Issues in Southeast Asia - Introduction

Issues in Southeast Asia

While tidying up my computer I came across some material from a course I followed last autumn, Contemporary Issues in Southeast Asia.

The course was taught through the internet as a distance-learning course, and I took the course just for fun. I didn’t formally complete the course, I don’t need university credits, but I did do one of the exercises, a so-called learning diary.

I’m not quite sure what a learning diary is and what form it should take. The instructions stated that its aim is “to summarize, analyse and comment on the course and lectures.” I wrote my little essays and opinion pieces about the lectures and uploaded them to the course website, expecting that other students might read them and in return I could read others’ opinions on the topics. This turned out not to be how the course was organised and my work, simplistic and from a layman’s perspective, just seemed to disappear into cyberspace.

Since time has passed, I feel free to post my learning diary texts for people to enjoy or ignore as they see fit. They are posted as they were written and the thoughts are those of the moment when they were written; I might very well have changed my mind.

The topics:

Lecture 1 – Introduction (no learning diary)
Lecture 2 – Peace and war in Southeast Asia: Trends and challenges
Lecture 3 – Climate change adaptation in Southeast Asia
Lecture 4 – Military reform in Indonesia
Lecture 5 – Islam in Southeast Asia: Islam and the challenges of freedom of religion or belief
Lecture 6 – Tourism in Southeast Asia: Challenges and new directions
Lecture 7 – Heritage, nationalism and identity in Southeast Asia
Lecture 8 – The political situation in Thailand: Contested democracy, the democratisation process, and the roles of civil society organizations
Lecture 9 – Burma-Myanmar: Beyond paradoxes and parameters
Lecture 10 – ASEAN regional economic integration: Southeast Asia as a business environment
Lecture 11 – Interlinkages of water and development in Southeast Asia: The Mekong River case
Lecture 12 – Gender discourses on migration and trafficking in the Mekong Region
Concluding comments about the course