Studies of socialism in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s have tended to focus on key intellectuals and communist parties, or socialist internationalism in the Chinese and Soviet orbit. This talk forms part of a larger project on non-communist socialism, its relationship to the broader left, and its transnational dimensions which I will be introducing here. The latter half of the talk focuses on the conditions by which socialism manifested in the political domain. In the 1950s and 1960s socialist fronts emerged in the Malay peninsula and in Singapore. They followed in the footsteps of the Burma-based Asian Socialist Conference and committed to the Bandung sprit, resisting Western military intervention in the region and pledging their support for liberation movements around the world. Yet the atmosphere of the Global Cold War and growing authoritarianism in the early 1960s severely strained the ability of the left to function effectively or to maintain a non-aligned stance. Meanwhile, the PAP harnessed ‘democratic socialism’ as a tool to win allies around the world, while suppressing the ‘hard’ left at home. In viewing the explosive history of the late 1950s and 1960s through transnational socialist networks and anti-colonial politics, this talk provides a fresh perspective on this pivotal point of the Cold War and decolonisation in the region.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies
Dr. Su Lin Lewis is Associate Professor of Modern Global History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (Cambridge 2016), co-editor (with Carolien Stolte) of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden, 2022), and co-editor (with Nana Osei-Opare) of Socialism, Internationalism, and Development: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonisation (forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2024). Her current monograph is on socialist internationalism in decolonising Southeast Asia.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).