In Thailand, the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps program (Ruk Sa Din Daen—หลักสูตรรักษาดินแดน [ร.ด.]) is something ordinary people are intimately familiar with. Roughly 15% of Thai high ...

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.

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 ...

If all had gone to plan, analysis of how the autonomy process in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) is travelling would now be focusing on the results of a parliamentary ...

A textbook might define anarchism s a political philosophy that rejects hierarchies of domination, especially the state and capitalism. Anarchists, accordingly, advocate for horizontal forms of social ...

Caught between eviction and embrace, residents of Jakarta’s informal settlements are finding new ways to assert their rights and reshape their city from the ground up. “They treated us like animals!

Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art writer, curator and educator based in Bangkok, where he teaches on the International Programme in Communication Design at Chulalongkorn University. His research ...

The global trend toward the neoliberalisation of higher education, characterised by market-driven practices, privatization, and financial austerity, poses serious threats to educational equity, ...

Floramante SJ Ponce merges various anthropological and sociological theories and methods to understand Southeast Asia’s economic, political, and sociocultural dynamics, particularly those of Laos and ...

Siraphop Phumpuengphut, known by his nickname “Khanun”, which means jackfruit in Thai, is a political prisoner currently serving a two-year sentence in the Bangkok Remand Prison. Khanun was convicted ...

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, ...