Development policies for fishery resources within the Mekong River Basin are increasingly divided between aquaculture and capture fisheries. The modern production orientation of aquaculture has been adopted by government and NGOs and justified by the rhetoric of poverty alleviation and rural development. In contrast, capture fisheries has been subjugated as an activity that reaffirms the dependency of the rural poor on natural resources. This paper critically analyses the division between aquaculture and capture fisheries in Cambodia, Thailand and Lao PDR by tracing the emergence and influence of ‘development narratives’ used to justify contemporary policy and practice.

Drawing on fieldwork in the central plains of Thailand, the paper traces the transformation of the study villages from agricultural communities, to divided and often fractious dormitory settlements. Agriculture has been largely squeezed out of the local economy and local livelihoods by a raft of economic, environmental and social changes. At the same time, the rural spaces of Thailand have been infiltrated by a range of non-agricultural activities – in this instance, reflected in the arrival of an industrial park – and villagers as well as migrant sojourners from other parts of Thailand have taken up these new opportunities in the non-farm economy. The net result of these processes of agrarian transformation has been that the village, as a community, a unit of production, a site of identity, and a place with a common history, is evaporating.

In 1690, the previously sympathetic Nguyễn ruler of Cochinchina (located in south-central modern Vietnam) prohibited Christian religious practice in his state. Uniquely in the history of Catholicism in early modern Vietnam, however, the ban did not lead to a persecution of believers. The following article, based extensively on archival materials from the Missions-Étrangères of Paris, historicises this event and the steps leading up to it in 1688–89. It argues that to understand what was happening on the ground in Cochinchina, and why, we need to analyse the way global and regional factors intersected with local, and even personal, ones to cause a prohibition of Christian practice in early 1690, an event for which internal Catholic dissention was almost entirely responsible.

When American imperialists seized the Philippines at the dawning of the twentieth century, their guiding philosophy was predicated upon broadly conceived notions of cultural and political historicism. The unwavering self-assurance required to rule over millions of unfamiliar imperial subjects derived its potency from an unquestioned panoptic view of history. This epistemological tool of imperialism found an especially unique and fascinating expression in the United States' politico-military rule over Filipino Muslims. This article explores the creation and processes of imperial taxonomy among Moro populations while accounting for a number of disturbing disruptions and anomalies in the Americans' historical narrative (such as slavery and Islamic civilisation) that threatened to unravel the tightly circumscribed concept of a uniform and interpretable progressive transitional past. It also examines the ways in which American imperialists accounted for these anomalies, and manipulated their own interpretations of the past and the present to maintain the integrity of their philosophical imperial foundations.

This article compares Indonesia's party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto period. It explores the question of why the party system of the 1950s collapsed quickly, while that of the contemporary polity appears stable. Challenging established assumptions that party systems fail if their individual parties are weakly institutionalised, I submit that the fundamental difference between the party politics of the 1950s and today's democratic system is related to the character of inter-party competition in both periods. While inter-party contestation in the 1950s took place at the far ends of the politico-ideological spectrum, the competition between parties in the contemporary democracy exhibits centripetal tendencies, stabilising the political system as a whole.

Since NEP, the ethno-political measure of Malay progress has emphasised Malay capital ownership, leading social scientists who study the Malay middle class to focus almost exclusively on what this article calls the ‘two poles of consumption and dependency’. This ethnography suggests that certain middle-class Malays use a different calculus to mark out their place in contemporary Malay life. It argues that these Malays portray themselves not only in terms of material and entrepreneurial success, but through their frequent experiences of failure. To them, failure becomes, paradoxically, a virtue that can establish their moral and Islamic distance from the Malays they characterise as the ‘indolent’ poor and the ‘politicking’ rich.