Please join us for an evening of presentation and discussion concerning the history and development of the Rohingya humanitarian tragedy in Myanmar and the resulting refugee crisis. The evening’s conversation will focus on the causes and conditions of the crisis along with the role that Buddhist laity and monastic communities have played in the rhetoric and violence. Led by an esteemed guest panel, this open discussion will hopefully bring a better understanding to the situation and identify compassionate ways of seeking justice and delivering relief to those who are suffering.

The panelists for the event are:

• Khin Mai Aung, US Coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition

• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim, Author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide”

• Adem Carroll, New York and UN Program Director of the Burma Task Force

• Ashley Aye Aye Dun, Writer and Founder of Saddha: Buddhists For Peace

To register for the event, click here.

HOSTED BY:

• The Buddhist Action Coalition

• Buddhist Council of New York

• The Union Thích Nhất Hạnh Program for Engaged Buddhism

A fragile alliance of Islamist groups known as the "212 Movement" that first emerged in 2016 has managed to sustain its mobilizing power by using Prabowo, the rival of incumbent candidate Joko Widodo, as a rallying point during the campaign leading up to the April 17 election. Now that Prabowo is the presumed loser, what will happen to the Islamists? Is a Jokowi win really a victory for pluralist democracy?

Nava Nuraniyah has been an analyst at the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) since 2015, and her research interests include the role of Islam in politics as well as the evolution of extremism in South East Asia, including the role of women. Before joining IPAC, she worked as a researcher on terrorism and radicalization in Indonesia at the Centre of Excellence for National Security, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore.

For more information, click here.

HOSTED BY:

• NYSEAN

• Race to Istana

• Wagner's Office of International Programs

In the spirit of April 30th, a diasporic Vietnamese day of remembrance, and April 17th, the Cambodian Genocide Remembrance Day, Mekong NYC is hosting a 2-part event centered around Southeast Asian resilience and healing. The first portion of the Southeast Asian Day of Resilience is an invite-only discussion featuring Southeast Asian (Vietnamese and Cambodian) community leaders and members, with a select group of Mekong NYC's allies invited to listen to and support this discussion. The second half of the event (from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm) is an open reception where Mekong and Southeast Asian artists will share our work, especially regarding how Southeast Asian people have pioneered amazing healing work for our diasporic community. We are proud to show the work of Khmer, Viet, and Lao artists: Amy Lee Sanford, LinDa Saphan, and Michelle Nguyễn Bounkousohn.

For more information, click here.

HOSTED BY:

• Mekong NYC

• Manhattan College

• Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation

The April 17th national election is over, but Indonesia remains polarized and vulnerable to further democratic decline. Marcus Mietzner, a leading scholar of Indonesia from the Australian National University, and Margaret Scott, a journalist who writes about Indonesia and an adjunct at NYU Wagner, will discuss the results and what they mean for the future of Indonesia’s democracy.

Speakers

Marcus Mietzner has written many books on Indonesia, and his most recent is Money, Power, and Ideology: Political Parties in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. He has also co-written a chapter entitled "The Mobilization of Intolerance and Its Trajectories: Indonesian Muslims’ Views of Religious Minorities and Ethnic Chinese,” in the forthcoming book. Contentious Belonging: The Place of Minorities in Indonesia.

Margaret Scott writes for The New York Review of Books and is one of the founders of the New York Southeast Asia Network.

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• Wagner's Office of International Programs

Crisis, warring, and never-ending suffering propel humanitarian organizations to the forefront of media attention. Examining the use of témoignage (witnessing) in the work of MSF, Peter Redfield notes that big NGOs now play a central role in defining secular moral truth for an international audience (Redfield 2006: 5–6). Combining medical expression, expert knowledge, public expression, and in the case of the Free Burma Rangers, mission, health organizations are able to mobilize both the most vulnerable people as well as substantial financial and moral support from a great field of followers (Redfield 2013). Moreover, the Free Burma Rangers also involve Rangers and ethnic minority villagers in witnessing and fact finding, by training them for independent human rights documentation, which will then feed the news of their website.

