| ID | 085875 |
| Title Proper | Teaching international relations in Southeast Asia |
| Other Title Information | historical memory, academic context, and politics - an introduction |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Chong, Alan ; Hamilton-Hart, Natasha |
| Publication | 2009. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | The teaching of international relations (IR) at universities in Southeast Asia plays a role in the production of knowledge about the IR of Southeast Asia. As a complement to the scrutiny of published research output, a focus on teaching offers one pathway toward comprehending the constitution of meaning in both the IR of Southeast Asia and the broader IR discipline. This introduction to a collection of essays on the teaching of IR in Southeast Asia also discusses the potential ways by which attention to teaching may uncover the socializing role of pedagogy. An inquiry into the discipline as it is taught in the region throws light on how particular national legitimating myths are reproduced, the transmission of collective historical memories, the dominance of certain schools of international thought, and the role of civil society in Southeast Asian knowledge production.
The study of Southeast Asian international relations (IR) has undergone a number of changes since its emergence as a field during the Cold War. Theoretical preoccupations have shifted over time, as have the empirical questions that have attracted most attention. Questions of identity formation, ideational sources of political power, and prospects for regional community building have come to dominate a large part of scholarly output, marking an evolution from earlier 'problem solving' research that examined the national security of individual states and balance of power considerations. In the policy world, the diplomatic turn toward introspection regarding the future of Southeast Asian regionalism, writ large in the ASEAN Charter project, serves as another inspiration to look back in curiosity at the ideational paths that have led Southeast Asian power elites to contemplate a hint of European Union-style international institutionalism.
The existing IR literature about Southeast Asia has begun to address the question of how and why policy discourses and preoccupations have changed. Two leading journals in the field, The Pacific Review and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, have, since the late 1990s, published between them two special issues and several articles assessing the archaeology of IR research about the region. To date, the self-conscious scrutiny of IR as a discipline has involved academics in the English-speaking 'West' more than those located in Asia. This situation is increasingly at odds with developments in the region. Two decades ago, Stanley Hoffmann diagnosed IR as a particularly American social science (Hoffmann, 1977). Yet, as shown in this collection of essays, the IR discipline in Southeast Asia has seen rapid growth in institutional terms over the last decade: new departments and centres focusing on IR have been opened in a number of Southeast Asian countries, and courses on IR have proliferated. The number of students graduating with major or minor concentrations in IR, as well as in related areas of study, such as strategic and security studies, has grown markedly at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In addition, a growing amount of the scholarship on the IR of Southeast Asia is now being produced by individuals located in Southeast Asia. Despite this development of the discipline in the region, many core questions surrounding the processes of knowledge production in the area of Southeast Asian IR remain unaddressed. Scholars located in the region are now more productive, in terms of their internationally recognized publications, yet how much of this scholarship continues to be produced in the shadow of the West remains an open question. In contrast to the reflective enquiry into the conditions under which 'area studies' knowledge and scholarship on Southeast Asia has been produced (e.g. Sears, 2007), the IR field in Southeast Asia has produced no comparable set of studies.
Given that academic disciplines reproduce dominant ideas through the teaching process - one could even argue that the teaching imperative is hard |
| `In' analytical Note | International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Vol. 9,No,1;Nov2008:p1-18 |
| Journal Source | International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Vol. 9,No,1;Nov2008:p1-18 |
| Key Words | International Relations ; Teaching International Relations - Southeast Asia ; Historical Memory ; Academic Context And Politics |