New Mandala

NEW: Through contemporary artworks and a chance encounter in the Singapore Art Museum, Lukas Fort reflects on how Singapore’s commitment to renewal shapes its cityscape, its visions of youth and ageing, and everyday engagements with technology. newmandala.org/city-of-renewa…

OBITUARY: "Vince Rafael exemplified the onset of a long overdue shift in the intellectual centre of gravity in Southeast Asian Studies to new generations of scholars hailing from the region" newmandala.org/vicente-l-rafa…

NEW 🇲🇲 Specimens of Myanmar's rich artistic heritage have often been copied and sold to foreign buyers. The booming post-coup market in counterfeit antiquities, gemstones and paintings is simply the latest chapter in a tradition of creative deception. newmandala.org/buyer-beware-f…

NEW 🇮🇩 When Dutch soldiers burned the home of Acehnese resistance leader Cut Nyak Dhien, they recorded the objects they took under her husband’s name. More than 130 years later, 🇳🇱has returned one of those objects—but not to where it was taken from. newmandala.org/returned-but-n…

NEW 🇮🇩 President Prabowo's drive to reassert state control addresses a genuine postcolonial grievance—but with a strategy that destroys the broader institutional conditions for the prosperity it claims to pursue, argues Rayhan Prabu Kusumo. newmandala.org/indonesias-new…

NEW 🇮🇩 Indonesia’s new ‘war on waste’ revives familiar community mobilisation strategies focused on downstream remediation while leaving the structural causes of pollution largely untouched, writes Lukas Fort. newmandala.org/indonesias-war…

NEW 🇵🇭 Rodrigo Duterte can no longer perform the strongman persona that generated his appeal, yet the political loyalty towards him has only intensified. John Lee Candelaria on the "debt of honour" many Filipinos feel they owe their former president: newmandala.org/moral-economy-…

NEW 🇲🇲 The socialist economy envisioned by the military regime that ruled from 1962 to 1988 existed only in propaganda. The real economy, meanwhile, ran on Johnnie Walker, jeans, and officials’ willingness to look the other way. newmandala.org/officially-uno…

NEW 🇹🇭 Thailand's February 2026 election was a disaster for reformist politics in Thailand, and Jirapreeya Saeboo argues that the People's Party's ideological and strategic shortcomings have to bear their share of the blame. newmandala.org/a-reckoning-fo…

NEW 🇮🇩 As modernist Islamic education flourished in late colonial West Sumatra, girls' schools became training grounds for anticolonial activism and a new generation of strong, devout Muslim women envisioned as shaping the future Indonesian nation-state newmandala.org/the-muslim-dau…

NEW 🇮🇩 The legacies of Jokowi’s demobilisation of Islamist civil society, combined with Prabowo’s own credibility with hardliners, have given the president extensive leeway to embrace a more even-handed approach to the Israel–Palestine conflict. newmandala.org/why-islamists-…

NEW 🇱🇦 The Lao state treats its public health workforce as a driver of socialist modernisation—but do those workers feel the same way? By Amelie Katczynski newmandala.org/laos-nurses-as…

NEW 🇮🇩 Too big to fail, and too big to succeed, Jokowi’s new capital city eventually came to be pushed forward by little more than the former president’s need to justify its existence, writes Anders Kirstein Moeller. newmandala.org/nusantara-the-…

NEW 🇵🇭 The delay to the BARMM's landmark parliamentary elections set for October 2025 is the latest in a long line of mishaps and missed opportunities that undermine local confidence in Manila’s commitment to Bangsamoro autonomy. newmandala.org/how-bangsamoro…

NEW 🇮🇩 Indonesia’s small but active anarchist community has become the go-to bogeyman for governments seeking to justify crackdowns. The scapegoating of anarchists has also undermined the unity and political impact of anti-oligarchic protest movements. newmandala.org/whos-afraid-of…

NEW 🇮🇩 Kadek Wara Urwasi's "Insurgent planning versus discretionary urbanism in Jakarta"—caught between eviction and embrace, residents of Jakarta’s informal settlements are finding new ways to assert their rights and reshape their city from the ground up newmandala.org/insurgent-plan…

NEW 🇮🇩 With the destruction of landmark Dutch-era buildings in August's protests, Indonesians have lost sites where they have for generations re-signified colonial remains into something simultaneously inherited and all their own, writes Noandha Dhegaska. newmandala.org/indonesias-her…

"Indonesia’s energy transition isn’t just about climate—it’s about health, economic opportunity, and national development", states Budy P. Resosudarmo, convenor of this years Indonesia Update conference, in his latest piece for @newmandala. newmandala.org/where-have-ind…