This post appears as part of New Mandala’s ARTSEA series on art, design and architecture in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, renewal is not merely an urban strategy; it is a moral and temporal ...

On 31 March 2026, the Dutch Director-General for Culture and Media and the Indonesian Ambassador to the Netherlands signed ...

Since the 2021 military coup, Myanmar’s economy has foundered. The number of tourists and other visitors has fallen dramatically. Most foreign residents have fled the ensuing civil war. Given the ...

On 12 November 1994, a group of 29 young Timorese men gathered to protest outside the US embassy in Jakarta. They were there to make sure the world did not forget what happened at the Santa Cruz ...

If the next redelineation exercise does not address malapportionment, it may be the end of reconciliation efforts ...

Large parts of Phnom Penh still showcase French colonial ideas about urban design that were in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French introduced European architectural styles, ...

There is a recurring mistake in the history of governments that believe history has given them permission to reshape national political economies, and it is not the one their critics usually name. Not ...

In 1967, Operation Merdeka was initiated by the late President Ferdinand Marcos. The main objective was to annex Sabah for the Philippines. The legal basis of the operation was the claim of the Sultan ...

The recent incursion into Sabah of more than 200 armed groups styling themselves as the Royal Army of the Sultan of Sulu has put another challenge to ASEAN’s claim to its centrality in the region.

The last week has seen a wave of huge protests around Indonesia against the new so-called omnibus law—a massive law that amends 79 existing statutes and is touted by the government as easing ...

One of the legacies Joko Widodo leaves Indonesia is a dramatically changed relationship between government and civil society. For the first decade and a half of the post-Suharto period, pro-democracy ...

Over recent decades, the nature of Indonesia-related expertise in Australian universities has changed dramatically. During the late 1980s the arts faculty in which I was an undergrad included many ...