The LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre has a distinctive role to play as a hub and host for Southeast Asian Studies in London, the UK, Europe, and beyond writes SEAC Director, Professor John T. Side

Sidel, John T.

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LSE Research Online

Southeast Asian Studies at the LSE:Historical Legacies, Enduring Structures,New DirectionsThe LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre has a distinctive role toplay as a hub and host for Southeast Asian Studies in London, the UK,Europe, and beyond writes SEAC Director, Professor John T. Sidel_______________________________________________As the incoming Director of LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, I’membarking on this new role and set of responsibilities with a mixture of excitement andtrepidation. On the one hand, I’m committed to continuing and building on the great workof my predecessor, Professor Hyun Bang Shin, over his five years as an exceptionallyactive and innovative Centre Director.  On the other hand, beyond ‘keeping on keepingon’, I’m also keen to make my own contributions to SEAC and the study of SoutheastAsia at the LSE and beyond. So at this juncture I would like to take a moment to reflecton the position that the LSE has occupied within Southeast Asian Studies over the yearsin order to better understand what the School, the Southeast Asia Centre, its scholars,and its students have to contribute to this field of academic research and analysis todayand into the future.For many, many years, Southeast Asian Studies at the LSE was synonymous with theeminent and influential figure of Michael Leifer, who worked at the School in variouscapacities from 1969 to his death in 2001, most notably as Professor of InternationalRelations, Pro-Director, and Director of the Asia Research Centre. Leifer was the world’smost prominent and prolific scholar of the international politics of Southeast Asia, and heplayed a central role in the development of this field of study through his writings,teaching, supervision and mentoring of generations of PhD students and young scholars,and public engagement in London, Singapore, elsewhere in Southeast Asia, andbeyond. Thanks to him, the LSE played a role in the schooling and socialization ofgenerations of Southeast Asian diplomats. Thanks to him, the School developed closeties with the region’s embassies in London, its foreign policy think tanks, and itsPage 1 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 10/10/2023policymakers and political establishments.This kind of profile for the LSE within the world of Southeast Asian Studies contrastedquite starkly with that of the nearby School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), withits roots in British imperialism and colonialism, its emphasis on the cultures, histories,and languages of Southeast Asia, and, by the end of the Cold War era, its greater criticaldistance on the regimes entrenched in the region. For example, prominent Indonesianstudents at SOAS during my years teaching there (1994-2004) included the leadinghuman rights lawyer Bambang Widjojanto and the most celebrated student activist – andpolitical prisoner – of the late Suharto period, Budiman Sudjatmiko. ProminentIndonesian students at the LSE, by contrast, included the likes of Juwono Sudarsono,who served in such positions as Minister of Defence and Ambassador to the UK, and,more controversially, Dino Patti Djalal, the Suharto regime’s point man on East Timorand later Indonesia’s Ambassador to the United States.The LSE’s profile and position in Southeast Asian Studies has also contrasted with thatof leading centres for the study of the region in the United States, such as Yale andCornell where I studied in the mid-late 1980s and early-mid 1990s. During the period ofheightened American military intervention in Indochina, a set of ‘area studies’ centressprang up which combined facilities for tuition in the major languages of Southeast Asiawith support for interdisciplinary studies that ranged from anthropology, archaeology, arthistory, and ethnomusicology to history and political science. The U.S. government’sstrategic priorities notwithstanding, these centres for Southeast Asian Studies weresolidly grounded in the humanities and followed the prominent anthropologist – andIndonesia specialist – Clifford Geertz in privileging interpretivist methods, ‘localknowledge’, and the lived experiences and symbolic (self-)representations and (self-)understandings of Southeast Asians themselves, in ways which arguably enabled theincreasing prominence of Southeast Asian – and Southeast Asian-American – scholarswithin the field.Today, more than twenty years since Michael Leifer’s passing and the eclipse of ‘areastudies’ in North America and Europe (as seen in the recent demise of the NordicInstitute for Asian Studies (NIAS) in Copenhagen), the LSE stands as a leading hub forthe study of Southeast Asia with its own distinctive features.  The School – and theSoutheast Asia Centre – boasts a full complement of anthropologists and historiansPage 2 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 10/10/2023whose research and writings focus on the region: Catherine Allerton, Fenella Cannell,Nicholas Long, and Hans Steinmüller in the Department of Anthropology, KirstenSchulze and Qingfei Yin in International History, and Kent Deng in Economic History. Butthe LSE is essentially a social-science institution (cum business school), and thusalongside two political scientists – myself and Jurgen Haacke of the Department ofInternational Relations – our other Southeast Asia specialists are based in broadly-based disciplines which are weakly represented as such in American universities,namely development studies and geography. The Department of InternationalDevelopment includes two senior Southeast Asia specialists – Tim Forsyth and JamesPutzel – and the Department of Geography and the Environment features three scholarswho work on the region — former Centre Director Hyun Bang Shin, Laura Antona, andTom Smith. These two departments are both notable for their intellectual diversity andtheir interdisciplinarity, as reflected in the work of these scholars.While Southeast Asian Studies at the LSE cannot match the scale and scope of world-leading hubs for the study of the region like the National University of Singapore (NUS)and the Australian National University (ANU), the embeddedness of our specialists onthe region within an institution and intellectual environment dedicated to thedevelopment of the social sciences provides the basis for our signature strengths. Onthe one hand, our departments and disciplines tend to privilege puzzles and questions,developments and trends, that are global rather than country- or region-specific, both inthe courses we teach and the venues where we publish our work. On the other hand, ourcolleagues include specialists on East and South Asia, Latin America, and the MiddleEast, as well as scholars whose work focuses on Europe and/or North America. Thiskind of milieu encourages and informs a way of thinking, researching, and writing aboutSoutheast Asia in which comparisons and connections with other parts of the worldfigure prominently. The cosmopolitanism and diversity of LSE’s students – including itsmany Southeast Asian students – reinforces these in-built tendencies in our work, asdoes our location in the great city of London. The ongoing processes of decolonizing –and de-provincializing – Southeast Asian Studies will thus inexorably continue to unfoldover the years ahead.Against this backdrop, it seems to me, the LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centrehas a distinctive role to play as a hub and host for Southeast Asian Studies in London,the UK, Europe, and beyond. In today’s globalized world of ‘Big Data’, Wikipedia,Page 3 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 10/10/2023YouTube, and ChatGPT, there is still a role for scholars with expertise on the countriesof Southeast Asia. Not as old-fashioned Orientalist ‘authorities’ but as rank-and-filesocial scientists with both deep appreciation for the specificity of local context, on theone hand, and interest in comparisons and connections to the world beyond, on theother. So I hope that the LSE’s Southeast Asia Centre will continue to serve as a hostand hub for empirically rich and analytically rigorous scholarship on Southeast Asia,complementing and contributing to scholarship on the region elsewhere across the worldin ways which help researchers, students, and other interested audiences to understandand engage with vital issues in Southeast Asia over the years ahead.______________________________________________*Banner photo by Sara on Unsplash* You can learn more about Prof John T. Sidel in SEAC’s ‘Spotlight On…’ feature.Page 4 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 10/10/2023

Southeast Asian Studies at the LSE: historical legacies, enduring structures, new directions

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Southeast Asian Studies at the LSE: historical legacies, enduring structures, new directions

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