The waterways and waterworks of Southeast Asia have long served as essential bedrocks and thoroughfares for the societies of the region, for fishing and agriculture, for the movement of goods and people, information and knowledge, language and discourse, beliefs and practices, and for the exercise, expansion -- and evasion -- of power. Scholars have long recognized the centrality of water in the history of Southeast Asia, but recent years have seen important new developments both in scholarship and in the ongoing -- demographic, economic, physical, political, and social -- transformation(s) of the region which concern its rivers, sea lanes, and marine beds, and its dams, port harbours, and reclamation projects.
Against this backdrop, the LSE's Southeast Asia Centre invited a set of leading specialists to share the fruits of their latest empirical research and analysis and shed new light on the histories and contemporary trends of Southeast Asian waters in a series of public lectures and discussions over the course of the 2021-2022 academic year.
Southeast Asian Waters Seminars
Wednesday 17 November 2021, 14:00 - 15:15
Ghosts in the Machine: Technology and Imperialism in Maritime Asia
Prof. Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University
Chair: Prof. John Sidel, Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics, LSE SEAC Associate
When can "machines be seen as the measure of men", as the historian Michael Adas so beautifully opined? This talk focuses on three moments when technology became crucial in "wiring" maritime Asia into larger landscapes of modernity and colonization. First, we examine the laying of telegraphs across Indochina's coasts en route to China, as the French started to plant flags in this part of the world. Second, we will look at the notion of building a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, in what is today southern Thailand, and what was then the semi-independent kingdom of Siam. Finally, we will also analyze the spread of lighthouses as Foucauldian instruments of coercion in the Anglo-Dutch sphere of Insular Southeast Asia, in land-and seascapes that currently comprise Malaysia and Indonesia. I argue in this presentation that all of these Southeast Asian processes were inter-related, and that they show in regional miniature the shadow and shape of larger forces that were then sweeping the globe.
Wednesday 24 November 2021, 12:00 - 13:15
Property, profit & risk: Jakarta’s real estate industry and the ongoing water crisis
Dr. Emma Colven (@EmmaColven) SEAC Visiting Fellow, Assistant Professor of Global Environment, University of Oklahoma
Chair: Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) SEAC Director, LSE Geography & Environment
Jakarta's fragmented water supply, high rates of groundwater extraction vulnerability to tidal flooding constitute both a water crisis and a major urban planning challenge. Despite these environmental risks, Jakarta remains a site of intense real estate investment and property development.
This paper examines how the real estate industry is affected by and responds to these environmental risks. I ask: how does Jakarta’s water crisis shapes the feasibility, profitability, success, or failure of property development? How does the real estate industry understand, and respond to the city's water crisis? I draw on in-depth interviews with various stakeholders in Jakarta and an analysis of secondary sources relating to water and property to examine the strategies through which the private sector negotiates environmental risks that threaten property and profit.
Wednesday 16 March 2022,
Urban Waterscapes and Global Climate Justice: Views from Jakarta
Dr. Kian Goh (@kiangoh) Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA
Chair - Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) SEAC Director, LSE Geography & Environment
From the flooding along one river, one watershed, how do we understand broader regional and global debates about urban water? The problem of cities and environments takes on different forms depending on point of view, framework of understanding, and scale of investigation. In this talk I trace the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes in Jakarta across conflicting ideas and narratives, and link them to emerging debates around climate change responses around the world and critical concerns of justice. Building on research explored in my book Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press 2021), which examined the politics of urban climate change responses within and between Jakarta, New York, and Rotterdam, I focus on what it means, riffing on Ananya Roy’s exhortation, to view all urban ecologies from this particular place on the map. Here I take seriously – and attempt to hold in view, if not resolve – contested claims and questions about worldviews, knowledge production, and privilege and positionality in urban environmental research.
Wednesday 23 March 2022,
The importance of humiliation: 1974, Vietnam and the South China Sea
Bill Hayton (@bill_hayton) Associate Fellow, Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House
Chair: Prof John Sidel, Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics, LSE SEAC Associate
Why did Vietnamese begin to care about the islets of the South China Sea? When French colonial authorities made claims to the Paracel and Spratly islands during the 1930s their efforts were largely ignored by wider public. It was only in 1974, in the context of the closing stages of the Second Indochina War and following the seizure of the western half of the Paracel Islands by the People’s Republic of China, that the fate of these tiny rocks and reefs became emotionally important to the people of the (southern) Republic of Vietnam. This paper will emphasise the importance of feelings of ’national humiliation’ in the development of Vietnam’s maritime geobody, paralleling a process that had taken place in China forty years earlier.
Wednesday 18 May 2022,
Expanding transboundary water governance: A mobile political ecology of sand and shifting resource-based livelihoods in Southeast Asia
Dr. Vanessa Lamb (@DrVanessa_Lamb) Senior Lecturer, School of Geography, University of Melbourne
Chair: Prof John Sidel, Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics, LSE SEAC Associate
An unprecedented rise in sand extraction from rivers and coasts for use in construction and urban development is impacting resource-based livelihoods, prompting scholars to declare “a looming tragedy of the sand commons”. Within a global context, Southeast Asia is emerging as one sand mining hotspot. Yet, while demand and extraction is set to intensify, the governance of sand and sediment flows has been characterised as a serious challenge in the region, particularly in the ways that this “unseen transboundary commons” is being depleted and sand mining is impacting local resource users and livelihoods. In this talk, I will outline a proposal to ‘expand’ the transboundary governance of water via a mobile political ecology framing that emphasises not only the importance of riverine sand and sediments (and the impacts of their extraction) but the range of shifting livelihoods and resource users in the region and their potential role in transboundary debates. I do so with consideration of the ‘dual crises’ of climate change and the covid-19 pandemic, where challenges for water governance, and a need to expand participation, have become more pronounced.
Wednesday 1 June 2022,
“Don’t Always Blame Climate Change”: The Political Ecology of Uneven Development and Vulnerability to Flooding in Southeast Asian Megacities
Dr Danny Marks, Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy and Politics, Dublin City University
Chair: Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) SEAC Director, LSE Geography & Environment
In the past decade, we have witnessed deaths, displacement, and high losses due to heavy flooding in Jakarta, Manila, and Bangkok. In response to these disasters, government and urban leaders have tended to blame the devastation on the external forces of climate change and nature. While it is likely that climate change contributed to the magnitude of these floods, by blaming nature or climate change, government leaders sought to absolve themselves of any responsibility for causing or worsening the extent of the disasters. I argue that floods in Southeast Asia, have been socially and politically produced. They are outcomes of urban development, particularly political decisions, economic interests, and power relations. Vulnerability to floods, a combination of exposure to and capacity to cope with them, has been uneven across the geographical and social landscape. Those who have been worst affected have primarily been the most marginalized groups. This presentation focuses on the historical production of flooding in the region’s three largest megacities: Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila, since a number of similarities between these cities exist.