On 28 June approximately 4.5 million voters in Bangkok will choose a new governor and Bangkok Metropolitan Council. On the surface the outcome looks predictable: polls consistently show incumbent ...

In May 2025 Malaysia’s Ministry of Home Affairs announced that migrant workers would be permitted to change employers across different industries. This could mean a potential break from the country’s ...

Rachel Killean is a Senior Lecturer in law at the Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, where her research centres responses to violence, with a focus on transitional justice, victims’ rights, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Chin Peng, born Ong Boon Hua, 21 October 1924 to 16 September 2013 The passing of Chin Peng in Bangkok on 16 September 2013 brings to an end one of the longest of Asian political biographies. Chin ...

Malaysia’s once exceptionally stable political order has been upended. A new phase has been entered in the long struggle over who formally exercises political power over the state—and to what end. For ...

Paul Chambers looks back at the politicisation of the Royal Thai Police, before turning to the palace's recent personalisation of authority over an institution often overshadowed by the military.

The Thai language versions of this article and report are now available by following this link. The 2014 coup d’état against the elected Yingluck Shinawatra’s government, staged by a military group ...

The motivations behind these reforms—the renewed emphasis on language learning, a desire to see more Australian students up in the Indo-Pacific for longer duration experiences, and a rebalancing of ...

[This is a rough summary translation of our original post in Thai. New Mandala readers who can read Thai should go here for the full length article. The English spelling of names in this article are ...

The 10 th of August 2020 will be remembered as either a key date in Thailand’s transition to democracy or as a precursor to yet another coup carried out by a military pledging itself to the defence of ...