Toby Carroll, Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones, eds. The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development under Hyperglobalisation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; pbk £24.99, e-book £19.99.
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This review first appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2020.1833074, latest articles, 21 October 2020). Readers may wish to note that I have worked in the same department as Toby Carroll, and that the front matter to the book lists me as one of the Series Editors for the Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, where this book appears. For the record, I had nothing to do with this book at any stage and I have retired from this position.
There have been three previous editions of the ‘Murdoch School’ Political Economy of Southeast Asia, all edited by Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison, and Richard Robison, with the subtitles An introduction (1997), Conflict, Crisis and Change (2001), and Markets, Power and Contestation (2006). This volume, with three new editors, identifies the Murdoch School’s approach as focused on the dramatic shift in industrial production from developed to developing countries, and similarly foregrounds ‘social conflict, primarily between class forces, as central to explaining political and economic life’ (vi–vii). The new editors note that the context has changed somewhat since 2006, notably with the rise of China, and the ‘intensifying global spread of trade, production and finance, and associated vast imbalances in power and wealth’ (viii). They opt for a thematic rather than country-based approach, aiming to avoid the trap of ‘methodological nationalism,’ and aim to show the way in which ‘local, national developments are ultimately intertwined with regional and global ones, helping us recognise both commonalities across societies and their shared causes’ (viii). There are four sections to the book: ‘Theory and Historical Evolution,’ ‘Economic Development and Governance,’ ‘Capital, State and Society,’ and ‘Capital, State and Nature,’ with 15 chapters, from a total of 19 authors, of whom six are women.
How far does the book succeed in providing a critical introduction to the political economy of Southeast Asia? Breaking this question down: Is its recourse to theory helpful? Is its approach applied successfully to the region, with due regard for specificity and diversity? Is the organisation of the volume as a whole conducive to an integrated understanding of the political economy of the region? Are the thematic chapters both persuasive on their own terms and appropriately linked to the broad framework overall? And finally, are there conspicuous gaps in its coverage?
The first chapter (by Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones) compares the social conflict approach with two ‘Weberian’ approaches it finds wanting – ‘state autonomy’ (the developmental state) and ‘historical institutionalism’ (methodologically nationalist ‘varieties of capitalism’). But in declining to address ‘neo-liberal’ approaches on the flimsy grounds that neoliberalism is an ideology, they leave unexplored the body of theory that supports marketising reform and underpins ‘hyper-globalisation.’ The gap this leaves is felt throughout the book, as references to policy initiatives from the World Bank and allied institutions appear throughout. Toby Carroll’s overview of the political economy of the region over the last 50 years in the second chapter, in contrast, does just what the reader needs. He locates the region, accounting for a little under 10% of the global population, and positioned between India, China and Japan to the north, and New Zealand and Australia to the south, in an historically and regionally sensitive account of integration into the contemporary global economy. The analysis centres on the export of Japanese industrial capital from the 1970s, mainly to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, the ‘absence’ of China in this critical period and its increasingly massive competitive presence from the 1990s on, and the specific trajectories of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma from ‘socialist’ isolation to late incorporation in which Chinese capital was dominant from the start. Developments in this period crucially inflected the previous all but universal experience of colonialism and anti-imperialist struggle, and the particular legacies of British, Dutch, French, Japanese and especially US imperialist war. With the exceptions of Brunei and Singapore, the outcome is what the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) term (lower) middle income traps, characterised by a continued reliance on commodity exports and low-value-added manufacturing, dominated by foreign capital in alliance with state-run or ‘crony capitalist’ local firms, and managed for the most part through single-party or quasi-single-party regimes.
The contributors of the 13 thematic chapters that follow have all read other relevant chapters with care (not the case in too many edited collections); the approaches adopted are congruent with a social conflict perspective on contested integration into a rampantly expanding and crisis-ridden world market, and by and large the volume achieves a degree of coherence that reflects well on editors and contributors alike. Of particular note, outstanding chapters by Elias, Gellert and Hirsch extend the reach of the volume and its comparative interest, in vitally important directions.
