Michael G. Vann is a professor of history at California State University, Sacramento, and the coauthor of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam.
Thailand and Cambodia shocked observers by going to war last month. The destructive border conflict doesn’t stem from an upsurge of popular nationalism: the political elites in both countries needed a distraction to shore up their flagging legitimacy.
The US invasion of Vietnam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese people, resulting in millions of deaths. Fifty years ago today, the US-backed regime finally collapsed as North Vietnamese forces took control of Saigon.
Fifty years ago today, the Khmer Rouge took power in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Instead of rebuilding the country after a destructive US bombing campaign, Pol Pot’s movement plunged it into one of the last century’s most horrifying catastrophes.
Paul Chambers, an eminent US scholar of Thailand, has been arrested on charges of criticizing the Thai monarchy. Chambers is one of the most high-profile targets of a clampdown on dissent against the world’s richest king.
Indonesia’s right-wing president Prabowo was elected with a commanding share of the youth vote in 2024. This year, a new youth protest movement is challenging Prabowo’s spending cuts and the role of the military in Indonesian politics.
Indonesia’s new president has a gruesome track record of human rights violations and hostility to democracy. But a slick campaign successfully presented him as a harmless grandpa.
Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo, has a gruesome track record of human rights violations and hostility to democracy. But a slick campaign successfully presented him as a cuddly grandpa figure, with crucial assistance from outgoing president Jokowi.
From The Host to Kingdom, Korean filmmakers have used the horror genre as a vehicle for political critique and reached a huge global audience. They’re building on a long international tradition of socially conscious scare stories.
Grad student workers in the UC system have been on strike for the last month, and they’re now facing a crucial moment in their battle for decent pay. The biggest academic strike in US history needs all the support and solidarity we can provide.
Street protests have rocked Indonesia’s main cities since the country’s president, Jokowi, announced a cut to gasoline subsidies. With global energy prices soaring, the Indonesian protests are sure to be repeated elsewhere in the months to come.
From its Hawaiian origins to the postwar surf craze, surfing has been a defiant challenge to the Calvinist work ethic and the commercial pressures of capitalism. But those malign social forces may now finally succeed in extinguishing the spirit of surfing.
After the fall of Indonesia’s US-backed tyrant Suharto in 1998, many Indonesians hoped that their country was on a path to genuine democracy. Two decades later, wealthy crooks and war criminals from the Suharto era are still deeply entrenched in power.
Under the leadership of Sukarno, postcolonial Indonesia was an optimistic country finding its place on the world stage. Suharto’s 1965 coup drowned that experiment in blood, with US politicians and media cheering on his campaign of mass killings.
Forged in the best traditions of American radicalism, historian Tyler Stovall remained loyal to the struggle for a better world throughout an illustrious academic career.
The US-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto was responsible for some of the twentieth century’s worst crimes. More than two decades after Suharto’s death, his regime’s brutal legacy is still holding back democracy in Indonesia.
The massacre of the Indonesian left in 1965–66, backed by Washington, was one of the great crimes of the twentieth century. A new generation of scholars has uncovered its long-suppressed history of slaughter of up to a million people in the name of anti-communism.