CSEAS Seminar Programme
The Centre of Southeast Asian Studies was established in 1964, soon after the founding of Monash University, in recognition of the importance of the Southeast Asian region to the university and the expertise of Monash staff in this field.
The weekly seminar series has been a vital part of the Centre’s activities across the years, facilitating the exchange of research findings between new and established scholars working on the region.
- All seminars are held in the Elizabeth Burchill Room, located in the Performing Arts Precinct of the Clayton Campus. (Building 68, found at coordinates E4/E3 on the Clayton Campus map: http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/maps/3- Claytoncolour.pdf)
- Seminars are held on Thursdays, commencing at 1.00 pm, and concluding at 2.00 pm. If conditions allow it, question time will be extended past 2.00 pm.
- Please send inquiries to the convenor: Julian.Millie@monash.edu
2011 Seminar Schedule: Semester 1
March 10: Sally Percival Wood
Panchsheel: A distinctly Asian diplomatic pathway through the 1950s Cold War
When the Asian-African Conference was convened in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the foreign policies of the 29 newly independent nations attending were still in the process of formation. At the time the world was bitterly divided between communism and capitalism, and both the Soviet Union and the United States were keen to draw Asia into their ideological camps.
The Geneva Conference of 1954 further entrenched what US diplomat Chester Bowles called ‘pactomania’ – the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) added to CENTO (the Central Treaty Organization or Baghdad Pact) and the ANZUS Treaty (Australia, New Zealand and United Stated). These treaties were all forged in the first five years of the 1950s – and within the first decade of Asian independence. They were designed to ‘contain’ the People’s Republic of China but were viewed with disdain among the majority of Asian leaders.
On his way home from the Geneva Conference, PRC Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai called in to New Delhi to meet with his Indian counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru. Together they formulated the five principles of peaceful coexistence, or Panchsheel, a policy of non-alignment with Cold War interests. Nehru was also in negotiation with Indonesia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma and Pakistan on an Asian-African Conference at the time, and he saw this as an opportunity to widely promote Panchsheel as an Asian peace initiative.
This paper examines the reception of Panchsheel at the Bandung Conference. It demonstrates how both sides of the Cold War actively undermined Panchsheel – the first distinctly Asian foreign policy to be asserted at an international forum – and why it has disappeared from the historical record.
Sally Percival Wood (Program Manager, Applied Research and Analysis, Asialink at the University of Melbourne) completed her doctorate ‘Sovereignty and Resistance: India and China at the Asian-African Conference, 1955’ in 2010 at Deakin University. As well as publishing on East-West relations in the 1950s, Sally has also published on Australia’s contemporary diplomatic relations with the Middle East, and with India, and has worked on several India-based research projects. These have included a history of Australia’s bilateral relationship with India, the history of psychiatry in India, and the debate over uniform civil code, that is, the constitutional recognition of Muslim personal law in India. Sally also spent three years researching the experience of Arab and Muslim students in Melbourne post-9/11, which resulted in the monograph Identity, Education and Belonging: Arab-Muslim Youth in Contemporary Australia, with Fethi Mansouri (MUP, 2008).
Since mid-2010 Sally has been with Asialink at the University of Melbourne. Working closely with Professor Tony Milner, this position involves researching the nature of, and stimulating closer engagement between, Australia and Asia at Track II level. The annual Asialink Conversations and ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Dialogue work specifically towards deeper Australia-ASEAN relations by engaging with Southeast Asian think tanks, heads of corporations, diplomats and academics to discuss problems of regional interest.
March 17: Melissa Crouch (Melbourne University)
A New Phase in Muslim-Christian Conflict: Court Battles Over Church Permits
In February 2011, riots broke out in Temanggung, Central Java, over the case of a Christian convicted for blasphemy, leading to several churches being burnt. This is just the latest incident in a long history of attacks by radical Islamic groups on the places of worship of religious minorities.
This presentation will examine the dynamics behind these local conflicts which are related to the local implementation of the national Joint Regulation 8 & 9/2006 on places of worship in Indonesia. I will focus on the case study of the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation, the largest Protestant denomination in Indonesia. This church was one of the first to successfully challenge the authority of a local leader to cancel their permit to build a church. I begin by exploring the history and background to the regulation of permits for places of worship in Indonesia. I then outline the provisions of the new Joint Regulation and highlight the ongoing problems for religious minorities at the local level.
In particular, I will look at how religious minorities are challenging the decisions of local authorities by taking court action. I argue that the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation court case is part of a broader trend for local authorities in Indonesia to use conflict over places of worship as opportunities for political gain in the highly competitive political atmosphere since the downfall of Suharto in 1998.
