Southeast Asia Archive

A chill has settled over U.S.-Cambodia relations. Since the start of the year, Cambodia’s pugnacious prime minister, Hun Sen, has canceled a planned bilateral military exercise, kicked out a U.S. naval engineering battalion working on charity projects, and assailed Washington for refusing to cancel a $500 million war debt from the early 1970s. This ominous trajectory dipped further with the Sept. 2 arrest of Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha on charges of treason. He is accused of conspiring with the United States to foment a “color revolution” aimed at overthrowing Hun Sen’s government, which has ruled Cambodia since 1979. Sokha, […]

YANGON, Myanmar—The crowd waiting for Aung San Suu Kyi’s highly anticipated address on the ongoing crisis in Rakhine, in western Myanmar, looked prepared for a pep rally, rather than a requiem on a conflict labeled “textbook ethnic cleansing.” On Tuesday morning, hundreds of people gathered in front of Yangon’s City Hall to watch a live broadcast of the first speech that Myanmar’s de facto leader has given since the military’s bloody counterinsurgency began in response to attacks from Rohingya militants last month. Yet the crowd’s euphoria all but eclipsed the somber topic at hand. Observers in shirts emblazoned with Aung […]

Thais waited anxiously throughout the summer for the conclusion of the trial of former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was removed by a military coup in May 2014. The charges Yingluck faced—mismanaging a rice subsidy scheme that wound up losing some $8 billion—were somewhat unusual, since she was not personally accused of corruption in the program. In some ways, she was being charged with making bad decisions in government. But a central objective of the junta since it took power has been to eradicate the influence of the Shinawatra family in Thai politics by breaking the bond between them and […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about education policy in various countries around the world. Since independence in 1971, Bangladesh has made several attempts to reform its education system. Despite some false starts, it has made important strides. Yet obstacles to reform have proved challenging, especially the bifurcated Islamic madrasa system that leaves millions of students unprepared for life outside of religious institutions. In an email interview, Md Shahnawaz Khan Chandan, an education activist and feature writer at The Daily Star in Dhaka, examines the short history of education reform in Bangladesh, its myriad successes and […]

Vietnamese Defense Minister Ngo Xuan Lich’s visit to Washington in early August was just the latest sign of the remarkable progress made in security ties between the United States and Vietnam over the past decade. But it also underscored the limits of how much Hanoi is willing to cozy up to Washington today, and how unconvinced it remains of the Trump administration’s commitment to Asia. The trip exemplified Hanoi’s multidirectional foreign policy, which rests on maintaining strong relations with many outside partners to avoid dominance by any one, and of how that strategy is evolving to face the growing threat […]