Papers

• Internationalist Southeast Asias: Notes on Research Agenda Thiti Jamkajornkeiat University of Victoria

  The relational framework of Internationalist Southeast Asias (ISA) intends to connect internationalist praxes arising from various struggles against systemic forms of oppression in Southeast Asia, understood as a global entity combining continental and diasporic components. It is designed to substantiate the capacious framework “Global Asias” – which appears in my assessment to be concerned more with formalist linkage than historical materialist articulation – with normative political content falling under the broad rubric of leftism. Currently, we have witnessed Southeast Asia as an active site of internationalist realignment whose notable configurations include the Milk Tea Alliance, Migrante International, platform worker solidarity, and abolitionist struggles against refugee deportations. While “Global Asias” as a conceptual assemblage already brings important ethnic studies inquiries such as race, indigeneity, and activism into the Cold War-formed Southeast Asian studies, it does not necessarily orient towards left materialist causes. Internationalist Southeast Asias then serves as a research cluster for analyzing and critiquing the capitalist foundation of oppressive structures in Southeast Asia. At the same time, it functions as a political laboratory for advancing Southeast Asia’s left internationalism. In this presentation, I explore the problematics emerging from different historical conjunctures of actually-existing internationalism in Southeast Asias from the interwar period in the 1930s to the Bandung-Vietnam moment in the 1950s-1960s, the financial crisis in the 1990s, and the trade war in the 2010s-2020s.

• How Red Doves Fly - Indonesian peace activism, the global Cold War, and the decolonizing world, 1950-1963 Sander van der Horst Leiden University

  From roughly 1950 to 1963, Indonesia witnessed the birth and growth of a radical peace movement. As wars of liberation and nuclear proliferation shook the post-war world, a cohort of communist- adjacent activists from Indonesia asked how they could contribute to anti-imperialism and peace advocacy. This paper studies leftist Indonesian attempts to build transnational coalitions for peace. It departs from the assumption that peace activists in and from Indonesia drew on anti-imperialist and anti-war ideas in their critique of global power. Through the perspective of these activists, this paper presents a social and intellectual history of decolonization and Indonesian peace activism from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, it brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the political culture underpinning their struggle for a decolonized and denuclearized world. In this paper, I argue that the communist peace movement in Indonesia was not only an emancipatory force that championed a range of anti-imperialist, anti- racist, and anti-capitalist ideas. More importantly, the peace movement can be seen as a vehicle for Third World anti-imperialism from and in Indonesia. The communist peace organization Komite Perdamaian Indonesia (KPI), for example, was an essential precursor to later collectives like OISRAA, the Indonesian chapter of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). The story of the peace movement in Indonesia is not only an erased history of Indonesian left internationalism but also demonstrates how anti-imperialism and anti-militarism crossed paths in the imagination of Indonesian and Afro-Asian progressives.

• The Role of Solidarity Networks and NGOs in East Timorese Nationalism: TAPOL and CDPM cases Nuno Canas Mendes University of Lisbon

  The solidarity network for East Timor nationalism in the 1980s and 90s was paramount in disseminating a broader knowledge of the situation in the territory, particularly of Human Rights violations. This network encompasses several sensibilities, political orientations, geographical areas, and organizations, from Australia to Portugal, the Catholic Church to the Asia-Pacific Coalition for East Timor (https://timorarchive.ca).

  Some of these movements are connected to the fight against dictatorships in Indonesia and Portugal. This will be analyzed through the cases of TAPOL (https://www.tapol.org) and ‘Comissão dos Direitos do Povo Maubere’ (CDPM, Commission for the Rights of the Maubere People), both organizations protagonized by women: Carmel Budjiardo and Luísa Teotónio Pereira.

  TAPOL initially fought for the liberation of political prisoners in Indonesia (Ta-pol is a contraction of tahanan politik) and prioritized the denunciation of massive attacks on Human Rights, taking East Timor as a vivid expression of the repressive nature of the Indonesian regime. Carmel Budjiardo was the founder and a prominent activist against Soeharto’s brutal rule.

  CDPM was founded by Luísa Teotónio Pereira, a historical member of CIDAC (“Centro de Informação e Documentação Anticolonial” and then “Centro de Informação e Documentação Amílcar Cabral”, Anti Colonial Center of Information and Documentation and then Amilcar Cabral Center of Information and Documentation), who organized a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Lisbon in 1981 and was pivotal as a privileged information platform connecting East Timor and international fora, such as the United Nations and its specialized agencies and Human Rights organizations.
  In this paper, both the evolution of the two organizations in the denunciation of the East Timorese situation, as well as the role of these two left-winged women, will be described to understand the importance of activism in these interconnected phenomena: the fight against authoritarian regimes and people’s autodetermination.

• On Revolutionary Myanmar: Insurgency, Autonomy, Inter/nationalism, Life Geoffrey Aung University of Vienna

  This paper specifies a fundamental contradiction in Myanmar’s revolutionary present. On one hand, a relay between insurrection and insurgency centers on smashing military rule and seizing the state. This state-oriented revolutionary horizon, deeply indebted to an eighteenth-century republican grid of intelligibility, aims for a transition from one (national) sovereign regime to another. On the other hand, a relay between land defense, territorial struggle, and autonomous administrations in liberated areas—mainly in Myanmar’s minoritized ethnic highlands, where armed struggle against the lowland Burman state has a long history—demonstrates a capacity to produce autonomous territory, or commune-type projects that cast the political beyond the state. I suggest these autonomous zones are more than insurgent bases, geared towards capturing then refounding the state. They promise a qualitatively different political subjectivity. The disruptive force of this commune form, I consider, is less about states within states, a federal order, a confederal system, or “Balkanization”; it suggests anti-states within a state, in which alternative forms of life can flourish. Based on research in Myanmar’s southeast, I draw out this tension between insurgency and autonomy, or statist and anti-statist tendencies, in revolutionary Myanmar. But I also situate that tension within a larger international/ist horizon, wherein the promise of autonomy raises more questions than answers.

Abstract