political tool from scratch in the post-1973 period, it has actually grown, in part, out of the pre-existing elite family networks. I develop these twin arguments by using the case of one royalist prime minister — Anand Panyarachun — as a focal point of analysis.

This article is a re-examination of Chinese student activism in Singapore through the lens of cultural performance, which has yet to garner due attention. Tracing the ebb and flow of Chinese school concerts in the politically volatile atmosphere of Cold War era Singapore and Malaya complicates current understanding about student activism in the city state. Whereas the official narratives by the British colonial administration and later, the PAP, often cast Chinese student activism as part of a communist insurgency, this article argues that school concerts—comprising folk dances, songs, choirs and theatre—were an alternative space for Chinese youth to articulate their visions of building an independent socialist state and an integrated multiracial Malayan nation. Unlike the student activism expressed through mass strikes, these school concerts enable one to see how the Chinese students displayed sophisticated ways of discipline, organisation skills, and creative energy through the performing arts in 1950s and 1960s Singapore.