Through the work of the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), professor Alexander Horstmann looks at how emergency healthcare is provided for the wounded ethnic minorities in Myanmar’s border zones and analyzes how humanitarian health organizations shape new landscapes for humanitarian assistance and mobilization.

Alexander Horstmann is an Associate Professor in Anthropology of Southeast Asia,at the School of Humanities at Tallinn University. His teaching includes Current Anthropology courses, Applied Anthropology “LIFE” project courses, AsianPolitics and Society courses, and PhD courses in Cultural Studies.

For more information, click here.

HOSTED BY:

• Cornell Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

• Cornell Southeast Asia Program

• Cornell East Asia Program

• Cornell Department of Anthropology

Join Boon Hui Tan, Asia Society Museum Director & Vice President of Global Arts and Cultural Programs; Livia Straus, Founder of Hudson Valley MOCA; and Malaysian artist Anne Samat for a discussion on the role of gender and traditional art-making practices in Samat’s work.

Anne Samat (b. 1973, Malaysia. Lives and works in Kuala Lumpur) creates elaborate totems that merge the traditional and the contemporary through her innovative practice of weaving with everyday household objects. The artist received a BA in Art and Design from the Mara University of Technology. She has been included in international group exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2019); Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium (2018); Yokohama Triennale (2017); and the National Visual Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur (2015). Samat is currently an artist-in-residence at Hudson Valley MOCA.

Livia Selmanowitz Straus is co-founder and Board President of Hudson Valley MOCA, formerly known as Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Straus is an educator who has lectured widely on art and spirituality. She is currently Professor Emeritus of Education and Jewish Religious Thought at The Academy for Jewish Religion and was formerly Adjunct Professor of Theology at Fordham University among other prestigious positions. Straus has served on the boards of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York and the Hebrew Union College Museum in Manhattan as well as participated in various capacities at other art institutions.

Hosted by: 

• Asia Society

Indonesia’s tour-de-force music duo Senyawa and Melbourne’s choreographic luminaries Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek join forces with two of Australia’s leading dance companies, Lucy Guerin Inc and Dancenorth to create Attractor. Senyawa reinterprets the Javanese tradition of entering a trance through dance and music as a powerful, secular, present-day ritual. Dancers are propelled into wild abandonment and ecstatic release, creating a visceral experience for the audience, as unrehearsed volunteers join the company on stage, to dissolve the demarcations between professionals and amateurs.

Find more information here. 

On April 17th, Indonesia will choose between incumbent Joko Widodo (widely known as Jokowi) and challenger Prabowo Subianto for the presidency. Simultaneously, Indonesian voters will choose representatives to its national and regional Parliaments. Jokowi’s victory in the last election was accompanied by optimism for change and prosperity — he is the first president to not have come from the military or the political elite. President Jokowi has successfully jump-started massive national infrastructure projects with tangible results, and a national health insurance plan. Yet, critics will point to his handling of the economy, human rights, and religious intolerance. On foreign policy, Jokowi has taken a more assertive position on Indonesia’s maritime borders — specifically involving the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea — and expressed his desire for Indonesia to shape the Indo-Pacific region as a maritime country.

Join us for a conversation with Ambassador Cameron Hume, Chairman of the American Indonesian Chamber of Commerce’s Executive Committee, the Hon. Mari Pangetsu, former Minister of Trade of Indonesia, and Dr. Robert Hefner, Professor of Global Affairs and Anthropology at Boston University, on the results of the election, and what the future holds for the country, its economy, and the Indo-Pacific region.

For more information, click here.

Hosted by: 

• Asia Society

The Trump administration has articulated a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy as the new modus operandi for the United States's policy on Asia, but is it a useful organizing concept? Please join Dr. Amy Searight, Senior Advisor and Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for a discussion of the Trump administration’s ‘free and open Indo-Pacific” and the Southeast Asian response. Dr. Andrew Nathan will provide a Chinese view of the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy in promises to be a stimulating discussion of an important topic. Acting as the moderator for the event will be Dr. Ann Marie Murphy of Seton Hall University. 

