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The paper provides tentative empirical evidence against Robert D. Putnam's claim that ethnic diversity is a threat to collective civic action, and finds support for Robert J. Sampson's proposition that established organisations foster collective civic action. The aim of this paper is twofold: to describe: (i) the ways in which volunteers and professionals make sense of and understand the multicultural neighbourhood; and (ii) how that impacts on collective civic action in the neighbourhood. The paper takes a small scale mixed-methods approach (9 semi structured interviews and a small scale quantitative survey (N=39)), comparing two neighbourhoods with similar characteristics in terms of ethnic diversity and socio-economic problems. The findings show that problems associated with ethnicity are not the most pressing ones for recent migrants. Instead they struggle with work, housing, a lack of supportive networks, unfamiliarity with the educational system, and language problems. The paper concludes that the multicultural discursive framework is a salutary one for those working and living in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods.

Until May 2018, Malaysia was home to the longest-serving elected government in the world, run by the Barisan Nasional (BN, National Front). The BN had been in continuous power since Malaysia’s inde...

In my first year introductory class on globalisation, one assessment is a ‘Local Gone Global’ presentation. In this presentation, students take an object or a development that is local to them (in ...

Lee recalls his first-hand and formative experiences with a campaign during the 2008 General Elections in Malaysia in which women’s activists sought to promote more women into Malaysia’s Parliament, where they are under-represented. This chapter focuses on the grounded circumstances that led to the campaign that year of the Women’s Candidacy Initiative (WCI) and how they came to be formulated as a theatrical and entertaining voter education campaign despite initial plans to put forward an actual independent female electoral candidate. This campaign, which gained global and local media attention, explores a number of aspects about the public sphere in Malaysia as it relates women. This chapter also argues against ‘success’ as a criterion of importance in judging civil society ventures.

In this book, the author draws on over a decade of first-hand experience as an academic-activist and on interviews with women in Malaysia's women's rights movement. Despite a considerable array of challenges to their participation in the public and political spheres, the movement is especially vibrant. Presenting insights from feminist activists in Malaysia, the book explores the Women's Candidacy Initiative's efforts to promote independent women in Parliament; the work of women's coalition the Joint Action Group for Gender Equality; how activists understand and experience the concept of feminism; and finally the place of men in feminism. Women's Activism in Malaysia will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, politics and sociology.

This article engages with Engin Isin's theoretical contributions on citizenship by applying his concepts of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘activist citizenship’ to Global Bersih, a movement for electoral reform in Malaysia that has crossed national boundaries. Global Bersih, and a further case study of the Melbourne-based Malaysian community magazine Jom, demonstrate some of ways through which Malaysians have sought to exercise influence on Malaysia despite being overseas. Through a description of the activities of Global Bersih and Jom, and of key persons behind each endeavour, I demonstrate that Isin's concepts are useful in understanding transnational citizenship activities and their potential for empowerment, while also reflecting on the need for a distinction between ‘scripts’ and ‘habitus’ when considering the criterion of novelty that Isin places on an act to be an ‘act of citizenship’.

The title of Susan Greenfield's new book, Mind Change, intends to suggest that the presence of digital technologies is having social and psychological impacts that are similar in scale to climate c...

On the eve of the campaign period of Malaysia's general elections in 2008, the plans of the Women's Candidacy Initiative (WCI) to increase the number of independent women in Parliament were thrown into disarray when their candidate was forced to withdraw at short notice. Rather than abandon their participation in those elections, WCI went through a creative moment during which they developed an innovative voter-education campaign revolving around the fictional character of Mak Bedah (Aunty Bedah). This campaign sought to draw attention to the issues that WCI felt were important, such as women's poor representation in Parliament. Through a novel and playful campaign, WCI made public a number of candidates' views on issues important to WCI, and succeeded in attracting significant media attention. The creativity exhibited in the development and deployment of this campaign is analysed in this article in the light of literature pertaining to the public sphere. I argue that when considering such interventions i...

This paper examines the concepts of multiculturalism and social capital, their relationship with each other and how these concepts are utilised by different interested parties in Australia. In the context of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, some commentators and scholars have argued that multiculturalism can have a negative impact on the fostering of social capital. These arguments are described before examining the same debate in Australia. However, the emphasis of this article is its description of how ethnic minorities and migrants on the one hand, and community organisations that assist these groups on the other, make use of the notions of multiculturalism and social capital to either legitimise their place in Australia or to effectively advocate for the social and economic utility of investing in programs that address problems faced by these groups. With data gathered through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne and Sydney, the authors demonstrate how the debates tha...

The general elections in Malaysia in 2008 saw the ruling coalition, which has ruled Malaysia uninterrupted since independence in 1957, lose control of a number of states and become significantly weakened at the federal level. Amongst the reasons often cited for this was significant and diverse civil society participation in these elections which was often critical of the incumbent government. This article examines four different engagements in the 2008 elections by civil society actors. Through this examination, it is demonstrated that distinctions between types of collective action, from social movements to political parties, are especially likely to be blurred in the context of repressive states such as Malaysia. This examination in turn sees Charles Tilly's concept of repertoires of contention defended against both Nick Crossley's criticisms of it and his preference of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus.

