SSEAC Stories

For the next four weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. To kick off the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Human Rights Watch Australia Director Elaine Pearson to discuss the interactions and tensions between academic research and investigation of human rights abuses conducted by human rights advocacy groups such as Human Rights Watch. Elaine Pearson gives an insight into some of the work conducted by Human Rights Watch across the region, highlighting the core role of research not just in understanding the problem, but in informing their advocacy approach to maximise impact. Together they reflect upon the different goals, methodological approaches, and challenges encountered by researchers, and delve into the ways that advocacy groups can break silos between academic research and real-world problems to progress human rights.

About Elaine Pearson:

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch, based in Sydney. She established Human Rights Watch’s Australia office in 2013 and works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. Pearson writes frequently for a range of publications and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division based in New York. She has conducted numerous human rights investigations in Australia and around the world.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Pearson worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales, on the advisory committee of UNSW’s Australian Human Rights Institute and on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Murdoch University and obtained her Master's degree in public policy at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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In the extreme north of Laos, in Phongsali Province, lies a tiny village home to around 24 households. Until recently it was a monoethnic Khmu village. The Khmu have had a historically ambivalent relationship to the national majority in contemporary Laos. It’s also home to the Akha, another ethnic group that have been described as state evaders seeking to avoid lowland politics and who migrated to northern Laos in recent decades. This small hamlet is a window into Laos’ march into a particular type of post-colonial modernity, where massive infrastructure projects, interethnic tensions, spirit beliefs and animistic practices coexist and collide.

Dr Paul-David Lutz joined Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to share the stories of this hamlet, and reflect on the importance of “animist” beliefs and practices in shaping a culturally-specific sense of modernity in the uplands of far-north Laos.

About Dr Paul-David Lutz:

Dr Paul-David Lutz recently received his PhD from the University of Sydney’s Department of Anthropology. He is a SSEAC Writing Fellow, and an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences. Prior to his PhD, Paul-David Lutz worked for several years as a rural development advisor in Laos and Vietnam. His thesis “Sert Has Gone” gives a ‘once-removed’ ethnographic history of the ethnic Khmu and Akha village of ‘Sanjing’ in Phongsali, northernmost Laos. His research brings development studies into conversation with both history’s interest in locally-specific ways of relating to the past, and anthropology’s burgeoning focus on ‘future-making’ and ‘more-than-human lifeworlds.’

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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The Philippines is one of the most natural hazard-prone countries in the world. With the social and economic cost of disasters in the country increasing due to population growth, migration, unplanned urbanisation, environmental degradation and global climate change, disaster resilience and management are more important than ever.

In 2020, Dr Aaron Opdyke spoke with Dr Natali Pearson about his work in disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response in the Philippines.

About Aaron Opdyke:

Aaron is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney and the Philippines Country Coordinator for the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. His research seeks to strengthen preparedness for and recovery after disaster and conflict, through the lens of safe and equitable shelter and housing. He has worked for nearly a decade on disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response programmes in the Philippines, both in practice and research. Aaron was named as one of the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2021 New Faces of Civil Engineering.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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With two megacities and strong economic growth, Indonesia has seen dramatic rates of rural-urban migrations. According to the World Bank, nearly 70 percent of Indonesia's population are expected to live in cities by 2045. While this transition has undoubtedly boosted the country's economic growth, it has also brought to the fore all the challenges that come with rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation. From traffic congestion to informal settlements, lack of clean water and waste management services, and widespread flooding, Indonesia's cities suffer significant human and economic costs, and are now highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change.

In 2020, Dr Sophie Webber spoke with Dr Natali Pearson about urban governance, and how urban resilience is being rolled out as a policy solution for cities such as Jakarta and Semarang in Indonesia, that are trying to adapt to the many shocks and stresses associated with urbanisation and climate change.

About Sophie Webber:

Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer, who conducts research about the political economies of climate change and international development assistance, principally in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. In particular, Sophie studies how 'truth' (knowledge claims and expertise), 'capital' (financial flows and investments), and policy packages structure relations between the minority and majority worlds. Methodologically, this research requires relational fieldwork, examining how climatological and developmental crises and problems are interpreted, storied, and managed, both by local and governmental authorities, as well as by distant international experts such as the World Bank. In 2020, Sophie was awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate the social, economic and environmental impacts of large-scale sand and water extraction to build protective infrastructure in vulnerable cities. Through a qualitative study of climate change hotspots in Indonesia and Fiji, this project will generate new knowledge about the potentials and limits of urban resilience infrastructure to protect cities against climate change.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Improper pest management has led to significant yield loss in rice and other crop harvests in Cambodia, causing economic losses to farmers and environmental disruption through ill-informed chemical use. The use of broad-spectrum pesticides as a solution to all observed pests is commonplace in the rice and mung bean fields of lowland Cambodia and can be linked to unsuitable sources of agricultural information.

In 2020, Professor Daniel Tan caught up with Dr Natali Pearson over Zoom to chat about his lifelong work supporting sustainable farming practices in Cambodia, including through targeted capacity-building programs and the development of image-rich mobile phone applications to assist Cambodian farmers with insect pest identification and crop management.

About Daniel Tan:

Daniel is Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He is also the Country Coordinator for Cambodia at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and a member of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture, the Sydney Nano Institute, and the Charles Perkins Centre. Daniel’s research focuses on crop agronomy, specifically abiotic stress. He has conducted extensive research in Southeast Asia, including a very successful program that aimed to improve smallholder farmer livelihoods in Cambodia, with funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).