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• Columbia Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Q&A with Kavich Neang

Once a thriving artist community and cultural hub, Phnom Penh’s historic White Building has been sold to Japanese condo developers, displacing nearly 500 families. Born and raised in the building, filmmaker Kavich Neang returns to interview friends, neighbors, and family as they prepare to uproot, stirring up the dust and memories that have accumulated in the building’s walls. As longtime residents somberly reflect on their old home and its imminent destruction, summoning memories of Cambodia’s post-independence golden age and of similar evictions during the Khmer Rouge, Neang captures the serene light and music its storied hallways one last time.

For more information and to buy tickets, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Film Society of Lincoln Center

In celebration of the new year - the Cambodian New Year in the month of April - the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association presents "Herstories and Healing: A Khmer Culinary and Literary Workshop Poetry and Khmer Food In Memory of Mak's Kitchen." 

This hybrid writing and culinary workshop will take its cue from the flavors and healing herstory of Khmer cuisine. Taking into account the sensations on our tongue, we will also play and reimagine traditional flavors while adapting to the contemporary diasporic experience. Come share, eat, and write with us as we bring in the Cambodian New Year.

POET SOKUNTHARY SVAY

Sokunthary Svay was born in a refugee camp in Thailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. They were sponsored to come to the United States and resettled in the Bronx where she grew up. She is currently poetry editor for Newtown Literary, the only literary journal for the borough of Queens, a founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), the recent recipient of the American Opera Projects' Composer and the Voice Fellowship for 2017-19, and the 2018 Emerging Poets Fellowship at Poets House. Her publication credits include Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time, FLESH, Prairie Schooner, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Perigee, and The Margins. Her first collection of poetry, Apsara in New York, is available from Willow Books. She is currently a doctoral student in English at the The Graduate Center, CUNY.

CHEF CHAKRIYA UN of KREUNG CAMBODIA

To visit her Instagram page, click here.  

It is necessary to RSVP for this event with a $10 admission fee. 

For more information and to register for this event, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Cambodian American Literary Arts Association

The night starts out in the AACC at 5 pm with a dinner and discussion with Vietnamese poet and novelist Lê Thị Diễm Thúy, author of the widely acclaimed 2003 novel 'The Gangster We Are All Looking For.' The event will feature a performance and reading from Ms. Thúy and then a moderated discussion on her experiences as a Vietnamese writer and engaging with Vietnamese identity and the traumas of war in her work. Afterward, from 7-8pm, ViSA will have a reception for its 'Fall of Saigon' exhibit in the AACC Exhibition Room. The exhibit will feature photography, interview excerpts on personal interpretations of what it means to be Vietnamese, family stories relating to the war, and a project on media representations of Vietnamese refugees. 

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Yale Vietnamese Students' Association

• Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies

• Yale Center for Race & Indigeneity and Transnational Migration

Recent scholarship on labour and development in the global South has renewed critiques of conventional development theory along two main lines. The first has highlighted the unsuccessful transition of peasant small-holders into wage workers, whose incomes and employment benefits, it was once argued, would both satisfy their social reproduction needs and allow for expanded consumption. As a consequence of this apparently ‘stalled transition’ a contradiction has emerged between the valorization of wage labour/full employment, and the precarious reality of work and underemployment in contemporary capitalism. The second critique to emerge has focused on the failure of numerous late industrializing economies to transition from low- to high-value-added manufacturing. This latter failure of the development project exposes the contradiction between the promise and the reality of contemporary development strategies, and has led to disillusionment with industrial and other forms of waged work. As a result, growing frictions at the point of production and beyond have emerged, exposing tensions and fissures in development models across Continental Southeast Asia. What happens, we thus need to ask, when low-value-added export-oriented factories that are central to long-term strategies for economic growth at a sub-regional level, fail to serve as a stepping stone to higher-value-added manufacturing? How do states and workers adapt to and address the apparent lock-in of low-value, precarious, production network at the national and sub-regional scale? This presentation, led by speaker Professor Dennis Arnold of the University of Amsterdam, seeks to address these questions through analysis of the multiple power relations between state, capital and labor in Cambodia’s garment production network.

