There is a widespread view in the West that if the right institutions are put in place, democratic politics and free-market economics will follow. Yet history does not often bear this out. Laos and Cambodia provide case studies of how what undermines the intended functioning of political...

The party systems of Indonesia and Malaysia are characterized by conflict patterns that can be analyzed with the cleavage model presented by Lipset and Rokkan. In both countries voters are mobilized on the background of fundamental divides. In Malaysia, voter mobilization takes place along these...

Six years after gaining independence, the small Southeast Asian state of Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) suffered a major setback in its political development: On 11 February 2008 President Jos? Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao were assaulted by rebel forces. Both...

The 2008 elections were a watershed event in Malaysia’s history. In spite of the entrenched dominance of the ruling coalition, which has held sway over the country since independence in 1957, and despite the limited competitiveness of elections, the opposition was, unexpectedly, able to strip...

While the European Union (EU) favours a formal, binding, output-oriented, and to some extent supranational approach to cooperation, the institutional architecture of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is built on informal, non-binding, process-oriented norms of intergovernmental...

The article first reviews the current theories of regional integration and points out that most of them can not explain the phenomena and patterns of regional integration of developing countries. Then it discusses the basic processes of Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) and ASEAN’s regional...

This paper reports on a survey on the environmental conditions in three small-scale enterprise clusters in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. The survey attempted to identify the existence and contribution of environmental innovation networks that influence the behaviour of clustered...

On July 27, 2008, Cambodia’s fourth National Assembly elections took place. Approximately six million Cambodians cast their votes for one of the 11 running parties. Unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who had already governed for 23 years, was confirmed in his position. His Cambodian...

The paper reports research on IFGs in Vietnam. It argues that these emerged into rural society from the early 1990s as the power of official cooperatives waned, and by the mid 2000s were an important part of farmers’ institutional capacity. As such, they generated a group of social leaders in...

Singapore is well known for its advanced economy, and its prosperity is most visible in its high-rise architecture and huge shopping malls. While this image dominates the self-perception of the city-state as well as the international image of this ‘Tropical City of Excellence’, rising social...