New Mandala in 2024

Dear readers

This is just a short and sweet message to let you know that New Mandala is taking a break for the Australian Christmas and New Year holidays and will resume publishing after 20 January 2025. I want to extend my most sincere thanks to everybody who had a role in keeping New Mandala an essential space for accessible scholarly analysis of Southeast Asia in 2024. This includes, as always, our readers and contributors, but also our newly-reconstituted Editorial Advisory Board, whose counsel has been incredibly valuable to me as editor in plotting out how to future-proof New Mandala as the online landscape changes.

Those of you who’ve jumped ship from Twitter/X to Bluesky can now find us there at @newmandala.bsky.social. I’ll also shamelessly repeat the plea I made last year for readers to sign up to our email distribution list, which will allow you to receive every New Mandala post in your inbox—and nothing else: no spam, no self-promotion—as it’s published.

The most important thing to keep an eye out for at New Mandala in 2025 will be the fruits of our Emerging Scholar Award, for which we received over 200 applications. The diversity and quality of the submissions offered welcome reassurance that scholarship on Southeast Asia (the state of area studies, and the health of higher education, in a lot of countries notwithstanding) and I’m grateful for the enthusiasm of the students and recent graduates who took the time to apply. I’m really looking forward to bringing readers a series of essays from January that showcase the work of the applicants whose projects we felt best represented the quality and diversity of scholarship on Southeast Asia that’s being done in PhD programs around the world. I’d like to also acknowledge the Australian National University for its financial support of this initiative.

For those of you about to enjoy an end-of-year holiday, we wish you a safe and happy time with loved ones. Thanks once again for your support of New Mandala throughout the year.

Liam Gammon | the editor

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New Mandala’s 10 most-read articles in 2024

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1. “The growing contradictions of Singapore’s HDB scheme” by Chua Beng Huat (co-published with AcademiaSG)

2. “Explaining the Prabowo landslide” by Sana Jaffrey and Eve Warburton

3. “Ethnonationalism and Myanmar’s future” by David Brenner

4. “Forgotten war in Burma, ignored war in Myanmar” by Edith Mirante

5. “Myanmar and the second-oldest profession” by Andrew Selth

6. “From polarisation to opportunism: organised Islam and the 2024 elections” by Alexander Arifianto and Aisah Putri Budiatri

7. “Forgetting the Battle of Manila” by John Lee Candelaria

8. “The workers paying the price for Indonesia’s nickel boom” by Alfian al-Ayubby

9. “James C. Scott: against the myopic study of politics” by Olle Tornquist

10. “Revolution and solidarity in Myanmar” by Justine Chambers and Nick Cheesman