Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia

In this lecture, John Sidel, Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), will discuss his recently published book, Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021). The book offers a reinterpretation of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions, which have long been understood in terms of the rise of nationalist consciousness and struggles for new nation-states. The book situates these revolutions against the backdrop of the region’s deepening integration into the world economy, the broadening of its connections with other regions of the world, and the emergence and evolution of new forms of modern cosmopolitan consciousness, connectedness, and capacities for organization under such rubrics as republicanism, Communism, and Islam. Overall, as Professor Sidel will explain in the lecture, his book offers a new –denationalized, transnationalized, and internationalized – analytical framework for understanding the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions, and for understanding modern Southeast Asian history as a whole.  

John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford University Press, 1999), (with Eva-Lotta Hedman) Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (Routledge, 2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (East-West Center, 2007), (with Jaime Faustino) Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (The Asia Foundation, 2020), and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell University, 2021).