The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia has long been recognized as the best all-around introduction to the diverse cultural traditions found in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. First published in 1977, it continues to offer useful insights to students and travelers to the region. In five well-defined and succinct chapters, Professor Keyes, a leading specialist in the field, offers a jargon-free, copiously annotated synthesis of knowledge about the cultural history of tribal, Theravada Buddhist, and Vietnamese societies. He combines analysis of traditional cultural practices with examination of cultural conflict in the colonial and post-colonial periods. The book remains unique in providing a detailed examination of urban life as well as of life in rural communities.

"The central theme of this book is the utility of bilateralism and multilateralism in Southeast Asia international relations. The intention was to examine a sufficient number of empirical cases in the Southeast Asian region since the mid-1970's so as to establish a pattern of interactions informing a wider audience of interactions unique to the region. Through these case studies, we seek to identify how this pattern of interaction compares with similar experiences elsewhere vis-a-vis the theoretical underpinnings of multilateralism and bilateralism. Consequently, this book also examines the theoretical drift in international relations literature at the broadest level and the overall drift of Southeast Asian international relations between the nations themselves and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)."--P. xv.

This book takes stock of the results of some two decades of intensive archaeological research carried out on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, in combination with renewed approaches to textual sources and to art history. To improve our understanding of the trans-cultural process commonly referred to as Indianisation, it brings together specialists of both India and Southeast Asia, in a fertile inter-disciplinary confrontation. Most of the essays reappraise the millennium-long historiographic no-man's land during which exchanges between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal led, among other processes, to the Indianisation of those parts of the region that straddled the main routes of exchange. Some essays follow up these processes into better known "classical" times or even into modern times, showing that the localisation process of Indian themes has long remained at work, allowing local societies to produce their own social space and express their own ethos.

In this large-scale ISEAS study, Razeen Sally looks at Southeast Asia in the World Trade Organization, against the background of national trade policy trends post-Asian crisis, sluggish ASEAN economic integration, and the recent high-speed proliferation of bilateral and regional trade negotiations. ASEAN co-operation in the WTO has broken down, with little prospect of revival. Nevertheless, Sally argues forcefully that Southeast Asia needs a liberal, rules-based multilateral trading system; and that the WTO needs active Southeast Asian participation. ASEAN countries should forge multiple coalitions, revolving around the United States and China, to restore workability and purpose to a lame, crisis-ravaged WTO. This would provide headwind for what matters most: unilateral (national) trade-and-investment liberalization and pro-competitive regulatory reforms to revive and enhance policy competitiveness in the region.

This is the first book in several years to review the foreign policies of major Southeast Asian states and the first ever to include those frequently neglected smaller states. It is also unique in the editors' adherence to a new comparative framework which attempts to weave together the earlier literature on comparative foreign policy analysis and current concepts of political economy. Comparative foreign policy studies are introduced by three distinguished scholars in that field. A general survey of international relations in Southeast Asia then precedes the country chapters, all authored by experienced specialists. A concluding chapter attempts to identify the emerging patterns of Southeast Asian foreign policy and suggest explanations for them.