John Sidel, Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), will discuss his recently published book, Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021).
The book offers a reinterpretation of modern Southeast Asian history and of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions, which have long been understood in terms of the rise of nationalist consciousness and struggles for new nation-states. The book recasts modern Southeast Asian history in terms of the region’s deepening integration into the world economy, the broadening of its connections with other regions of the world, and the emergence and evolution of new forms of modern cosmopolitan consciousness, connectedness, and capacities for organization under such rubrics as republicanism, Communism, and Islam.
Overall, as Professor Sidel will explain in the lecture, his book offers a new –denationalized, transnationalized, and internationalized – analytical framework for understanding the modern history of the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia as a whole.
Moderator: Professor William Hurst, Deputy Director of the Centre for Geopolitics and Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at the University of Cambridge
