ASCL 54.20 The Cold War in Southeast Asia

This course offers a Southeast Asian perspective to the study of the Cold War. It explores the ways in which the Cold War is documented, memorialized, imagined, and re-imagined in the Southeast Asian region. The Cold War was a key period of global history, which deeply affected the politics and culture of Southeast Asia, changing the everyday life of people as well as the function of the nation-state.

The course will move beyond the idea of the Cold War as a contestation between the USA and USSR, to explore the inter-play of superpower dynamic in Southeast Asian countries, given their “Global South” and “Third World” contexts. We will explore how many conflicts in various Southeast Asian polities were shaped by -- and in turn shaped -- the Cold War superpower dynamics. The course challenges the idea that there was a ‘Cold War’ per se and expands the understanding of the Cold War into actual conflicts, which caused significant casualties in the Southeast Asian region, and the Asia- Pacific more broadly. The course takes a thematic approach to thinking about the Cold War in Southeast Asia by introducing various ideas around the political dynamics and cultural dimensions of the conflict in the region, and demonstrates how local actors and their agency, be they politicians, novelists, filmmakers and others, all shaped how the Cold War in the region was experienced. We will also explore how the memory of the period continues to live on in various Asian diasporas, alongside the troubled legacies of conflict in relation to mass killing and political violence.

The course aims to destabilize notions that the Cold War was necessarily only about grand geopolitical moves (even as it explores them), but in fact, it inspired various local expressions of either ideological alignment, resistance or ambivalence. We will explore the conditions for postcolonial emergence and decolonization of the states in the region (Brunei, Burma [Myanmar], Cambodia, Indonesia, East Timor, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), and examine how the Cold War introduced neocolonial dimensions to these configurations. We will also explore how this speaks to broader conversations about development in the ‘global south’ as a legacy of the period, and the lasting impacts of war and devastation on the nations in the region.

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:INT or SOC; WCult:NW

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Department-Specific Course Categories

Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages