This book is a detailed case study of post-colonial transition in Asia in the context of the emerging Cold War; it charts British and American approaches to Burma between the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962.

This book charts British and American approaches to Burma between the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962. It analyses the fundamental drivers of Anglo-American policy-making during this crucial period – assumptions, expectations and apprehensions that would, eventually, lead America into the disaster of Vietnam. The book suggests the key to understanding British and American approaches to Southeast Asia is to see them in terms of a search for order and stability in an increasingly chaotic and dangerous world. Such order had previously been provided by the colonial regimes of the European powers. With those regimes gone or going, British and American planners faced a region beset with new uncertainties, led by a set of nationalist politicians driven by very different, and often competing, goals and aspirations. A detailed case study of post-colonial transition in Asia in the context of the emerging Cold War, this book focuses on the retraction of European colonial power in Southeast Asia, the concomitant expansion of US engagement in the region and the broad processes underpinning these changes. It draws on unique, previously unpublished British and American archival material relating to the Burmese case and fills an important gap in historical understanding of Western engagement in Southeast Asia.

This book examines the role of China in driving and sustaining India’s post-Cold War engagement with Southeast Asia. In doing so, it provides a unique insight into the regional dimensions of the Sino-Indian relationship. India launched its Look East Policy in the early 1990s as part of a concerted effort to revive the importance of Southeast Asia in the country’s foreign policy agenda. This study assesses the role of the China factor – defined here as China’s regional role, which has been interpreted through the prism of the Sino-Indian relationship – in the inception and evolution of the policy. More specifically, it establishes the extent to which China has been raised as a priority in discourses of India’s Look East Policy and how this has varied over time from the origins of the policy through to the most recent phase of the renamed Act East Policy. Addressing the distinction between what policymakers signal in their official statements and their true or underlying motivations, the book alludes to the fact that government officials may not always reflect true intentions in their official statements, and it is often what is not said that may reveal more about their real motivations. This is particularly relevant in the context of the Sino-Indian relationship where diplomatic rhetoric often masks more competitive and confrontational aspects of the bilateral relationship. An important analysis of the interplay between India’s relations with Southeast Asia and China, this book will be of interest to academics, policymakers and students in the fields of International Relations, Asian Security, Southeast Asian politics, and in particular, Indian foreign policy, the Sino-Indian relationship, and India’s Look East/Act East Policy.

The origins and the key defining moments of the Cold War in Southeast Asia have been widely debated. This book focuses on an area that has received less attention, the impact and legacy of the Cold War on the various countries in the region, as well as on the region itself. The book contributes to the historiography of the Cold War in Southeast Asia by examining not only how the conflict shaped the milieu in which national and regional change unfolded but also how the context influenced the course and tenor of the Cold War in the region. It goes on to look at the usefulness or limitations of using the Cold War as an interpretative framework for understanding change in Southeast Asia. Chapters discuss how the Cold War had a varied but notable impact on the countries in Southeast Asia, not only on the mainland countries belonging to what the British Foreign Office called the "upper arc", but also on those situated on its maritime "lower arc". The book is an important contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and International Relations.

The historiography of the Cold War has long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, with Southeast Asian perspectives largely confined to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. Southeast Asia’s Cold War corrects this situation by examining the international politics of the region from within rather than without. It provides an up-to-date, coherent narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry. When viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines join Vietnam and Indonesia as key regional players with their own agendas, as evidenced by the formation of SEATO and the Bandung conference. The threat of global Communism orchestrated from Moscow, which had such a powerful hold in the West, passed largely unnoticed in Southeast Asia, where ideology took a back seat to regime preservation. China and its evolving attitude toward the region proved far more compelling: the emergence of the communist government there in 1949 helped further the development of communist networks in the Southeast Asian region. Except in Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s role was peripheral: managing relationships with the United States and China was what preoccupied Southeast Asia’s leaders. The impact of the Sino-Soviet split is visible in the decade-long Cambodian conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. This succinct volume not only demonstrates the complexity of the region, but for the first time provides a narrative that places decolonization and nation-building alongside the usual geopolitical conflicts. It focuses on local actors and marshals a wide range of literature in support of its argument. Most importantly, it tells us how and why the Cold War in Southeast Asia evolved the way it did and offers a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asia we know today.

This book is an examination of American army legal proceedings that resulted from a series of moments when soldiers in a war zone crossed a line between performing their legitimate functions and committing crimes against civilians, or atrocities. Using individual judicial proceedings held within war-time Southeast Asia, Louise Barnett analyses how the American military legal system handled crimes against civilians and determines what these cases reveal about the way that war produces atrocity against civilians. Presenting these atrocities and subsequent trials in a way that considers both the personal and the institutional the author considers how and why atrocity happens, the terrain of justification, and the degree to which the army and American society have been willing to take military crimes against civilians seriously. Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia will be of interest to students, scholars and professionals interested in Military Justice, Military history and Southeast Asian History more generally.

Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, barely features in most histories of the Second World War. However, the combination of distinctive war experiences, a vibrant set of local historian groups, and powerful media organizations disseminating local war history, has generated an identifiable set of local collective memories. Hokkaidoʼs status as an early colonial acquisition also makes the island an important vantage point from which to reassess the course and nature of the Japanese Empire. This book argues that Hokkaido’s experiences of war and its militarized post-war constitutes a local case study with a much greater national and international significance on both theoretical and empirical grounds than first impressions might suggest. Using Japanese-language sources presented for the first time in English and a number of detailed local history case studies, it offers a fascinating and hitherto little-known perspective on the Second World War. It also combines a comprehensive theory of how war memories operate at the local level within a broad historical context that explains Hokkaidoʼs pivotal role within Japanese imperial history. Demonstrating that understanding local history and memories is essential for a nuanced understanding of national history and memories, the book will be highly valuable to students and scholars of Japanese history, Second World War history, and Asian history.