Fracturing of Malay/Muslim parties has made it difficult to unite the Malay/Muslim electorate through ethnoreligious appeals.

No Malaysian election campaign is complete without these highlights of food, flags and swag, as the GE14 season enters its final days.

Street theatre and the wayang of politics merge one warm night in an urban battle about corruption big and small.

How much change, beyond Najib's ousting, does a Mahathir-led coalition represent? Or does an emboldened, victorious Najib mean political rebirths are redundant?

‘Thainess’ only truly laid down its roots at the end of the 1970s. ความเป็นไทยหรือการเป็นคนไทยเพิ่งจะลงหลักปักฐานจริงๆก็ในปลายทศวรรษ 1970 เท่านั้นเอง

Malaysia's GE14 marks the end of Malaysian Chinese politics after 60 years of dwindling and divisive outcomes, as its modern patron UMNO itself struggles to survive.

Thanathorn has made clear that the Future Forward Party has no intentions of being a Pheu Thai shadow.

Beyond the media hype, the new Indonesia Solidarity Party (PSI) isn’t much different from the conservative, oligarch-linked parties we’re used to.

Both sides of the political divide are trying to woo a vastly underestimated, non-homogenous rural Malay public.

The Australian National University's long running Myanmar Update series addresses the theme of 'Living with Myanmar' in 2019.

Social media is now central to any Malaysian election campaign. In 2018, the opposition is facing a far better organised incumbent than last time.

Political Islam at GE14 isn't just a race between parties as democratisation throws up alliances and fractures to define Muslim society.

A new generation's contest over Sarawak's lost autonomy may force its GE14 voters to reconsider how today's leaders are trapped by the past.

Tacloban's new tourism campaign is a coverup of five years of post-Yolanda devastation.

Electoral changes recently rammed through parliament can mean winning power at GE14 with just 16.5% of the popular vote. But would such elections confer the legitimacy to rule?

A commentary on the Sufi poem of the peculiar whale, by the 16th-century Malay poet Hamzah of Barus.

The era of Malaysia's dominant federal government may be over as its leading states push for greater autonomy.

A new survey shows that political parties are divided only by their attitudes on Islam.

Nearly two decades of decentralisation have shown the promise and challenges for Indonesia's civil society.

Looking at Indonesia's grassroots neighbourhood associations helps us understand the perils of aligning civil society with elite interests.

Can former minister and prime minister Najb Razak's ‘good friend’ Shafie Apdal sweep out Sabah's incumbents at GE14, and end up delivering power to Mahathir's opposition?

On the many meanings of Hari Kartini, Indonesia's annual celebration of its most famous colonial-era feminist thinker.

Reform-minded Malaysians are fatigued after two missed opportunities since 2008, with today's centrifugal politics generating even more social tensions. Not even Dr Mahathir’s surprise (re)emergence can mend those fractures, as Malaysians dream of the First World but still struggle in the Third as inequality worsens.