To me, though, the organisation of the volume is unhelpful. I would not read the thematic chapters in sequence, but begin with Hughes on Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (the ‘CLMV countries,’ Chapter 4), and Al-Fadhat on the internationalisation of capital, with illustrative reference to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia (Chapter 7): they expand usefully on Carroll, and reinforce the points that, in both groups, agribusiness and extractive industries are as important as manufacturing and services, and that despite the sharp difference in points of departure, both groups now exhibit close ties between foreign capital on the one hand and groups within or close to the state on the other. Three excellent chapters, left until too late, flesh out the core political economy of the region. The first is Philip Hirsch’s account of land and agrarian relations (Chapter 14), focused on the ‘shift from a peasant rural economy to a neoliberal era defined by globalisation, marketisation, livelihood diversification and precarity, including growing exclusions and enclosures that alienate people from their land’ (341) – massively promoted by the ADB and the World Bank (348), and still of course far from complete – is crucial to understanding the region, and fundamental background for a clutch of other chapters. It is well supported by Pascale Hatcher (Chapter 13) on extractive industries: she notes the global significance of the region in mineral production, with Indonesia and its liberal investment regime to the fore, and highlights the World Bank- and ADB-promoted ‘race for reforms’ (327) that brought about liberalisation and increased foreign investment in the 1990s in Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Her identification of the social conflicts arising from ‘policies engineered to aggressively expand the extractive frontier in the region’ (333) leads into Paul Gellert’s discussion of the political economy of environmental degradation and climate disaster (Chapter 15), which seamlessly integrates a broadly world system theory approach to political ecology into the social conflict perspective of the Murdoch School. Gellert soberly details the ways in which ‘degradation has been inherent in Southeast Asia’s mode of capitalist development’ (373), drawing primarily on his deep knowledge of the Indonesian case. Agribusiness, mining and manufacturing have all contributed to the process, and hyper-globalisation is now matched by ‘hyper-degradation,’ not least because of rising Chinese and Indian demand for primary commodities (374). The obvious suspects – coal and palm oil – are an important part of the picture, but so is the toxic combination of rapid urbanisation and spiralling car ownership inherent in growth-led accumulation, allied to weak regulation.
Gellert notes the weakness of regional and global regulation of environmental issues, notably in relation to deforestation, and two further chapters round out the forms of regional and global governance in which the region is embedded. Hameiri and Jones (Chapter 8) deploy Jayasuriya’s (2008) notion of ‘regulatory regionalism’ to argue convincingly that whatever its shortcomings in relation to security, ASEAN, in conjunction with other regional initiatives, has been effective in creating new institutions and networks inducing domestic reforms that in turn impose regional discipline on states and societies, promote pan-regional investment, production and trade networks and empower the social forces seeking integration into the global economy. Such schemes introduce regional surveillance mechanisms, and, in the case of the ASEAN Economic Community (212–220), specify ‘in minute detail what every member-state should be doing in virtually every area of economic life’ (215). As the authors note, supportive liberalising elites face resistance from entrenched oligarchs, bureaucracies fearing a loss of authority, middle-class professionals worried by the free movement of labour, and workers and the poor concerned that vital subsidies and other forms of support are at risk. Andrew Rosser (Chapter 12), on the political economy of aid in the region, likewise sees ‘continued predatory, populist and authoritarian/semi-democratic rule’ (310) as likely to persist, with China rejecting political conditionality and ‘traditional’ donors only weakly committed to promoting it. But as global and regional institutions and traditional donors do promote the integration of regional and global markets, and China devotes resources primarily to building the requisite infrastructure, all sides contribute to the continued growth of pan-regional investment, production and trade networks.
This is the changing landscape, then, into, across, and beyond which migrant workers have travelled, and in another exemplary chapter (10) Kelly Gerard and Charanpal Bal describe a two-tier or ‘bifurcated’ system which allows ‘receiving states to cherry-pick professionals from the global workforce, while leaving low-wage migrants vulnerable to precarity, exploitation, abuse and debt bondage’ (249). Two-thirds of international migration is intra-regional: Myanmar, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines are the leading sending countries, the latter primarily sending outside the region, while Singapore and Thailand are the leading receiving countries, along with Malaysia, which both attracts (mainly from Indonesia) and sends (mainly to Singapore) substantial numbers (251). Over half of those entering Malaysia and Thailand are undocumented. The primary focus is on governance regimes: receiving countries (Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia) generally severely limit migrants’ legal-political rights, keep them subject to unilateral removal, frequently bar them from changing employers or seeking jobs on the open market, and typically cut them off from trade union membership (255), though different systems operate for high-wage migrants, with Singapore’s system of graduated passes the most elaborate (262–263); the leading sending countries, Indonesia and the Philippines, maintain regimes whose levels of protection for migrants are ‘always constrained by a desire to expand deployment’ (257).
