Robert H. Taylor

The politics of elections in Southeast Asia

List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: the study of elections in the politics of Southeast Asia R. H. Taylor 1. Elections and participation in three Southeast Asian countries Benedict R. Anderson 2. A useful fiction: democratic legitimization in New Order Indonesia R. William Liddle 3. Elections without representation: the Singapore experience under the PAP Garry Rodan 4. Elections Janus face: limitations and potential in Malaysia K. S. Jomo 5. Malaysia: do elections make a difference? Harold Crouch 6. Contested meanings of elections in the Philippines Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet 7. Elections in Burma/Mynmar: for whom and why? R. H. Taylor 8. Elections and democratization in Thailand Suchit Bunbongkarn 9. A tale of two democracies: conflicting perceptions of elections in Thai politics Anek Laothamatas 10. The Cambodian elections of 1993: a case of power to the people? Kate G. Frieson Afterword Dan S. Lev Index.

Disaster or Release? J. S. Furnivall and the Bankruptcy of Burma

At the heart of modern social science lies the belief that if societies understand the causes of their current condition, their people will foresee what future ills may befall them unless particular public policies are implemented to avoid the undesirable consequences of previous actions. Analysis and prediction thus provides the power to alter the future, which is only inevitable if people and governments do nothing to understand the causes of their present complaints. J. S. Furnivall, arguably the most prescient foreign analyst of Burmese political and economic life this century, was a true disciple of this idea.

The idea of freedom in Asia and Africa

Contributors xv Introduction I ROBERT H. TAYLOR I. Itineraries of Ideas of Freedom in Africa: Precolonial to Postcolonial 9 CRAWFORD YOUNG 2. African States and the Search for Freedom 40 WILLIAM J. FOLTZ 3. Developmentalism, Revolution, and Freedom in the Arab East: The Cases of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq 62 JAMES L. GELVIN 4. Ideas of Freedom in Modem India 97 SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ 5. Freedom in Burma and Thailand: Inside or Outside the State? I43 ROBERT H. TAYLOR 6. Reverberations of Freedom in the Philippines and Vietnam 182 BENEDICT J. TRIA KERKVLIET 7. Japan: State, Society, and Collective Goods versus the Individual 214 SHELDON GARON 8. Redefinitions of Freedom in China 248 ANDREW J. NATHAN Notes 275 Index 317

Opposing the rule of law: how Myanmar’s courts make law and order

and local Lanna past which, paradoxically, is more developed, civilised and prosperous than alternative visions advanced by either Bangkok or the West. A final substantive chapter closely analyses debates among planning professionals over projects to restore urban local identity and prosperity through revitalisation of local architectural aesthetics, public squares, urban temple systems, and taboos in building craft. In a brief conclusion, Johnson summarises his argument about the parallel logics and function of possessing spirits and cultural heritage as privileged but alternative fulcrums “through which the potential of the past is actualised into khwam charoen” (progress) (p. 156). The most convincing parts of Johnson’s argument emerge out of his discussion of city planners, architects and artists. His ethnographic data in these chapters is detailed, varied and extensive, particularly his extended discussion of the creation, reception and use of the Royal Floral Exposition in Chiang Mai in 2006. In these chapters Johnson does a fine job of teasing out the complications arising when religious aesthetics, ritual and the built environment are reconfigured into forms of regionalised cultural heritage, as well as when sites and objects of reinvented cultural heritage become, in turn, objects of religious pilgrimage. His analysis is particularly effective in pointing out how empty the rhetoric of “Thainess” or “Lanna-ness” often actually is when employed as a marker of authentic localism in contrast to the threatening cultural foreign otherness of the West or Bangkok. Johnson’s ethnographic materials on spirit mediums and possession in Chiang Mai are more partial, fragmented and de-contextualised. Extended descriptions and analysis of ritual events in their full performative complexity are absent, as is a discussion of the place of spirit mediums within the total urban ritual economy of Chiang Mai. How the voices and activities of spirit mediums are uniquely suited to address the urban misfortunes of Chiang Mai is less clear as a result, especially since spirit mediums in rural settings throughout Thailand also utilise the same mythologies and ritual forms that Johnson describes. At the foundation of Johnson’s argument that spirit mediums and city planners and architects are privileged parallel vehicles through which the material and spiritual potential of Chiang Mai can be actualised are several iconoclastic claims. One is that phatthana (development) refers to superficial, material qualities while charoen refers to an object’s hidden, unseen qualities, and that charoen is a key index of spiritual advancement and cosmological status. A second is the frequent suggestion that cities themselves, and not just the spiritually potent objects located within them, possess magical charisma (barami). Further research is required to validate these assertions.

Saffron shadows and salvaged scripts: literary life in Myanmar under censorship and in transition

ume deals are just as important, if not more, than delineating the contours of the institutional ideal as has been the preoccupation of the mainstream rule of law discourse. The smaller scale, more incremental reform agenda based on close engagement with—and learning from—local context that this book advocates may make less-ambitious promises than the over-night tectonic shifts that reform programs normally attempt, but holds the promise for a more embedded and durable mode of transformation with impacts for some of the most vulnerable communities in the world. The volume should be of interest to legal scholars and students interested in the transposition of the rule of law from the classroom to the real world, but is particularly recommended for policy makers in the position to allocate precious resources better and more effectively—as a reminder of the often uncomfortable and inconvenient realities of the world we inhabit.

Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia

pp. 18–19) overstates the ‘‘continuities’’ between colonial and post-colonial uses of city space. On the other hand, the most important spatial form corresponding to the phase of public sector production in Bangalore, the industrial township, easily the forerunner of the ‘‘campus-like’’ quality of the new ‘‘informational urbanism’’, has been entirely ignored in this account. (The public sector enters this narrative only as ‘‘a factor’’ that engendered the new economy: p. 36.) By concentrating on the contemporary urban fabric, and through impressive and detailed quantitative profiling of each area studied, the author emphasises the architectural novelties of the contemporary transformation. But by neglecting the equally important ways in which the public sector had inscribed the city space in specific ways, spawning a large and impressive ancillary and informal economy, R&D centres and their preferred architectural forms, an opportunity for considerably strengthening the argument regarding a significant shift in urban form and fabric has been lost. Maps and photographs of the important sites discussed provide useful illustrations of Stallmeyer’s narrative. The theoretical apparatus that he deploys, notably the idea of the ‘‘informational cascade’’, is more elusive; after all, even that early observer of industrial capitalism, Karl Marx, noted the innate capacity of capital not merely to destroy older means and relations of production but to adapt creatively to earlier ones. In order to assert a primacy of the ICT regimes in the transformed landscape, a discussion of those contending, if relatively minor, elements of the economy that are also driving this change would have been useful. This said, Stallmeyer’s book must be welcomed as one of the first to pay attention, at least in the Indian setting, to the importance of the physical-material spaces of production, and to architectural form in particular, in analyses of new urbanisms.