This study explores and understands transnational activism in Asia, specifically focusing on the crucial role played by individuals, particularly Thai youth activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, in shaping and constructing transnational networks and relations. The study argues that the networks individuals establish with other transnational actors serve as the primary source of inspiration for other individuals to engage in transnational activism. These networks are rooted in everyday life interactions in the era of globalisation, with activism reflecting this embeddedness and interconnectedness. The case study of Netiwit demonstrates how connections between Thai activists and activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan stem from the increased mobility of individuals in the globalised world, facilitating physical interactions. By analysing this dynamic, the study aims to offer a more nuanced explanation of transnational activism, the movement of knowledge, and the concept of globalisation in Asia.

As the third decade of the twenty-first century begins, Vietnam embarks on a more advanced phase of national development and international integration, with a greater emphasis on foreign policy as part of the country's overall national defence and development strategy. This informs greater expectations about shifts in Vietnam's foreign policy perception and discourse in pursuit of national interests and the regime's legitimacy amidst major domestic and international developments. This article analyses the making, in terms of processes and actors, and the evolution, in terms of themes and directions, of Vietnam's foreign policy under the Thirteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam, which was held in early 2021. The article argues that while embedding continuity with what the country has been pursuing since its renovation process (known as Doi Moi) started in the mid-1980s, Vietnam's foreign policy under the Thirteenth Party Congress is crafted on a broader base of domestic consensus and features new dimensions, implying stronger domestic support for Hanoi's conduct of foreign affairs and a Vietnamese nation brand with greater visibility and contribution in the regional and global arenas in the coming years.

This article examines issues of island sovereignty and lighthouse administration in maritime Southeast Asia in the context of post-war decolonisation. It does so by demonstrating how lax and complacent colonial governance in British North Borneo led to the construction of a lighthouse on contested island territory. By the late 1940s these islands became the focal point of a regional dispute between the Philippines, North Borneo's colonial government, and the United Kingdom. While lighthouses were, in the colonial mind-set, deemed essential for illuminating the coasts and projecting order onto the seas, the Philippine government sought to renege on colonial-era obligations and wrest a new sense of post-colonial legitimacy.

The legacy of the Turtle Island transfer was therefore significant in recalibrating imperial lighting in the Sulu Sea, as well as giving rise to a Philippine post-colonial authority that was characterised by an acknowledgement of indigenous Suluk maritime heritage. Similarly, it reflected an extension of previous instances of transnational disputes in the region, where the island shoal had been simultaneously claimed and administered by the United States, the United Kingdom and the historical Sulu Sultanate. While the lighthouse remained destroyed, and the seas dimmed, by mid-1948 the Turtle Islands had attained a new post-colonial and transnational status. Utilising a range of archival sources, memoirs and published material, this article sheds light on an under-examined period of Southeast Asian history.

Spatial practice is at the core of postcolonial geography's response to the geography of colonialism. However, the methodology of postcolonial spatial practice is linked to pessimisms within the postcolonial debate. This study aims to overcome pessimisms of postcolonialism by analysing a case of postcolonial spatial practice through literature review, expert interview, and field study. The case under investigation is Fatahillah Square in Jakarta, which has been transformed through postcolonial spatial practices from a space that symbolised the tragedy of colonialism into one of culture and art. Here, the characteristics of Homi K. Bhabha's “third space” are apparent, but this case may also be interpreted as an extension of the concept. Through the hybrid and emancipatory plurality of its spatial practice, it refutes the pessimisms of postcolonialism and calls for further postcolonial practice and analysis.

We explored the nexus between the quality of human capital, productivity-enhancing factors, and the quality of institutions in nine Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries using canonical correlation and principal component analysis of country-level data for 2007–2017 from the World Bank, World Economic Forum, and Penn World Tables databases. We found that an unequal development of human capital in the ASEAN countries is clearly linked to their heterogeneous institutional conditions and that the quality of human capital drives technology absorption and innovation. The four transition economies in the region—Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar—are facing particularly difficult challenges in developing institutional environments that stimulate human capital development to reach higher levels of knowledge intensity of their economies and achieve the resulting competitive advantages.

Amy Chua catapulted to fame in the United States with the publication of her bestselling World on Fire: How Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2002) and a much-discussed Wall Street Journal excerpt from her next book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). A wry account of a ‘Chinese’ mother's efforts, not all successful, to raise her two daughters to be high-achievers, Tiger Mother created some controversy owing to its critique of ‘Western’-style parenting and its perceived advocacy of a ‘Tiger Mother’ brand of parenting that drew on the author's own experience of being raised by Chinese-Filipino immigrant parents in America. Not only did Battle Hymn generate heated discussion in America about the stereotyping of Asian-Americans as ‘model minority’; it also tapped into American anxieties about the waning of U.S. power in the wake of a rising China, while provoking spirited responses from mainland Chinese women looking to raise their children in ‘enlightened’ ways. This article follows Amy Chua's career as an ‘ethnopreneur’ who capitalises on her claims of ‘Chineseness’ and access to ‘Chinese culture.’ Drawing on localised/provincialised, regional, and family-mediated notions of Chineseness, Chua exemplifies the ‘Anglo-Chinese’ who exploits – and profits from – national and cultural differences within nations as well as among Southeast Asia, the U.S., and China in order to promote particular forms of hybridised (trans)national identities while eschewing the idea of mainland China as the ultimate cultural arbiter of Chineseness.

The legal evidentiary approach to “solving” statelessness can sometimes lead to the issue being framed in terms of certain groups of people not meeting objective citizenship criteria or lacking required legal documents. Building on critical interdisciplinary scholarship in anthropology, history and legal studies, this article demonstrates the “constructedness” of citizenship and statelessness through the lens of the politics of recognition and documentation. Using Thailand as a case study, I highlight how global economic, political and social contexts play a significant and dynamic role in delineating the legal line of membership. By tracing how Thai nationality has been instrumentalised by the state throughout the twentieth century, this article contextualises statelessness as a legal and social by-product of statemaking. As such, it challenges the framing of nationality as a non-discriminatory mode of recognition founded in legal objectivity and reiterates the politics of statelessness. In emphasising the fragility of citizenship when granted without genuine social, political and moral recognition, I argue that the objective of statelessness advocacy should not simply be about turning stateless persons into citizens, but rather about creating a more equitable society wherein one's rights are upheld regardless of legal status.

This article is an attempt to stand back and re-imagine the landscape of the Red River over the last two millennia. The only static components of the Red River valley and delta are its mountains and geological deposits, everything else has changed over time. By marrying historical records with recent scientific findings on the Red River, this article outlines aspects of these changes; including changes to the climate and landscape, the possibility of shifting river courses, the movement of historical trade routes, and the rise of Thang Long–Hanoi.