Ying-kit Chan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. His latest book is New Directions in Thai Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

When Chulalongkorn University announced plans to redevelop Bangkok’s Sam Yan district into a “Smart City”, few expected that ...

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!

From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Indonesia’s development strategy was famously shaped by the influence of the “Berkeley Mafia”, a group of US-educated technocrats—including Widjojo Nitisastro, ...

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, ...

In 1975, Vietnam emerged from a brutal war that by government estimates claimed the lives of 1.1 million soldiers and 2 million civilians. In its aftermath, the Communist Party-led government was ...

Last year New Mandala was pleased to be able to introduce our Emerging Scholar Award, an initiative aimed at promoting the dissemination of outstanding PhD research on Southeast Asia to a global ...

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 ...

Observers in the West have largely interpreted the devastating violence that has engulfed Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup as a “battle between democracy and authoritarianism”. This ...

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 ...

Large parts of Phnom Penh still showcase French colonial ideas about urban design that were in vogue during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French introduced European architectural styles, ...

On 13 June 2024, a nickel smelting furnace at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi caught fire and exploded, sending two workers to hospital. A year earlier, on 24 ...