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Cornell Department of Development Sociology

• Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations

• Cornell Southeast Asia Program

Human Rights Defenders and Indigenous Peoples are increasingly under attack worldwide. This convergence of threats was recognized by a report last year from the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples. That report highlighted how intensified competition over natural resources -- led by private companies and at times with government complicity -- has placed indigenous communities seeking to protect their traditional lands at the forefront as targets of persecution.

This panel features perspectives from the Americas, Asia, and Africa on the nature of these threats against indigenous rights defenders and the responses these organizations and their allies are taking to ensure the security of indigenous rights defenders and advancing efforts to defend the lands, resources, and rights of indigenous communities.

A reception will follow the panel discussion.

Panelists:

Antenor Vaz, a former senior official at FUNAI, the federal agency responsible for Brazil's indigenous peoples, and an author of a recent report on the situation of voluntary isolated tribes in the Amazon.

Nidia Becerra, has been elected leader of the Inga three times. Nidia works with the Yunguillo, a reserve in the department of Putumayo, in the Colombian Amazon, to achieve the protection of its territory. Under her leadership, she has quintupled the amount of formally protected traditional Inga land. She also coordinates Land is Life’s Indigenous-Led Grantmaking initiative throughout the Amazon.

Daniel Kobei, Founder and Executive Director of Ogiek Peoples’ Development Program, a Kenyan-based NGO working to secure human and land rights of the indigenous Ogiek community and other Indigenous Peoples across Kenya and Africa.

Aisah Czarriane Mariano is Deputy Secretary General of the Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance, a federation of peoples organizations in the Cordillera region of the Philippines.

Relmu Ñanku is a Mapuche leader from Argentina.

Moderator: John Gershman, Clinical Professor of Public Service, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• Wagner's Office of International Programs

• Land is Life

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. This talk, based on a book of the same title, describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, the talk illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. The talk will illustrate how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, the talk describes how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, the talk shows how experts seek to create a new “geo-economics” centered in Southeast Asia—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance. The speaker, Daromir Rudnyckyj, is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. 

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Cornell Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

• Cornell Department of Anthropology

• Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

• Cornell Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management

• Cornell Department of Economics

• Cornell Comparative Muslim Societies Program

• Cornell Southeast Asia Program

• Cornell Global Learning

• Global Cornell

This panel aims to explore the nexus between urban poverty, policing, and violence. It will explore how violence is woven into the fabric of policing strategies that have focused on the security and safety of the rich and the middle class, and on criminalizing the poor as thieves, drug addicts, and scoundrels. Seen in this light, the war on crime is but the latest expression of a decades-long war against the urban poor.

Speakers: 

- Mary Racelis, The Long Struggle for Rights in the City: Perspectives from the Philippines

- Ronald Mendoza, Using News Reports to Estimate Drug Casualties in the Philippines

- Bruno Paes Manzo, Citizen Security and Homicides in Brazil: Patterns and Variations

- Ronna Risquez, Police Violence and Death Squads in Venezuela

For more information and to register for this event, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• Columbia Journalism School

• NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

• NYU Center for Latin and Caribbean Studies

President Rodrigo Duterte came to power by promising a bloody war on drugs. Since he assumed office in July 2016, thousands of drug users and dealers have been killed in both police operations and murders by unknown assailants. Nearly all of these victims were poor Filipinos who lived in informal settlements in the country’s largest and most populous cities.

This frenzy of violence is rooted in wider and older forms of violence and injustice: poverty, segregation, and systematic violence against urban poor communities, such as forced evictions and police saturation drives. It is also enmeshed in the growing polarization of Philippine cities.

