Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia

Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia adds to the small but growing body of publications on warfare in Southeast Asia and colonial armies. Its chapters are written by a multi-national and multi-disciplinary team of authors who are experts in their field and who bring in their ‘disciplinary’ strengths, such as history, sociology, social anthropology, political science, and philology, in analyzing a wide range of sources, including royal chronicles, missionary dictionaries, colonial archival documents, VCDs, and face-to-face interviews. Military-society relations are examined in a wide range of ways: traditional strategies of augmenting populations, mutinies and mutiny attempts, imperial anxieties, Japanese military legacies, the trans-oceanic experiences of Southeast Asian and European soldiers, post-war demobilizations and post-conflict biographies, and the transformation of communist guerrillas into guardians of the state and their development of capitalist enterprises. 

This volume will be of interest to Southeast Asianists and military historians alike because it covers not only traditional territorial grounds, thematic terrains, and temporal landscapes but also extends to individuals and further includes the national, regional, and transnational lives of military institutions that have often been insufficiently covered in previous studies due to the complexity of the region and the difficulty for scholars to master all the required languages. 

Contents 

1. Introduction—Volker Grabowsky and Frederik Rettig 
2. Military Traditions and Society in Lan Na—Volker Grabowsky 
3. Juan de Salcedo Joins the Native Form of Warfare—Felice Noelle Rodriguez 
4. The Fears of a Small Country with a Big Colony—Kees van Dijk 
5. Vietnamese Soldier-Workers during the Two World Wars under French Social Controls—Marie-Eve Blanc 
6. A Mutiny with Vietnamese Characteristics—Frederik Rettig 
7. Japanese Military Policies in Southeast Asia during World War II—Joyce Lebra 
8. Dominance, Twilights, and Legacies of Power—Jun Honna 
9. The Consequences of a Failed Demilitarization—Henk M. A. G. Smeets 
10. The Expanding Roles of the Vietnam People’s Army, 1975–2002—Carlyle A. Thayer 
11. From Guerrillas to Guardians—Geoffrey C. Gunn 
12. Revolutionary Specialists, Strongmen, and the State in a Philippine Province, 1990s– 2001—Rosanne Rutten 
13. From Cassette to Video CD—Amporn Jirattikorn 

About the Editors 

Volker Grabowsky is Professor of Thai Language and Culture at the Asia-Africa Institute of the University of Hamburg and a specialist on the ethno-history of the Tai peoples in the Upper Mekong valley. 

Frederik Rettig is co-editor of Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (2005) and Women Warriors in Southeast Asia (2020), who has published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and in South East Asia Research. From 2007 to 2013, he was Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University.