Internal migration is equally important, and Hirsch notes that ‘as production becomes increasingly capital-intensive, rather than labour-intensive, a ‘surplus’ population emerges in the countryside. This also has particularly gendered effects: historically, when men have left rural communities to work in the cities, left-behind female family members have tended the farms; but agriculture’s mechanisation often involves the displacement of female by male workers (354). Gerard and Bal add that while men and women are equally likely to migrate abroad, labour migration ‘is highly gendered with women strongly represented in domestic work, nursing and sex work, and men in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries and forestry’ (251). All of this leads into Elias’s trenchant summary (Chapter 9) of the deep inequalities and widespread violence of gender relations in the region – which has the highest recorded levels of domestic violence in the world (227). She lays out the ways in which Southeast Asian developmentalism is intrinsically gendered: non- or even anti-welfarist in orientation, dismissive of the value of economic activity centred in the household, and rooted in the assumption that a reserve army of low-cost female labour is available (229). Her conclusion (revising and extending the ‘Murdoch School’ focus), that ‘the reproduction of class inequalities and conflict occur alongside and are [sic] bound up with persistent gender inequalities’ (230), is an essential insight into the political economy of the region and the social conflicts inherent in it.
The remaining four chapters usefully address aspects of the politics of the region, but are less well integrated into the volume as a whole. Garry Rodan and Jacqui Baker (Chapter 3) suggest that: ‘The cold war and authoritarian rule first destroyed the left, while the region’s late insertion into globalised capitalist production systems has militated against the emergence of independent civil society organisations’; with the region’s growing middle and business classes ‘typically directly or indirectly dependent upon the state,’ and lacking ‘the will and/or capacity to challenge oligarchic power,’ the region’s oligarchs remain prominent, but ‘continually face challenges of political management from new or emerging social forces, often manifesting as struggles over political institutions’ (88). Their chapter proposes a ‘modes of participation’ (MOP) framework (democratic, populist, consultative and particularist), and provides examples of a consultative initiative from Singapore (Our Singapore Conversation, 2012–2013) and particularism as reflected in Jakarta’s neighbourhood associations, but nobody else takes the framework up. Nathan Quimpo (Chapter 5) on the decline of the left, dwells far more on the fate of the Maoist strategies adopted by communist parties in the region than on subsequent electoral politics and the weak emergence of social democratic initiatives (148–151); the discussion of populism by Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz (Chapter 6) takes in India, Turkey and the USA as well as Southeast Asia, and touches unevenly on Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia. Jane Hutchison and Ian Wilson explore poor people’s urban movements in Chapter 11, seeing them as ‘generally instrumental, concerned with tangible gains in the short term, and highly opportunistic’ (272), but focus rather narrowly on contrasting responses to forced evictions from informal settlements in Jakarta and Metro Manila without giving a sense of the constituent elements and survival strategies of the urban working poor across the region as a whole. The thematic chapters are generally strong, and with the partial exception of those on politics, are appropriately linked to the broad framework deployed. The volume as a whole provides the best and most current introduction to the region, and many individual chapters could valuably be assigned to comparative courses. On my reading, as noted, a different organisation brings out more strongly the depth and coherence of the critical political economy of the region they provide. But in any case, the thematic approach makes the volume flexible and easily adaptable for classroom use. The absence of a summary of the thinking behind the agenda of broadly ‘liberal developmental’ or ‘marketising’ structural transformation promoted by international and regional organisations is a weakness, especially for students outside Asia trying to get to grips with current regional dynamics. Happily, the Asian Development Bank’s Asia’s Journey to Prosperity (ADB 2020), not available to the authors at the time of writing, sets out clearly the thinking behind ‘deep marketisation,’ and its first chapter offers a handy summary. This volume delivers the critique. The Murdoch School lives on, and prospers, in the hands of a largely new generation of scholars.
References
ADB. 2020. Asia’s Journey to Prosperity: Politics, Market, and Technology over 50 Years. Manila: Asian Development Bank.
