On 28 June approximately 4.5 million voters in Bangkok will choose a new governor and Bangkok Metropolitan Council. On the surface the outcome looks predictable: polls consistently show incumbent ...

In May 2025 Malaysia’s Ministry of Home Affairs announced that migrant workers would be permitted to change employers across different industries. This could mean a potential break from the country’s ...

In Thailand, the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps program (Ruk Sa Din Daen—หลักสูตรรักษาดินแดน [ร.ด.]) is something ordinary people are intimately familiar with. Roughly 15% of Thai high ...

Chin Peng, born Ong Boon Hua, 21 October 1924 to 16 September 2013 The passing of Chin Peng in Bangkok on 16 September 2013 brings to an end one of the longest of Asian political biographies. Chin ...

The motivations behind these reforms—the renewed emphasis on language learning, a desire to see more Australian students up in the Indo-Pacific for longer duration experiences, and a rebalancing of ...

On 13 June 2024, a nickel smelting furnace at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi caught fire and exploded, sending two workers to hospital. A year earlier, on 24 ...

Paul Chambers looks back at the politicisation of the Royal Thai Police, before turning to the palace's recent personalisation of authority over an institution often overshadowed by the military.

[This is a rough summary translation of our original post in Thai. New Mandala readers who can read Thai should go here for the full length article. The English spelling of names in this article are ...

1932 is usually described as the beginning of Thailand’s century-long coup season. Once upon a time when I sought to determine when this history of coups began I was surprised to find obscure ...

Photo courtesy of Akshay Mahajan (Creative Commons licence) After a long period of relative silence, the most tragic period in Cambodia’s history has experienced a renaissance of interest. Spurred by ...

How the issue of citizenship-for-votes plays out at GE13 remains moot but the certainty that Sabah remains BN’s fixed deposit no longer holds.

Islamic schools have always been part and parcel of the Malay-Muslim communities, even long before the British came to shores of Malaya. The traditional Islamic schools are known as pondok and were ...