One of the intriguing themes that link the research articles in this issue is their attention to how circumstances surrounding the failure of administrative policies and practices in Southeast Asia provided opportunities for state expansion. In case studies covering post-1954 Vietnam, British Burma, Cold-War Malaya, the Straits Settlements, and post-1932 Thailand, the authors consider the concept of failure not simply as the collapse of official projects or policies but as a narrative device that structured experiences of fractured authority, ambivalent belonging, and contested spaces. Mainly historical in approach, the articles engage how states (and other elite stakeholders) adjusted to the unplanned, the unexpected, and the unintended outcomes of state integration measures. In broad strokes, the studies deepen our understanding of state–society relations, highlighting how moments of friction amongst stakeholders enabled state authorities to exercise power in novel ways, leaving epistemological traces that affect scholarship today.
Ken MacLean’s contribution employs the concept of failure to reassess the Vietnamese Land Reforms (1952–56) carried out by the Vietnamese Communist Party in northern Vietnam. The reforms were part of a broad mass mobilisation campaign to integrate rural Party cells into a more centralised apparatus while deepening ‘Party and state control over local affairs’. Drawing from recent scholarship that expands the understanding of failure beyond binary success–failure dichotomies, MacLean examines how the Party framed failure in official ‘recapitulation’ reports produced during the reorganisation of local Party cells as a form of coping with a range of administrative and capacity challenges in Thai Nguyen Province. MacLean’s discussion identifies how different storytelling devices were employed to shape narratives of failure to explain local variances in the implementation of centrally directed policy. For MacLean, failure does not interrupt the authority of the state narrative; it paradoxically secures it, revealing that official histories can absorb contradictions without relinquishing power, thereby complicating historical judgements over what constitutes truth and propaganda.
Where MacLean examines the rhetorical management of failure in the years following the First Indochina War in Vietnam, Jagjeet Lally addresses how ‘wilful failure’ by British Burma’s colonial administration to curb opium smuggling was a deliberate strategy for state expansion. Lally’s study investigates the dynamics of the opium economy in British Burma and its regulatory framework from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, focusing on the borderlands between Burma, China and Siam, and the corresponding relations amongst different actors operating at both the colonial centre and the state’s edges. Lally frames state absence or failure as a strategic tool rather than a mere lack of control, recontextualising how we understand state-making practices. Like MacLean’s rural cadres, Lally’s colonial administrators reveal how failure becomes a productive ambiguity within state narratives, instrumental in constructing authority, negotiating legitimacy, and masking systemic contradictions.
Productive ambiguity links Lally’s study to Hema Kiruppalini’s contribution, which explores the concept of ‘apolitical warriors’ as a theoretical tool for understanding how Gurkhas and their families are positioned within political discourses in Southeast Asia. Her study interrogates how Gurkhas, as military migrants, are discursively constructed as impartial, loyal, and detached from the socio-political dynamics of their host countries (Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei). Drawing on theories of martial race and migrant subjectivity, the article argues that the portrayal of Gurkhas as apolitical warriors serves both to celebrate their contributions and to justify their exclusion from citizenship and social integration. By focusing on the performative aspects of remembrance ceremonies held in Malaysia and Singapore, Kiruppalini uncovers how narratives of loyalty, bravery, and impartiality are constructed, reinforced, and contested. Kiruppalini’s nuanced analysis suggests that the ambiguous place of Gurkhas in national narratives, a legacy of colonial–postcolonial practices, is not the result of the state’s failure to produce memory or gratitude but is the result of a constitutive feature of how belonging itself is selectively constructed and denied.
Staying in the context of British Malaya, Richard Stubbs’ article critically examines the rise of a ‘new orthodoxy’ in scholarship about the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), particularly its emphasis on the success of the Briggs Plan’s resettlement programme in ensuring the defeat of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). He contends that forced resettlement under the Briggs Plan was far less effective than proponents of the new orthodoxy claim, with inadequate infrastructure, insufficient security personnel, and widespread local dissatisfaction undermining its efficacy. Stubbs’ analysis raises issues with how senior administrators reported the results and the impact of the resettlement programme, challenging interpretations of the Emergency that in his view overlook the agency (and failures) of local actors. In line with MacLean’s article, Stubbs’ research highlights how a failed (or successful) state policy is epistemologically constructed by historical actors and different generations of scholars, affecting how the archive and dependent narratives shape historical understandings of events such as the ‘Emergency’.
Tomas Larsson’s article revisits the conceptual ambiguities surrounding the concept of civil religion within the context of Thai intellectual and political history, aiming to clarify its theoretical utility and relevance to scholars of both Buddhism and politics in Thailand despite ongoing conceptual imprecision. Larsson proposes understanding civil religion as a discursive and ideological framework, a form of nationalist ideology, nation-making and state-building; a notion that supports religious pluralism and allows for ideological accommodation between the state and various religious communities. Underpinning this discussion is Larsson’s identification of ‘cosmopolitan royalism’, presenting it as Thailand’s dominant form of civil-religious nationalism, with the king positioned as a patron of multiple religious traditions. By examining how civil religion has been interpreted and applied by various Thai intellectuals and state actors, Larsson highlights how competing interpretations of civil religion reflect broader debates about nationalism, legitimacy, and religious pluralism.
Chien Wen Kung’s article explores the intellectual and political career of Wu Teh-yao, his contribution to Singapore’s nation-building efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, and his broader role in the construction of ‘Asian Conservatism’. Kung argues that Singapore’s political ideology during the 1970s and 1980s, was not solely the result of policies devised by Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party (PAP) but was influenced by Wu’s conservative vision, itself a product of trans-Asian intellectual discussions, which emphasised moral education, social stability, and cultural continuity. Kung frames Wu’s work within broader discussions of conservatism as a transnational ideological project, particularly its intersection with notions of ‘Asian Values’. While the article historicises conservative ideas in Singapore, Kung treats conservatism not as a static ideological construct fixed to a particular place, but as being dynamically constructed and co-constituted across several settings and contexts in Asia. This approach situates Wu within a broader conservative setting shaped by the Cold War, decolonisation, and the cultural politics of Southeast Asia. Kung traces how Wu’s engagement with various ideological and institutional networks contributed to the articulation of conservatism as a transnational project in Asia.
Our book review section completes the issue with six book reviews of the most recent volumes in the field. We continue to be grateful to the authors and review contributors for their support of the Journal.