Daniel currently has collaborative research links at CSIRO Plant Industry (Narrabri), the University of Oxford, NSW Department of Agriculture, Applied Horticultural Research (Sydney), Texas A&M University (USA) the United States Department of Agriculture (Lubbock, Texas, USA) and ICRISAT, India. Daniel has been a member of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology (AIAST) since 1991. He is also on the Editorial Boards of the 'Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture' and 'Frontiers of Plant Science'.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, its waters home to hundreds, if not thousands, of shipwrecks. As maritime neighbours with both a common boundary and a shared history, protecting and preserving this maritime heritage is an important element of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In recent years, government agencies from both countries have cooperated to manage the wreck of HMAS Perth (I), an Australian warship sunk off the coast of Java in World War II. However, efforts to engage the next generation have been limited.

For this special episode, Dr Natali Pearson jumps on the other side of the mic and chats with Dr Thushara Dibley about her recent work building links between Indonesia and Australia to increase cooperation for the preservation of underwater cultural heritage. She notably discusses her recent initiative coordinating a capacity-building course in Indonesian maritime archaeology with funding from the Australia Indonesia Institute. Delivered through online learning modules and field site visits, the course brought together students from across the archipelago to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of managing and interpreting underwater cultural heritage in an Indonesian context, and paved the way for future cooperation across the seas to preserve the nation’s wealth of maritime histories.

About Dr Natali Pearson:

Natali is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney, where she is affiliated with the School of Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Natali is co-editor of Perspectives on the Past at New Mandala and a regular contributor to The Conversation and Inside Indonesia. Natali holds a PhD in Museum Studies (2019, USYD). Her new book, Belitung; The Afterlives of a Shipwreck, will be published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2022. You can follow Natali on Twitter @sea_greeny.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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February 2021 witnessed yet another military coup in Myanmar. Whether it was unexpected or entirely predictable is, perhaps, a matter of debate. But what is without a doubt different this time around is the way the population of Myanmar has responded, with younger generations in particular taking to social media to call for change, in a bid to avoid the suffering of their parents’ generation. Among those actors pressing for change are members of the diaspora, many of whom spent years in refugee camps and who continue to live proximate to Myanmar.

On World Refugee Day, Dr Susan Banki joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss the political mobilisation of refugee and migrant populations from Myanmar seeking to enact change in their home country, arguing that the physical proximity of these diaspora communities is key to their empowerment, but has, until now, been relatively unexplored.

About Dr Susan Banki:

Susan Banki is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Her current research examines the ways in which refugee and migrant populations mobilise for change in their home countries, with a particular focus on refugees from Myanmar and Bhutan. She has recently completed a manuscript about the political mobilisation of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. In the wake of the coup in Myanmar, she has been writing and speaking about the coup and its aftermath for a range of media outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Conversation, ABC National Radio’s Late Night Live, and ABC’s the News Hour.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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More than anywhere else in the world, Asia is experiencing an infrastructure boom. Although it is driven by both internal and external factors, this boom has accelerated noticeably as a result of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to extends port, railway and other connections throughout and across Southeast Asia. But what is the cost of this aggressive infrastructure development? What do we know about the people and places that are negatively impacted by these large-scale projects? In Laos, the government has placed enormous emphasis on infrastructure expansion as a mechanism for driving economic growth and poverty alleviation. Yet this infrastructure rollout has come at severe social and environmental costs.

Dr Kearrin Sims joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss how these large-scale infrastructure projects have led to increased political oppression and the repeated displacement of local communities in Laos.

About Dr Kearrin Sims:

Kearrin Sims is a lecturer in development studies at James Cook University. He researches regional connectivity and South-South cooperation within Mainland Southeast Asia, with a focus on ethical development. His recent work examines the intersectional violence of large-scale infrastructures, political oppression, and development geopolitics. Kearrin is the author of numerous academic and media publications, and lead editor of a forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Global Development.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Since 2000, there has been a boom in Indonesian popular novels and films set overseas, showing young Indonesians living in foreign countries and having life changing adventures there. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 150 such novels and films released – many more than in the first 55 years of Indonesian independence.

In this episode, Associate Professor David Reeve speaks to Dr Natali Pearson about his latest project looking at Indonesian romance novels and films set overseas, discussing the reasons behind the rise of this literary genre and how it conflicts with the lived experiences of many in the Indonesian diaspora.

About Associate Professor David Reeve:

Associate Professor David Reeve has been visiting Indonesia for over 50 years as a diplomat, researcher, historian, lecturer, language teacher and project manager. He was a founding figure in Australian Studies at Universitas Indonesia in the 1980s and was Resident Director of the ACICIS program in Yogyakarta in the late 1990s. He has worked in eight Indonesian universities and several in Australia. He is retired from UNSW and is now completing a biography of Indonesian historian Onghokham, to be published in January 2022.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Since the decline of piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia has re-emerged as the world’s hotspot for maritime piracy, with 85 reported attacks in the region in 2020 alone. Unlike much of the rest of the world, Southeast Asia has also seen a resurgence of sophisticated maritime piracy, beyond just simple robberies. Yet this recent upsurge in maritime piracy is no coincidence.

Professor Justin Hastings spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about Southeast Asia’s long history of maritime piracy, highlighting how the region’s archipelagic geography, legacies from colonial rule, trade integration, contested maritime boundaries, political unrest, and weak governance have all contributed to the rise of maritime piracy, and explaining the many strategies pirates have adopted over time to respond to state crackdowns.

Justin Hastings is Professor of International Relations and Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. He researches the geography and political economy of clandestine groups, including maritime pirates, organized criminals, terrorists, insurgents, nuclear traffickers, and black and gray markets, with a focus on Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region. He is the author of No Man’s Land: Globalization, Territory, and Clandestine Groups in Southeast Asia (2010) and A Most Enterprising Country: North Korea in the Global Economy (2016).

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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