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INTRODUCTION
For disadvantaged individuals and communities, Southeast Asia’s pursuit of economic growth and development is shadowed by a deepening everyday precarity. This paper examines how state-led discourse and practice tend to obscure the diverse and situated realities of precarity across the region. The marginalized and dispossessed are routinely aggregated within narrow framings of risk and vulnerability, with the underlying conditions of their precarity largely masked. While ostensibly neutral and technocratic, these assessments remain insufficient for grasping the forces and interests configuring and reproducing the very circumstances they purport to address. This paper advances a precarity lens as a timely and generative means for interrogating the constitutive relationships between political authority, commercial expansion, ecological degradation, and structural inequality permeating Southeast Asia’s contemporary condition.
BIONOTE
Paul J. Carnegie is an Associate Professor of Politics at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His interests focus on the sociology of the everyday, the politics of development, state formation, marginality, and precarity in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. He is the author of The Road from Authoritarianism to Democratization in Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and co-editor of Human Insecurities in Southeast Asia and (Re)presenting Brunei Darussalam: A Sociology of the Everyday (both Springer, 2016; 2023). His research output has appeared in Pacific Affairs, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, South East Asia Research, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Journal of Population Research, and the Australian Journal of International Affairs.
ARTICLE INFORMATION
Type of Manuscript: Essay
Volume, Issue, Year: Volume 59, Issue 1, Year 2023
Pages:
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