The Philippine case is not unique. Echoes of the Philippine experience can be found worldwide. This conference aims to bring together journalists and scholars who have explored the nexus between urban poverty, policing, and violence. It will explore how violence is woven into the fabric of policing strategies that have focused on the security and safety of the rich and the middle class, and on criminalizing the poor as thieves, drug addicts, and scoundrels. Seen in this light, the war on crime is but the latest expression of a decades-long war against the urban poor.

To register for this event, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• Columbia Journalism School

• NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

• NYU Center for Latin and Caribbean Studies

“Lakon Babat Alas Mertani”

Led by the Dalang/puppeteer Darsono Hadiraharjo, the Yale Community Gamelan Ensemble and students of Culture and Performing Arts of Central Java, Music 233, have collaborated to present a wayang kulit performance. The performance will also include guest musicians Anne Stebinger and Phil Acimovic, and guest speaker Professor Michael R. Dove.

Dalang Darsono Hadiraharjo has chosen a lakon (plot structure) which specifically addresses the issues of deforestation and the environmental issues so pressing in Indonesia today. Javanese wayang performance has a multifaceted role in Java; embodying artistic and spiritual practices and values, providing entertainment and engaging society with current events through critical social commentary.  With F&ES students of the Yale Community Gamelan, Darsono intends to create an artistic and educational wayang performance. 

Darsono has identified three scenes to bring in dialogue and conversations about environmental issues, creating opportunities for F&ES/ gamelan members to share their research. Peter Ludwig will be sharing his stories and research on Javanese gamelan instruments and resources for the craftsmanship of these instruments during the gara gara scene. This will most likely be delivered as a dialogue between Punakawan characters (comedic, but also descendants of gods) and Peter. Another scene will involve a research topic by Andy Lee, who will focus on the issues of deforestation and its impact on feline species in Southeast Asian regions. Guest speaker, Professor Michael Dove will address some of the issues surrounding deforestation in Indonesia and its effect on the society, communities, history and environmental policies through the voice of Yudhistra who advises Bima in the lakon to stop getting rid of the forest.

Hosted by: 

• Yale Council On Southeast Asia Studies

• MacMillan Center

• Yale Department of Music

• Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

The Yale Central Javanese Gamelan Ensemble is proud to present the Central Javanese Gamelan Music Concert. Directed by Maho Ishiguro, this event is in collaboration with the Yale Community Gamelan Ensemble and students of the Yale Central Javanese Gamelan Ensemble course, Music 232. 

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Yale Council On Southeast Asia Studies

• MacMillan Center

• Yale Department of Music

• Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Join the Alliance for Southeast Asian Students (ALSEAS) and their partners AASA, ViSA, and IYA for their first-ever exhibit entitled "Faces behind the Southeast Asian Diaspora." Come learn about and come hear the personal narratives of ALSEAS members and their families, and explore the contemporary issues that Southeast Asian refugees, immigrants, and their families experience in the US today. 

Their exhibit will be featured in the Silliman Art Gallery between April 16, 2019, to April 20, 2019, but all are welcome to their gallery reception on April 19, 2019, at 7 PM at the Silliman Art Gallery. 

Hosted by: 

• Yale Alliance for Southeast Asian Students

• Kasama: The Filipino Club at Yale

• Yale Asian American Students Alliance

• Indonesia Yale Association

Burmese Buddhists tell rebirth stories to explain where they came from and will go, from previous life to the next in the cycle of rebirth. The ultimate goal of their existence is not for the cycle to continue but to end, so as to attain nirvana. The Western modernist assumption of linear endlessly progressing time embedded in standard models of kinship in anthropology needs to be withdrawn to take into account the Burmese Buddhist experience and practice of kinship, with its multiple concepts of time and multiple paths through which relatedness by blood and water unfold along cycles of rebirth. The Burmese case invites an anthropological inquiry into the concept of time, and offers a critique of, and alternative to, the Western idea of teleological progress.

Please join us for a seminar featuring Naoko Kumada, a research fellow at the School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, and moderated by Zhaohua Yang, the Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism at the Columbia Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. No registration is required for the event. 

