Come learn more about our winter study abroad in Cambodia. In collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), Cornell's Southeast Asia (SEAP, Einaudi) Study Abroad program in Cambodia will provide an in-depth focus on on how the dynamic changes in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap connect to their history, policies, and labor politics. This highly interactive course involves a mix of lectures by scholars and policy makers, with field visits. Given that the labor-intensive garment industry has contributed to making Cambodia one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, we will specifically focus on the role of labor and human capital in Cambodia's development.

Come learn more about our winter study abroad in Cambodia, lunch provided. In collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), Cornell's Southeast Asia (SEAP, Einaudi) Study Abroad program in Cambodia will provide an in-depth focus on on how the dynamic changes in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap connect to their history, policies, and labor politics. This highly interactive course involves a mix of lectures by scholars and policy makers, with field visits. Given that the labor-intensive garment industry has contributed to making Cambodia one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, we will specifically focus on the role of labor and human capital in Cambodia's development.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Jenny Hedstrom, (Associate Professor in War Studies, Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University), who will discuss women's labour and the Kachin conflict.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

This book explores insurgency warfare from the vantage point of women’s social reproductive and productive labour. The research combines feminist political economy and war studies to explain why and how war is sustained and reproduced. Developing the concept of militarised social reproduction, I examine how women’s underpaid or undervalued household duties enable and sustain the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), a poor insurgent group fighting for political rights and a degree of autonomy in the north of Myanmar. Based on more than one hundred semi-structured interviews and participant observations collected between 2013 and 2023 in Myanmar and Thailand, I show how women’s labour (re)produced from the household provides a critical, if overlooked, piece to the puzzle that is the war in Kachinland. I argue that while dominant accounts of the Kachin conflict are preoccupied with the conduct of States or the actions of military leadership, it is more instructive to focus on the activities of the household. Focusing on women’s reproductive work helps to explain how and why the Kachin conflict has been maintained for so long, despite the superior strength and resources of the Burman military force.

About the Speaker

Jenny Hedström is an Associate Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. Jenny’s research and teaching concerns the relationship between households, gender, and warfare; gender, transitions, and peacebuilding; women’s activism and resistance; and ethics and methods when researching war, often with a focus on civil wars in Myanmar. Her research has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Peacebuilding, Critical Military Studies and International Studies Review, and other outlets. Together with Elisabeth Olivius, she is the editor of the edited collection “Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions” (NIAS Press, 2023). Jenny is the Principal Investigator for the Swedish Research Council-funded project “Women’s Labour in Civil War” and co- Principal Investigator for the project “Gender Experts in Peacebuilding”. Together with Hilary Faxon she leads the “Land, Labour, Love and Revolution” project - a collaboration with farmers, artists, students and activists to trace and understand gendered relations of land, labour and love in the Myanmar Spring Revolution.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Lisandro Claudio, (Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley), who will discuss imperialism and good governance in the Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

The near collapse of the Philippine National Bank (PNB) in the early 1920s is often held up as proof of how Filipino corruption derails economic development. It is an important case study in works that analyze the Philippines through the lenses of rent-seeking and crony capitalism. Unfortunately, much of this analysis has been derived from imperialist sources. More importantly, these imperialist sources were empirically incorrect. The PNB was in crisis not because of corruption, but because of a postwar global deflation—an event that has been called the most underrated economic crisis in world history. Using the PNB crisis, this lecture challenges the dominant form of political-economic analysis in the Philippines (and many other parts of Southeast Asia and the developing world), which reduces issues of economic development to questions of corruption and good governance. If scholars, credulous over imperial sources, got this event wrong, what else have they misinterpreted?

About the Speaker

Lisandro E. Claudio is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Vicente L. Rafael, (Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Washington in Seattle), who will discuss authoritarian imaginary in the Contemporary Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this talk is co-sponsored by the Department of History. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

President Rodrigo Duterte's term ended in May 2022 amid a violent drug war and the hardships of the COVID pandemic. Yet, surveys indicated that the president’s astronomic popularity did not suffer significantly. His job approval rating remained high—as much as 91% according to one poll--even as the majority of the people had become increasingly pessimistic about the state of the country.

Why this massive popularity amid the most catastrophic of conditions? How was it that a mass murderer continued to register such highly positive ratings? Why did his governance by fear meet with such widespread approval? Or is it the case that by focusing on Duterte, we’ve missed something much more fundamental, namely the persistence of structures of power that envelop and enable the survival of sprawling urban communities where his support was most evident? How did his authoritarian imaginary circulate and reinforce existing notions of community? That is, how did a certain fantasy about sovereign power—the power to decide who shall live and who shall die—oscillate between ruler and ruled? Indeed, is there something about the construction of community that preceded and will continue beyond Duterte’s regime-- something about the logic and logistics of living together--that also create the conditions for cultivating violence and spreading death?

About the Speaker

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022) as well as several other works on the history and cultural politics of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines. Recently, he also co-edited with Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: the Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia (2023).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Meredith Weiss, (Professor, Department of Political Science, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy), who will discuss Malaysia's dominant-party system.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Malaysia’s 15th general election in November 2022 decisively ended the country’s dominant-party system. What might take its place, however, remains hazy—how competitive, how polarized, how politically liberal, and how stable an order might emerge will take some time to become clear. The opposition Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), having secured a plurality of seats, but with a sharply pronounced ethnic skew, formed a coalition government with the previously dominant, incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front) and smaller, regional coalitions. This settlement resolved an immediate impasse, but relied upon obfuscation of real programmatic, ideological, and identity differences, raising questions of longer-term durability or results. Examining this uncertainty suggests three broad queries, with resonance well beyond Malaysia. The first is the fragmentation and reconsolidation of Malaysian party politics, and how party dominance transforms or falls. The second is the extent to which its dominant party defined or confirmed Malaysia as electoral authoritarian, and whether we should consider it still to be so. And the third is what possibilities Malaysia’s apparent party-system deinstitutionalization opens up for structural reform beyond parties. Does the deterioration of that system—more than simply the previous dominant party’s electoral loss—clear the way for more far-reaching liberalization? All told, Malaysia’s incremental dismantling of its dominant-party system does not also spell the end of electoral authoritarianism. Party and party-system deinstitutionalization leave the system in flux, but illiberal reconsolidation is as plausible as progressive structural reform.

About the Speaker

Meredith L. Weiss is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In four books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—numerous articles, and a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She is the inaugural Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series on Southeast Asian Politics & Society.