The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia

Juanita Elias is Associate Professor in International Political Economy. She joined the University of Warwick in 2013 from Griffith University, Queensland, where she held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Her research and teaching interests include gender and international political economy, studies of work and migration, Southeast Asian political economy, with a particular focus on Malaysia, and the role of gender in global economic governance. She has published her work in journals such as International Political Sociology, Asian Studies Review, Economy and Society, Third World Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, the International Feminist Journal of Politics and The Pacific Review. She is the author of Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Firm and Gendered Employment in a Globalising World (2004) and editor of The Global Political Economy of The Household in Asia (with Samanthi J Gunawardana, 2013). She is currently working on projects that explore the gender politics of efforts to promote economic competitiveness in Malaysia and the Southeast Asian regional domestic worker migration regime. Lena Rethel is Associate Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Her research interests are concentrated in the broad areas of the political economy of finance and Southeast Asian politics. Conceptually, this includes the relationship between finance and development, financialisation and the politics of debt, alternative globalisations and the disciplinary parameters and spatial location of contemporary international political economy scholarship. In her research, she has focused on developments in the Southeast Asia region, mainly Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Her most recent books are Global Governance in Crisis (co-edited with Andre Broome and Liam Clegg, 2015) and The Problem with Banks (with Timothy J. Sinclair, 2012). Currently, she is working on a range of projects that explore the relationship between financial system change and development, trajectories of emerging market debt and the emergence of Islamic finance.

• Part I. Introduction: 1. Southeast Asia and everyday political economy Juanita Elias and Lena Rethel; Part II. From Development to Multiple Modernities: 2. Policies and negotiated everyday living: a view from the margins of development in Thailand and Vietnam Johnathan Rigg; 3. Everyday agents of change: trade unions in Myanmar Nicholas Henry; 4. Neoliberalism, resource governance and the everyday politics of protest in the Philippines Jewellord T. Nem Singh and Alvin A. Camba; Part III. Widening and Deepening Markets: 5. The political economy of Muslim markets in Singapore Johan Fischer; 6. Islamic finance in Malaysia: global ambitions, local realities Lena Rethel; 7. Resisting marketization: everyday actors, courts and education reform in post-New Order Indonesia Andrew Rosser; Part IV. People, Mobilities and Work: 8. From formal employment to street vending: Malaysian women's labour force participation over the life course Anja K. Franck; 9. Everyday identities in motion: situating Malaysians within the 'war for talent' Adam Tyson; 10. Regional disputes over the transnationalization of domestic labour: Malaysia's 'maid shortage' and foreign relations with Indonesia and Cambodia Juanita Elias and Jonathan Louth; 11. Everyday agency, resistance and community resources for Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong Carol G. S. Tan; Part V. Conclusion: 12. Everyday international political economy meets the everyday political economy of Southeast Asia John M. Hobson, Juanita Elias, Lena Rethel and Leonard Seabrooke.

'This genuinely multidisciplinary work by an impressive set of authors draws on three intersecting fields of study - International Political Economy (IPE), social anthropology and economic geography - as well as using original fieldwork from Southeast Asia to show how processes of market-building unfold on the ground involving non-elite, even marginalised or vulnerable groups, in a non-western setting. The authors demonstrate convincingly that an everyday approach adds value to more common elite-centred analyses of economic transformation by unmasking tensions, subjectivities and behaviours otherwise hidden from scholarly eyes directed towards elites. This book is highly recommended for students of political economy and of Southeast Asia for its nuanced analysis of non-elite agency, often in unexpected and seemingly non-rational ways, that complicates, perhaps even frustrates, top-down, elite-dominated agendas, plans and programmes.' Helen Nesadurai, Monash University, Malaysia