Jayasuriya, K. 2008. ‘Regionalising the State: Political Topography of Regulatory Regionalism’, Contemporary Politics, 14 (1): 21–35.
There have been three previous editions of the ‘Murdoch School’ Political Economy of Southeast Asia, all edited by Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison, and Richard Robison, with the subtitles An introduction (1997), Conflict, Crisis and Change (2001), and Markets, Power and Contestation (2006). This volume, with three new editors, identifies the Murdoch School’s approach as focused on the dramatic shift in industrial production from developed to developing countries, and similarly foregrounds ‘social conflict, primarily between class forces, as central to explaining political and economic life’ (vi–vii). The new editors note that the context has changed somewhat since 2006, notably with the rise of China, and the ‘intensifying global spread of trade, production and finance, and associated vast imbalances in power and wealth’ (viii). They opt for a thematic rather than country-based approach, aiming to avoid the trap of ‘methodological nationalism,’ and aim to show the way in which ‘local, national developments are ultimately intertwined with regional and global ones, helping us recognise both commonalities across societies and their shared causes’ (viii). There are four sections to the book: ‘Theory and Historical Evolution,’ ‘Economic Development and Governance,’ ‘Capital, State and Society,’ and ‘Capital, State and Nature,’ with 15 chapters, from a total of 19 authors, of whom six are women.
How far does the book succeed in providing a critical introduction to the political economy of Southeast Asia? Breaking this question down: Is its recourse to theory helpful? Is its approach applied successfully to the region, with due regard for specificity and diversity? Is the organisation of the volume as a whole conducive to an integrated understanding of the political economy of the region? Are the thematic chapters both persuasive on their own terms and appropriately linked to the broad framework overall? And finally, are there conspicuous gaps in its coverage?
The first chapter (by Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones) compares the social conflict approach with two ‘Weberian’ approaches it finds wanting – ‘state autonomy’ (the developmental state) and ‘historical institutionalism’ (methodologically nationalist ‘varieties of capitalism’). But in declining to address ‘neo-liberal’ approaches on the flimsy grounds that neoliberalism is an ideology, they leave unexplored the body of theory that supports marketising reform and underpins ‘hyper-globalisation.’ The gap this leaves is felt throughout the book, as references to policy initiatives from the World Bank and allied institutions appear throughout. Toby Carroll’s overview of the political economy of the region over the last 50 years in the second chapter, in contrast, does just what the reader needs. He locates the region, accounting for a little under 10% of the global population, and positioned between India, China and Japan to the north, and New Zealand and Australia to the south, in an historically and regionally sensitive account of integration into the contemporary global economy. The analysis centres on the export of Japanese industrial capital from the 1970s, mainly to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, the ‘absence’ of China in this critical period and its increasingly massive competitive presence from the 1990s on, and the specific trajectories of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma from ‘socialist’ isolation to late incorporation in which Chinese capital was dominant from the start. Developments in this period crucially inflected the previous all but universal experience of colonialism and anti-imperialist struggle, and the particular legacies of British, Dutch, French, Japanese and especially US imperialist war. With the exceptions of Brunei and Singapore, the outcome is what the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) term (lower) middle income traps, characterised by a continued reliance on commodity exports and low-value-added manufacturing, dominated by foreign capital in alliance with state-run or ‘crony capitalist’ local firms, and managed for the most part through single-party or quasi-single-party regimes.
The contributors of the 13 thematic chapters that follow have all read other relevant chapters with care (not the case in too many edited collections); the approaches adopted are congruent with a social conflict perspective on contested integration into a rampantly expanding and crisis-ridden world market, and by and large the volume achieves a degree of coherence that reflects well on editors and contributors alike. Of particular note, outstanding chapters by Elias, Gellert and Hirsch extend the reach of the volume and its comparative interest, in vitally important directions.
