Category: Teaching

I always struggle to express to undergraduates just how important it is to understand Asian American experiences from the community collectively known as the “Boat People.” Thanks to IPUMS-USA (Ruggles et al. 2015), though, I can make this figure. It summarizes the distribution of educational attainment for major census subgroups from the 2010 American Community Survey, for everyone aged 21-50.

This simple graphic summarizes very effectively how refugees from former French Indochina compare to other Asian and Pacific islanders. It can never replace a complete analysis of the experiences of actual communities, nor can it represent the many ways in which the legacies of war are experienced among millions of people in the U.S. (and Australia, and France,…) today. It does not suffice to explode the myth of the model minority. But I hope it can start the conversation.

REFERENCE

Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015.

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.