Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • Syllabus Ideas: The Politics of Violence in Southeast Asia

    I am in the process of putting together a syllabus for a graduate-level half-semester course on the politics of violence in Southeast Asia. The goal of such a course would be to make sense of the micro-dynamics of conflict and violence—type of violence, its spatial distribution and incidence, its causes and consequences—but also to retain a macrostructural perspective as well, how war and conflict shape state development and vice versa.

    Although I recognize that conflict and violence is a subset of the broader conceptual category of contentious politics, in the interest of keeping this short class manageable I am holding off on including important works on mobilization, protest, and “weapons of the weak.” (Although someday it would be nice to create such a dedicated Southeast Asia-focused course too.)

    In building this syllabus, I recognize that my own knowledge is biased towards Indonesia. So, I’m hoping that readers might be able to identify some foundational texts that I have missed. I am especially interested in books, but good edited collections like Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia could be useful too. It is generally easier for me to identify interesting and important journal articles, so that is not a major concern at this stage.

    Here is my working list of books and monographs.

    • Edward Aspinall, Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia
    • Jacques Bertrand, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia
    • Mary Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma
    • Christopher Duncan, Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia
    • Benedict Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines
    • Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79
    • Duncan McCargo, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand
    • Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali
    • James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia
    • John Sidel, Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia
    • Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948-1960
    • Yuhki Tajima, The Institutional Origins of Communal Violence: Indonesia’s Transition from Authoritarian Rule

    Amazingly, I have no entry yet on the Vietnam conflicts (Scott is something of an exception).

    And in case this is not obvious, I am completely uninterested in the academic discipline of the author(s). If the subject is politics, or political, it counts.

  • The Moro Rebellion and Trump’s Colonial Delusion

    Donald Trump’s comments last night about the American suppression of Muslim Filipinos and Black Jack Pershing‘s alleged torture and slaughter of Moro prisoners has earned him his latest round of condemnation. In a campaign season full of horrific language, this still manages to take my breath away.

    Most of the most vocal outrage is against the careless repetition of an old rumor which has no factual basis. To his credit, his GOP opponent Marco Rubio raises the more fundamental point that the message of the story is terrible. It is not just that the rumor is probably untrue. Why would anyone want it to be true?

    Still, there is much more to this story, things that have escaped notice. Notice first that Trump managed to deliver this anecdote without ever referring to the place or the context. Not once. “They had a terrorism problem” is all he says. But who is “they”? The American colonial authorities in the occupied southern Philippines. Who are the “terrorists”? The Moro insurgents. That Muslims might reasonably favor not being a colonial possession does not even occur to the audience, because like most Americans, I suspect, they have no idea that the United States ever actually held overseas colonies (it still does, but that’s a story for another time and place, like here).

    Even more frustrating is that the very premise of the false anecdote is false. Even if soldiers actually did dip bullets in pigs blood and slaughter prisoners of war, such a move to frighten the Moro insurgents did not actually work. What did work to quell the insurgency, instead, was (1) the promise of eventual independence, and (2) significant development efforts and legal reforms. Of course, this makes less of a story, that you defeat insurgents by acceding to most of their demands.

    Fortunately, all of this comes just a couple days before we cover the American colonial regime in the Philippines in my Southeast Asian Politics course. We will have lots to cover.