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Columbia Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Is there a point to international justice? Many contend that tribunals deliver not only justice but truth, reconciliation, peace, democratization, and the rule of law. These are the transitional justice ideals frequently invoked in relation to the international hybrid tribunal in Cambodia that is trying senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the mid-to-late 1970s. In this ground-breaking book, The Justice Facade, Alexander Hinton argues these claims are a facade masking what is most critical: the ways in which transitional justice is translated, experienced, and understood in everyday life. Rather than reading the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in the language of global justice and human rights, survivors understand the proceedings in their own terms, including Buddhist beliefs and on-going relationships with the spirits of the dead.

Alexander Hinton is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Global Affairs, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention at Rutgers University, Newark. He is a past President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and served as an expert witness at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

To RSVP, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• NYU Wagner's Office of International Programs

• NYU's Liberal Studies Program

Please join Sidney Jones, the executive director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), for a timely conversation about Indonesia’s presidential election - which will take place on April 17 - and the role of religion in the politics of the world's largest Muslim-majority nation. Margaret Scott, one of NYSEAN’s founders and a journalist who writes about Indonesia, will moderate the conversation.

Before setting up IPAC, Jones worked from 2002 to 2013 with the International Crisis Group, first as Southeast Asia project director, then from 2007 as senior adviser to the Asia program. Before joining Crisis Group, she worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and New York (1977-84); Amnesty International in London as the Indonesia-Philippines-Pacific researcher (1985-88); and Human Rights Watch in New York as the Asia director (1989-2002). She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She lived in Shiraz, Iran for one year as a university student, 1971-72, and studied Arabic in Cairo and Tunisia. She received an honorary doctorate in 2006 from the New School in New York.

Hosted by: 

• NYSEAN

• Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University

• NYU Wagner's Office of International Programs

The Northeastern Conference (NEC) on Indonesia is an initiative of the Yale Indonesia Forum (YIF) and the Cornell Indonesia Student Association (CIA). The 19th Northeastern Conference in New Haven is organized by the Yale Indonesia Forum and funded by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS) at Yale University.

The Yale Indonesia Forum (YIF) seeks to address the issues of rising fear and anxiety, marginalization, and otherization in Indonesia from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives. How have categories of proper Indonesianness been historically constructed, and whom have they excluded? What are the historic and contemporary sources of societal anxiety in Indonesia? What new opportunities for and challenges to mutual understanding have emerged since the rise of human rights discourses? Are there clear victim-perpetrator binaries when it comes to otherization, and in what ways do targets of marginalization stake their claims to belonging? Can we predict what social categories will be the next targets?

Theme

In the throes of Jakarta’s gubernatorial election campaign of 2017, mass opposition arose against then-governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok, for his alleged blasphemy against the Quran. Ahok’s subsequent election loss and arrest carried uncomfortable echoes of the past. The animosity directed towards the Christian and ethnically Chinese governor sparked fears that Indonesia’s ethnic and social tensions were dangerously resurgent.  Indeed, the creation of a distinct “Other” against whom to direct societal anxieties has taken various forms in Indonesia, including the portrayal of the ethnic Chinese as unscrupulous opportunists, the depiction of communism as the source of all social ills, and more recently, the panic over LGBT populations being a supposed source of moral decay. 

For more information, click here. 

Hosted by: 

• Yale Indonesia Forum

• Cornell Indonesia Student Association

• Yale Council On Southeast Asia Studies

John Buchanan is a Postdoctoral Assistant at Yale University. Buchanan is a founding member and the Director of Research for the Institute for Strategy and Policy, Myanmar, which is a Yangon-based think tank. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington – Seattle in 2017. His dissertation, “The Rise of the Bo: Autonomous Strongmen, Opium Capital, and State Formation in Mainland Southeast Asia (1948-1996),” examines processes of local state formation in opium producing areas and the emergence of powerful autonomous strongmen. His study of the nexus of state formation, militarized violence and illicit capital accumulation draws attention to the persistence of non-state spaces.

