Editors’ Note

This issue of SOJOURN begins with a pair of pioneering articles on Cambodia. First is Astrid Norén-Nilsson’s deeply informed study of the fate of royalism in the country’s politics since 1993. This remarkable article exposes efforts, undertaken beneath the venal and dispiriting surface of recent Cambodian politics, to develop ideological programmes and to foster political legitimacy. Its sophistication and perspective will leave readers eager for the release of Norén-Nilsson’s forthcoming book, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy, whose release is sure to be a major event in Cambodia studies. Sophistication and perspective also characterize Courtney Work’s and Alice Beban’s equally remarkable article on rural Cambodians’ mimicry-in-advance of the desired results of the land titling project launched by Prime Minister Hun Sen in 2012. Their article combines outstanding empirical work and innovative theorizing to set a standard to which we hope future contributors to SOJOURN will aspire.

In a third article on Cambodia, Frédéric Bourdier uses the case of the country’s malaria eradication programme to argue provocatively that partnerships with external actors undermine its national healthcare delivery system. This article represents a refreshing reminder of the benefits of national sovereignty for even the least-advantaged members of Southeast Asian societies.

The study of Southeast Asian art also features here. We are exceedingly proud to publish Melissa Carlson’s article on Myanmar artists’ negotiation of the regime of censorship that obtained in their country during the decades of military rule between 1988 and 2011. Carlson — a participant in the landmark Getty Foundation–University of Sydney initiative, “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art” — draws in her article on interviews with a roster of contemporary Myanmar’s most important painters … and also with a censorship official. In a second engaging article on art, Catherine Arthur explains the use of street art on the part of members of the generation of East Timorese who came of age after 1975 to assert their place in the new nation. SOJOURN is committed to publishing still more scholarship on art in Southeast Asia in the future.

The final two research articles in this issue of SOJOURN examine religions in wartime Vietnam. Each underlines the great leaps by which the study of twentieth-century Vietnamese history has developed in recent decades. In the first article, Phi Vân Nguyen analyses the press organs created by Northern Catholic refugees in the southern Republic of Vietnam directly after 1954. She thus reveals the vision of anti-communism and of their own place in the history of the second half of the twentieth century developed by some among those refugees. She also brings to life long-ignored actors and thinkers of a kind to which historians of the region have a deep obligation to devote far more attention. Next, Jérémy Jammes traces the careers of three prominent Cao Đài figures in southern Vietnam at war in order to illuminate both the diversity and complexity of their choices and their common commitment to the role of Caodaism in the country. His article ought to serve as an example for future scholarship on wartime southern Vietnam.

Andrew Willford’s Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations is the subject of the latest SOJOURN Symposium. The book treats ethnicity and the now disappearing plantation economy in Malaysia with great originality. In particular, it examines notions of justice as imagined by aggrieved members of a minority resentful that lands developed and populated by their ancestors are now claimed by Malays as their own. Willford argues that notions like these complicate legal demarcations of ethnic difference in post-colonial states. He also examines the variety of strategies that Malaysian Tamils employ to gain access to justice beyond the law. In the spirit of generating scholarly debate and advancing ideas among members of the scholarly community and our readers, Willford contributes a well-argued rejoinder to reviews of his book by Carl Vadivella Belle, Charles Hirschman and Edmund Terence Gomez. This exchange addresses, not least, the role...