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 ...

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 ...

In the early 20th century, those Dutch residents in Indonesia who supported what became known as the Ethical Policy spoke of the debt of honour which the Dutch owed Indonesians, and especially ...

A spectre haunts Indonesia’s tangible heritage: the spectre of raging flames. Across the decades, Dutch colonial-era buildings have been engulfed in fire—sometimes by accident, sometimes through ...

In the four and a half years that have elapsed since Myanmar’s armed forces, or Tatmadaw, took back direct political power, scholars, journalists, activists and sundry other pundits have made a wide ...

As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, patterns of resource extraction and violence are intensifying globally amid skyrocketing demand for the “critical minerals”—including cobalt, lithium, ...

Open your fridge, pantry, or bathroom cabinet, and you’re likely to find a product containing carrageenan, a gelling substance derived from red seaweed. It is an essential part of modern daily life, ...

Last year New Mandala was pleased to be able to introduce our Emerging Scholar Award, an initiative aimed at promoting the dissemination of outstanding PhD research on Southeast Asia to a global ...

In 2016, Philippine Congresswoman Geraldine Roman became the first openly transgender woman elected to a national legislature in Asia. Her election received international media attention and was ...

This post is an adapted version of an article that appears in a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary Asia on “Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar” (Vol 54 No 5). Before the 2021 military ...

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 ...

Observers in the West have largely interpreted the devastating violence that has engulfed Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup as a “battle between democracy and authoritarianism”. This ...