Melissa Crouch is a PhD candidate in the Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne. She is also a Principal Research Assistant at the Asian Law Centre. In 2006, Melissa completed Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws (Hons.) degrees at the University of Melbourne. Melissa’s doctoral research is supported by an ARC Federation Fellowship doctoral scholarship and an Endeavour Australia Award. She will be submitting her thesis in July 2011. Melissa has had articles published in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law, the Australian Journal of Asian Law, the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies and the Asian Studies Review.
March 24: Stuart Robson
Javanese script as cultural artefact: Historical background
Stuart Robson is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Monash University.
March 31: Kieran James (USQ)
“The Road less travelled By: Opposition Grassroots Activism in Lee Hsien Loong’s Singapore”
(Kieran James, Peiying Leong, Chris Tolliday and Rex Walsh)
Via detailed personal interviews, this paper canvasses the views of leading Singapore opposition politicians and grassroots activists about the state of play in Singapore politics and likely developments over the next ten years. The role of internet activism is also explored. We find that the two major opposition parties have contrasting approaches, with Low Thia Khiang’s Workers’ Party of Singapore (WP) being a disciplined and restrained party political machine which has a primary goal of winning more seats at elections and Dr Chee Soon Juan’s Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) operating more like a Western or Hong-Kong based NGO with its strong emphasis on human rights, democracy, non-violent resistance, and freedom of speech. The SDP has the greatest continual active presence of all the opposition parties on a day-to-day basis outside of elections. It may be moving away from the prior emphasis on civil disobedience. Our interviewees show that the Singaporean grassroots opposition activist community, while small, is passionate and committed to taking their country away from the right-wing authoritarian path. We also specify factors that have led individual activists down, in poet Robert Frost’s words, ‘the road less travelled by’.
April 7: Dewi Anggraeni (Monash University)
Breaking the stereotype: Chinese Indonesian women tell their stories
In her latest book, Breaking the Stereotype: Chinese Indonesian women tell their stories, Dewi collated the stories told to her by eight Indonesian women of different gradations of Chinese ethnicity, complemented by her own observations during her time spent with each of them. She challenges much of the stereotype on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, which portrays them as ruthlessly money-grabbing, exclusive, opportunistic, and having no loyalty to Indonesia. The eight subjects’ stories cover a span of time from the third decade of the 20th century to the present time. And the women live, or have lived, in different regions throughout Indonesia. None of the subjects fits in the box constructed by the stereotype. And each story reflects the subject’s social and political environments, which in themselves are revealing. One of the stereotypical aspects broken is that of exclusiveness: apart from Ester Indahyani Jusuf who, as far as she and her family know, has no other ethnicity mix, the others have indigenous ancestry as well, though somehow they were still regarded as ethnic Chinese. However, Ester herself was married to an indigenous man of Javanese ethnicity, after losing her Batak husband. Interestingly, the stories also challenge the popular belief that indigenous Indonesians avoid developing real friendships with their ethnic Chinese counterparts. This may be true to a certain extent, but real personal experiences tell a different story. Lastly, what many ethnic Chinese are seeking, it seems, is acceptance, and not being regarded as ‘the other’.
Dewi Anggraeni is an Adjunct Research Associate at the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, and a writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is a correspondent for Tempo news magazine and contributor to The Jakarta Post in Indonesia. She writes essays, reviews, features and opinion articles, as well as short stories, for a number of publications in Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and the US. Dewi has also contributed stories and essays to various collections and journals in Australia, Indonesia and the United Kingdom. She writes in English and Indonesian languages.
She has had nine books published; six of fiction and three of non-fiction. The two latest fiction works are Snake (2002) and Neighbourhood Tales (2001); and the two latest non-fiction books are Breaking the Stereotype; Chinese Indonesian women tell their stories (2010) and Dreamseekers; Indonesian women as domestic workers in Asia (2006).
Breaking the Stereotype has been independently and almost simultaneously published in Indonesian and English, in Indonesia and Australia respectively, the Indonesian edition's title being Mereka Bilang Aku China; jalan mendaki menjadi bagian bangsa.
April 21: Dr Joost Cote (Deakin University)
Remembering the centenary of the publication of Door Duisternis tot Licht
April 28
(semester break)
May 5: Nicole Lamb (Monash University)
May 12
(speaker not yet finalised)
May 19: Howard Manns Jr. (Monash University)
May 26: Susie Protschky (Monash University)
Interlopers and incumbents: Javanese kings and Dutch monarchs at royal celebrations in the Netherlands Indies
June 9: David Kloos (VU University Amsterdam)
Everyday Islam in Aceh
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CSEAS Seminar Organiser
Mr Sven Schottmann
Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University
Email: Sven.Schottmann@monash.edu
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Archives of previous years' series