Understanding Society

We don't get a lot of exposure to social science and policy research from Vietnam, so it was very interesting for me recently to r...

An earlier post described James Scott's recent book on the segment of Southeast Asia that he refers to as Zomia ( The Art of Not Being...

The redshirts in Thailand have moved onto the world stage in the past several months.  Massive protests in Bangkok have stymied the Thai go...

James Scott opens his most recent book with quotations from frustrated pre-modern administrators and missionaries whose territories include...

James Scott is one of the really exceptional social scientists of his generation.  His contributions to peasant studies have been transfor...

What theories and values ought to underlie our best thinking about global economic development?  Along with Amartya Sen ( Development as F...

Burma has been a cauldron of surprising news in the past two years or so. The generals have taken a series of actions in a number of areas: ...

There are many diaspora populations in the world: the African diaspora, with populations in the Caribbean, North and South America, and Euro...

What is involved in running a military dictatorship in a large country like Burma? Simply having a lot of military force is obviously not e...

It is striking how ignorant we are about the most basic facts about Burma. I don't mean simply that the western public is poorly inform...

Map: Kachin State, northern Burma In an earlier post I initiated a geo-twitter experiment to see how much it is possible to learn from twit...