To me, though, the organisation of the volume is unhelpful. I would not read the thematic chapters in sequence, but begin with Hughes on Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (the ‘CLMV countries,’ Chapter 4), and Al-Fadhat on the internationalisation of capital, with illustrative reference to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia (Chapter 7): they expand usefully on Carroll, and reinforce the points that, in both groups, agribusiness and extractive industries are as important as manufacturing and services, and that despite the sharp difference in points of departure, both groups now exhibit close ties between foreign capital on the one hand and groups within or close to the state on the other. Three excellent chapters, left until too late, flesh out the core political economy of the region. The first is Philip Hirsch’s account of land and agrarian relations (Chapter 14), focused on the ‘shift from a peasant rural economy to a neoliberal era defined by globalisation, marketisation, livelihood diversification and precarity, including growing exclusions and enclosures that alienate people from their land’ (341) – massively promoted by the ADB and the World Bank (348), and still of course far from complete – is crucial to understanding the region, and fundamental background for a clutch of other chapters. It is well supported by Pascale Hatcher (Chapter 13) on extractive industries: she notes the global significance of the region in mineral production, with Indonesia and its liberal investment regime to the fore, and highlights the World Bank- and ADB-promoted ‘race for reforms’ (327) that brought about liberalisation and increased foreign investment in the 1990s in Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Her identification of the social conflicts arising from ‘policies engineered to aggressively expand the extractive frontier in the region’ (333) leads into Paul Gellert’s discussion of the political economy of environmental degradation and climate disaster (Chapter 15), which seamlessly integrates a broadly world system theory approach to political ecology into the social conflict perspective of the Murdoch School. Gellert soberly details the ways in which ‘degradation has been inherent in Southeast Asia’s mode of capitalist development’ (373), drawing primarily on his deep knowledge of the Indonesian case. Agribusiness, mining and manufacturing have all contributed to the process, and hyper-globalisation is now matched by ‘hyper-degradation,’ not least because of rising Chinese and Indian demand for primary commodities (374). The obvious suspects – coal and palm oil – are an important part of the picture, but so is the toxic combination of rapid urbanisation and spiralling car ownership inherent in growth-led accumulation, allied to weak regulation.
Gellert notes the weakness of regional and global regulation of environmental issues, notably in relation to deforestation, and two further chapters round out the forms of regional and global governance in which the region is embedded. Hameiri and Jones (Chapter 8) deploy Jayasuriya’s (2008) notion of ‘regulatory regionalism’ to argue convincingly that whatever its shortcomings in relation to security, ASEAN, in conjunction with other regional initiatives, has been effective in creating new institutions and networks inducing domestic reforms that in turn impose regional discipline on states and societies, promote pan-regional investment, production and trade networks and empower the social forces seeking integration into the global economy. Such schemes introduce regional surveillance mechanisms, and, in the case of the ASEAN Economic Community (212–220), specify ‘in minute detail what every member-state should be doing in virtually every area of economic life’ (215). As the authors note, supportive liberalising elites face resistance from entrenched oligarchs, bureaucracies fearing a loss of authority, middle-class professionals worried by the free movement of labour, and workers and the poor concerned that vital subsidies and other forms of support are at risk. Andrew Rosser (Chapter 12), on the political economy of aid in the region, likewise sees ‘continued predatory, populist and authoritarian/semi-democratic rule’ (310) as likely to persist, with China rejecting political conditionality and ‘traditional’ donors only weakly committed to promoting it. But as global and regional institutions and traditional donors do promote the integration of regional and global markets, and China devotes resources primarily to building the requisite infrastructure, all sides contribute to the continued growth of pan-regional investment, production and trade networks.
This is the changing landscape, then, into, across, and beyond which migrant workers have travelled, and in another exemplary chapter (10) Kelly Gerard and Charanpal Bal describe a two-tier or ‘bifurcated’ system which allows ‘receiving states to cherry-pick professionals from the global workforce, while leaving low-wage migrants vulnerable to precarity, exploitation, abuse and debt bondage’ (249). Two-thirds of international migration is intra-regional: Myanmar, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines are the leading sending countries, the latter primarily sending outside the region, while Singapore and Thailand are the leading receiving countries, along with Malaysia, which both attracts (mainly from Indonesia) and sends (mainly to Singapore) substantial numbers (251). Over half of those entering Malaysia and Thailand are undocumented. The primary focus is on governance regimes: receiving countries (Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia) generally severely limit migrants’ legal-political rights, keep them subject to unilateral removal, frequently bar them from changing employers or seeking jobs on the open market, and typically cut them off from trade union membership (255), though different systems operate for high-wage migrants, with Singapore’s system of graduated passes the most elaborate (262–263); the leading sending countries, Indonesia and the Philippines, maintain regimes whose levels of protection for migrants are ‘always constrained by a desire to expand deployment’ (257).
