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Download by: [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] Date: 17 January 2016, At: 23:46
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
The Making of Southeast Asia: International
Relations of a Region
Vincent Houben
To cite this article: Vincent Houben (2013) The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 49:2, 250-251, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2013.809852
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.809852
Published online: 26 Jul 2013.
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250 Book reviews
(chapter 9). The Fatayat represented the liberal side of the pornography-law debate; their sisters in the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party) the conserv-ative side (chapter 10).
The key players here are all Muslims. One could hardly call the liberal Muslims secular, or, worse, describe the battle as between Muslims and seculars, or kair
(inidels). Rather, all three chapters see Muslims debating with fellow Muslims, particularly about the relationship between Islam and the state. They illustrate the presence of different strands of Islam in Indonesia, which had already engaged in a healthy discourse on the topic before the country’s independence, in 1945. This debate suffered, however, under Sukarno’s dictatorship and, later, under Soehar-to’s policy of repressing political Islam.
Now, with more freedom and democracy, Indonesians are once again debating the issue. The violence that often accompanies some of the debates is unfortunate and should be dealt with, but it would be wrong to stop the discussions alto-gether. In a more open and free environment, these conversations would ensure that Indonesia developed and modernised in a way and at a pace that its people would be most comfortable with. The pornography-law debate shows that there are suficient forces on the liberal and conservative sides to keep Indonesia on a moderate path.
Endy Bayuni The Jakarta Post
© 2013 Endy Bayuni
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.809849
Amitav Acharya (2012) The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, and Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, pp. xviii + 350. Paper: $49.90.
This comprehensive study is an updated and expanded version of the author’s The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2000). It adds to the original a solid overview of the international-relations policies that have shaped Southeast Asia since 1945, and an account of the devel-opments since the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. Its point of departure is that regions in general – and this region in particular – are socially constructed and that the international relations of Southeast Asia, of which the sum constitutes more than its parts, come from within instead of being imposed from the outside. Focusing primarily on regional politics, Acharya’s book also refers to eco-nomic developments such as export orientation and liberalisation, the ASEAN Free Trade Area, and bilateral free-trade agreements with states outside Southeast Asia. Useful and necessary as these observations are, they neither challenge the received wisdoms of the economic literature on the region nor raise new thoughts about the relationship between regional politics and economic performance. The book’s attempt to bridge area studies with the study of international relations is more innovative, placing ‘regionness’, or regional identity, at the core of what constitutes Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how important it is to view Indonesia,
Book reviews 251
for example, within the broader context of the region. This makes for a strong argument in favour of a regional perspective and against the view that the region has at best been constituted from the outside and is therefore innately weak.
Yet, as can be expected from such a historical constructivist narrative, certain critical questions remain unanswered; for example, one could ask what exactly is the current long-term heritage of the pre-colonial interstate system. By focus-ing on the region as a whole, Acharya under-exposes the role of the variegated foreign policies of the individual nation-states within it. The exact nature of the entanglements between the various scales involved (subnational, national, trans-national, supratrans-national, regional and global) needs to be explored further; the social construction of the region from below (that is, from beyond the NGOs), in the form of media lows, increased travelling and the effects of, for instance, educational exchange, also needs further research. These points for discussion, however, do not diminish my admiration for this very important study, which should be read by every student of Southeast Asia.
Vincent Houben Humboldt University, Berlin
© 2013 Vincent Houben
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2013.809852