Drawing on archival research conducted in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, London and Washington, D.C., as well as extensive fieldwork in Burma and Thailand, he examines the conditions under which strongmen exercise social control autonomous of state agents. In doing so, he challenges conventional market-focused analyses of the commercialization of opium production in Mainland Southeast Asia and the fragmentation of political authority. His research shifts the focus, instead, to localized dynamics within agrarian societies that involve efforts to mitigate risks posed by predatory armed groups. During the year at Agrarian Studies, John will transform “The Rise of the Bo” into a book manuscript while continuing to contribute to policy and scholarly debates on a range of topics including drug crop production, state formation, and armed conflicts.

Find more information here. 

Hosted by Yale Agrarian Studies Program

Global investments in the energy infrastructure sector have received the lion’s share of contemporary financing from the public and private sector in the twenty-first century. Infrastructure building in the nineteenth and twentieth century traditionally served to embody the modernizing ambitions of successive states in their bid to construct public goods and lay foundations for their industrialization strategies. Since the end of the 20th century and particularly after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis however, paradigmatic shifts in the private turn in development have expanded and deepened the reach of financial markets in the developing world. While liberalizing reforms to facilitate the entry of private sector actors into financing for development have been led by the usual Bretton Woods institutions, the author argues that these reforms have facilitated the vociferous entry of non-traditional actors and coordinated business groups from the emerging economies of East and Southeast Asia seeking high returns in a business model which treats infrastructure building as an asset in their portfolio-driven quest to transition from ‘national champions’ to international powerhouses. Emerging regional development finance is rapidly changing the environmental and economic landscapes of mainland Southeast Asia, creating a new round of debt and dependency which cuts against popular notions of win-win ‘south-south’ development. The author compares similar and divergent trends in hydro-infrastructure financing in Lao PDR and Myanmar and discusses the present and future of socio-environmental governance along the Mekong and Ayeyarwaddy.

About the Speaker:Dr. Pon Souvannaseng is a Research Associate at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include aid politics and development finance; the political economy of energy security and infrastructure expansion, particularly in Asia and Africa, and issues of environmental governance and regulation. She conducts research in West Africa and mainland Southeast Asia on the UKRI-funded FutureDAMS research programme. She has previously served as a Fellow in Political Economy and International Development at University College London (UCL) and as a Research Analyst at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). She has been a Fulbright Research Scholar in Southeast Asia and a CODESRIA-CLACSO-APISA South-South Young Laureate Award holder. She holds degrees from the LSE and Tufts University in Political Science.

Hosted by NYSEAN.

The Indonesian Speakers Series provides opportunities for Indonesian students and the wider community to engage with inspiring leaders. For this event, we will welcome the current Indonesian Minister of Finance, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, and the former Indonesian Minister of Trade, Gita Wirjawan. 

About our Speakers:

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Sri Mulyani Indrawati is an Indonesian economist who has been Minister of Finance of Indonesia since 2016; previously she served in the same post from 2005 to 2010. In June 2010 she was appointed as Managing Director of the World Bank Group and resigned as Minister of Finance.

Gita Wirjawan

Gita Irawan Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, investment banker and philanthropist. Previously he served as Minister of Trade of the Republic of Indonesia during President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Kabinet Indonesia Bersatu II. He is the founder of Ancora Group and Ancora Foundation.

To RSVP for Sri Mulyani's event, click here. [4PM-6PM]

To RSVP for Gita Wirjawan's event, click here. [2PM-4PM]

Hosted by: 

• Permias NYC

• NYU Indonesian Student Association

• KJRI New York

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The 2019 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture will be given by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given once a year in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic, Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003, and who was a member of the board of guarantors at the Italian Academy. Professor Said was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the field of cultural and postcolonial studies. The Annual Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture pays tribute to Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.

Introduction by Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is made possible in part by the generosity of The JKW Foundation and The Abraaj Group.

Hosted by: 

• The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities