“Southeast Asia”: What's in a Name?

Emmerson, Donald K.

doi:10.1017/s0022463400012182

Cited by 122 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…They find themselves in an`unfortunate opposition' with constructionists,``who regard all regions as mere inventions of the observer whose definitions say more about the political-social position of that observer than the phenomena the regions purport to classify.'' (4) Southeast Asia specialists have been discussing the nature and identity of their area, as well as their own achievements and shortcomings, to an extent completely unknown to their colleagues specialising in, for example, South Asia (see Emmerson, 1984;Hirschman et al, 1992;Solheim, 1985; Weighing the Balance 2000). (5) But culturalist criteria make geographic definitions highly problematic.…”

Section: What Is An Area?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia

2002

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‘Area studies' use a geographical metaphor to visualise and naturalise particular social spaces as well as a particular scale of analysis. They produce specific geographies of knowing but also create geographies of ignorance. Taking Southeast Asia as an example, in this paper I explore how areas are imagined and how area knowledge is structured to construct area ‘heartlands' as well as area ‘borderlands‘. This is illustrated by considering a large region of Asia (here named Zomia) that did not make it as a world area in the area dispensation after World War 2 because it lacked strong centres of state formation, was politically ambiguous, and did not command sufficient scholarly clout. As Zomia was quartered and rendered peripheral by the emergence of strong communities of area specialists of East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, the production of knowledge about it slowed down. I suggest that we need to examine more closely the academic politics of scale that create and sustain area studies, at a time when the spatialisation of social theory enters a new, uncharted terrain. The heuristic impulse behind imagining areas, and the high-quality, contextualised knowledge that area studies produce, may be harnessed to imagine other spatial configurations, such as ‘crosscutting’ areas, the worldwide honeycomb of borderlands, or the process geographies of transnational flows. Scholars of all conventional areas can be involved in this project to ‘jump scale’ and to develop new concepts of regional space.

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Section: What Is An Area?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia

2002

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“…When the military junta's crackdown on the opposition in 1996 and 1997 sparked international criticism, a regional debate ensued about how assertive the organization should be in its criticism of domestic practices and whether liberal democratic standards, specifically respect for human rights, should be an entry condition (Acharya 2001, 111-112). The foreign ministers of Malaysia and Thailand publicly put Myanmar's planned accession to 6 Of course, the definition of geographical boundaries is always subject to political contestation and strategic calculation (Acharya 2010;Emmerson 1984). In Southeast Asia, any rhetorical inclusiveness was thwarted by Cold War security practices, which effectively drew a dividing line through the region.…”

Section: Myanmar Cambodia and Asean's Anti-coup Normmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional standards of membership and enlargement in the EU and ASEAN

Spandler

2018

Asia Eur J

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For regional organizations (ROs) as geographically defined entities, questions of membership often raise moral questions about the very foundations of regional identity. To date, comparative approaches to the role of norms in the politics of RO enlargement are a missing piece in the regionalism literature. This paper assumes that enlargement practices are shaped by discourses about legitimate actorness. Drawing on the concept of Bstandards of civilization,^I argue that prospective RO members are judged against a set of norms-the standard of membership-which constitute basic ideas about the identity of the regional international society. As evidence from the Spanish and Greek accession to the European Community and the accession of Myanmar and Cambodia to ASEAN shows, this standard is not a static catalogue of cultural values, as existing accounts suggest, but develops in response to accession requests which trigger normative crises among the existing member states. In such situations, RO actors may argue for the inclusion of new norms in the standard of membership by drawing on Bcognitive priors^. Enlargement processes thus reveal a dialectical relation between regional norms and boundary-drawing; while a regional standard of membership informs the redefinition of an RO's boundaries, the accession of new candidates also transforms that very standard.

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“…There can be important differences in the main orientations, constraints, and contributions of area specialists based on different continents, as the works of Emmerson (1984), Bowen (2000), King (2001), and Milner (1999) have separately shown. These differences, however, are not as important as those found to exist between, on the one hand, all of these scholars taken together and, on the other, Southeast Asian scholars.…”

Section: Southeast Asians or Southeast Asianistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?

Heryanto¹

2002

moussons

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“Southeast Asia”: What's in a Name?

Cited by 122 publications

References 11 publications

Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia

Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia

Regional standards of membership and enlargement in the EU and ASEAN

Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?

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