There’s a notorious stretch of road in Indonesia, by the border of North Sumatra and Aceh provinces, that passes through kilometres and kilometres of oil palm plantations. There are few people there, ...

Are Indonesia’s political parties all alike? Are some more in favour of political reform than others? Do some favour business interests while others see themselves as siding with the poor? And does it ...

Observers in the West have largely interpreted the devastating violence that has engulfed Myanmar following the February 2021 military coup as a “battle between democracy and authoritarianism”. This ...

Photo courtesy of Akshay Mahajan (Creative Commons licence) After a long period of relative silence, the most tragic period in Cambodia’s history has experienced a renaissance of interest. Spurred by ...

Amidst the grapple with the COVID-19 recovery, President Joko Widodo’s ambitious $32 billion mega project to relocate the national capital continues. This mega project is one of a variety of ambitious ...

One of the legacies Joko Widodo leaves Indonesia is a dramatically changed relationship between government and civil society. For the first decade and a half of the post-Suharto period, pro-democracy ...

Findings from a nationwide survey commissioned by Yangon-based NGOs Colors Rainbow and &PROUD indicate that Myanmar’s general public are in favour of greater equality for the country’s LGBT* ...

The last week has seen a wave of huge protests around Indonesia against the new so-called omnibus law—a massive law that amends 79 existing statutes and is touted by the government as easing ...

With over 2.8 million confirmed cases and 50,341 deaths from COVID-19, the Philippines is suffering one of the worst outbreaks in Southeast Asia. However, despite its dire situation, the country has ...

On 13 June 2024, a nickel smelting furnace at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi caught fire and exploded, sending two workers to hospital. A year earlier, on 24 ...

Last week, PoP brought you Jarrah Sastrawan’s review of Nurturing Indonesia: Medicine and Decolonisation in the Dutch East Indies by Associate Professor Hans Pols. This week, we are pleased to bring ...

The 10 th of August 2020 will be remembered as either a key date in Thailand’s transition to democracy or as a precursor to yet another coup carried out by a military pledging itself to the defence of ...