Internal migration is equally important, and Hirsch notes that ‘as production becomes increasingly capital-intensive, rather than labour-intensive, a ‘surplus’ population emerges in the countryside. This also has particularly gendered effects: historically, when men have left rural communities to work in the cities, left-behind female family members have tended the farms; but agriculture’s mechanisation often involves the displacement of female by male workers (354). Gerard and Bal add that while men and women are equally likely to migrate abroad, labour migration ‘is highly gendered with women strongly represented in domestic work, nursing and sex work, and men in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries and forestry’ (251). All of this leads into Elias’s trenchant summary (Chapter 9) of the deep inequalities and widespread violence of gender relations in the region – which has the highest recorded levels of domestic violence in the world (227). She lays out the ways in which Southeast Asian developmentalism is intrinsically gendered: non- or even anti-welfarist in orientation, dismissive of the value of economic activity centred in the household, and rooted in the assumption that a reserve army of low-cost female labour is available (229). Her conclusion (revising and extending the ‘Murdoch School’ focus), that ‘the reproduction of class inequalities and conflict occur alongside and are [sic] bound up with persistent gender inequalities’ (230), is an essential insight into the political economy of the region and the social conflicts inherent in it.
The remaining four chapters usefully address aspects of the politics of the region, but are less well integrated into the volume as a whole. Garry Rodan and Jacqui Baker (Chapter 3) suggest that: ‘The cold war and authoritarian rule first destroyed the left, while the region’s late insertion into globalised capitalist production systems has militated against the emergence of independent civil society organisations’; with the region’s growing middle and business classes ‘typically directly or indirectly dependent upon the state,’ and lacking ‘the will and/or capacity to challenge oligarchic power,’ the region’s oligarchs remain prominent, but ‘continually face challenges of political management from new or emerging social forces, often manifesting as struggles over political institutions’ (88). Their chapter proposes a ‘modes of participation’ (MOP) framework (democratic, populist, consultative and particularist), and provides examples of a consultative initiative from Singapore (Our Singapore Conversation, 2012–2013) and particularism as reflected in Jakarta’s neighbourhood associations, but nobody else takes the framework up. Nathan Quimpo (Chapter 5) on the decline of the left, dwells far more on the fate of the Maoist strategies adopted by communist parties in the region than on subsequent electoral politics and the weak emergence of social democratic initiatives (148–151); the discussion of populism by Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz (Chapter 6) takes in India, Turkey and the USA as well as Southeast Asia, and touches unevenly on Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia. Jane Hutchison and Ian Wilson explore poor people’s urban movements in Chapter 11, seeing them as ‘generally instrumental, concerned with tangible gains in the short term, and highly opportunistic’ (272), but focus rather narrowly on contrasting responses to forced evictions from informal settlements in Jakarta and Metro Manila without giving a sense of the constituent elements and survival strategies of the urban working poor across the region as a whole. The thematic chapters are generally strong, and with the partial exception of those on politics, are appropriately linked to the broad framework deployed. The volume as a whole provides the best and most current introduction to the region, and many individual chapters could valuably be assigned to comparative courses. On my reading, as noted, a different organisation brings out more strongly the depth and coherence of the critical political economy of the region they provide. But in any case, the thematic approach makes the volume flexible and easily adaptable for classroom use. The absence of a summary of the thinking behind the agenda of broadly ‘liberal developmental’ or ‘marketising’ structural transformation promoted by international and regional organisations is a weakness, especially for students outside Asia trying to get to grips with current regional dynamics. Happily, the Asian Development Bank’s Asia’s Journey to Prosperity (ADB 2020), not available to the authors at the time of writing, sets out clearly the thinking behind ‘deep marketisation,’ and its first chapter offers a handy summary. This volume delivers the critique. The Murdoch School lives on, and prospers, in the hands of a largely new generation of scholars.
References
ADB. 2020. Asia’s Journey to Prosperity: Politics, Market, and Technology over 50 Years. Manila: Asian Development Bank.
Jayasuriya, K. 2008. ‘Regionalising the State: Political Topography of Regulatory Regionalism’, Contemporary Politics, 14 (1): 21–35.