This article demonstrates that, contrary to the common image of Islam in Malaysia as being predominantly liberal, a conservative and authoritarian Islam frequently prevails. State‐sanctioned interventions into the minutiae of people’s daily and moral lives often take place. Drawing particularly on Cornelius Castoriadis’s idea of autonomy and Roy Rappaport’s notion of oversanctification, the author argues that such interventions may have a number of negative effects, including putting at risk the wider basis on which State and religious authority rests.

At the AWID International Forum, the Coalition of Sexual and Bodily Rights organized a panel on research undertaken on social change in Muslim Societies. Julian Lee describes how groups in Lebanon, Malaysia and Indonesia are acting to advance the rights of women and sexual minorities in view of the shifting context of the political landscape in Muslim countries. Development (2009) 52, 239–245. doi:10.1057/dev.2009.20

On 27 October 2007, five Malaysian civil society organizations collaborated to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Operasi Lalang. This police operation was sanctioned by the government in 1987 and saw 107 Malaysians, mainly opposition party members and activists, detained without trial for as long as two years. Operasi Lalang is regarded by many critics of the Malaysian government as the most egregious deployment of the repressive Internal Security Act, under which these detentions were made. This article examines the social and political impacts of the Internal Security Act and Operasi Lalang before describing the commemoration which was styled as a court hearing with the Internal Security Act as the accused. Evident at the commemoration was a comprehensive loss of faith in the infrastructures of the state that are supposed to carry out justice and protect the citizenry from abuses of power. Thus the commemoration-cum-trial declared guilt and took justice, rather than seeking it through infrastructures of the Malaysian state.

(2013). Book Review: Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow. South East Asia Research: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 179-181.

In September 2011, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak, announced that the Internal Security Act (ISA) was to be repealed in order to make Malaysia ‘the best democracy in the world’ (Bernama, 2011; cf. LFL, 2012). The ISA allowed for renewable two-year periods of detention without trial and was perhaps the most draconian piece of legislation in Malaysia (Fritz and Flaherty, 2003). The ISA, along with a draft of other pieces of legislation including but not limited to the Official Secrets Act, the Police Act and the University and University Colleges Act, contributed to Malaysia being described by academic observers since the late 1980s and 1990s as being a pseudo- or semi-democracy (for example, Zakaria, 1989; Crouch, 1993; Case, 2001; in October 2013, detention without trial was reapproved under Najib; Associated Press, 2013). More recent studies have continued to describe Malaysia as authoritarian despite having some of the trappings of democracy, with descriptors including ‘Electoral Authoritarianism’ (Abbott, 2011) and an ‘Electoral One-Party State’ (Wong and Norani, 2009).

Prior to the start of The Ashes in 2006 in which England and Australia played five five-day long games of cricket, Cricket Australia, the country's governing body for the sport, announced that it would be cracking down on racism. The words 'Pom' and 'Pommie', however, were deemed by Cricket Australia to be inoffensive. Unacceptable, nevertheless, was racial abuse directed at Monty Panesar, a Sikh member of the English cricket team. The author analyzes why abuse hurled at white English players is acceptable and abuse hurled at non-white players unacceptable. He does this by using the work of Ghassan Hage and an episode of the cartoon South Park and briefly examines the implications for multiculturalism as a policy.

This paper seeks to discuss debates in Malaysia relating to the intersection of gender, justice and rights. In Malaysia, social and political issues are frequently framed as contestations over the religious or secular nature of the Malaysian State. Whereas Lee has described in detail the nature of some of these discussions elsewhere (Lee, 2010a), we intend here to focus on those contests that pertain especially to gender. Our discussion describes the way in which some issues, which have played out in the public sphere, reveal the nature of public narratives relating to gender that both everyday Malaysians as well as activists must negotiate.

Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore By SUDHIR THOMAS VADAKETH Singapore: NUS Press and Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Pp. 282. Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000398 In the first sentence of Floating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore, the author informs us that 'This is a story about Malaysia and Singapore--or Malaya, if you will'. Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, who works as a senior editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit in Singapore, tells us that he uses '"Malaya" because I grew up thinking of the two countries as one'. While it is no doubt true that although the separation of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965 has had social and political consequences, including the development of distinct national identities, it is also the case that so much shared history and culture cannot be put asunder by what is a very porous border, across which thousands of people cross every hour. While much is often made of those identities that are supposed to separate people, there are other stories to be told in which barriers are irrelevant and commonalities great. It is because of this that the project Floating on a Malayan Breeze sets for itself is of great value. As suggested by the cover and the blurb, the book's story revolves around a month-long cycling trip around Singapore and Malaysia (and some of southern Thailand as well) which the author undertook in 2004 with a close friend of his. This trip in turn evolved out of discussions with American classmates with whom Vadaketh was doing postgraduate study in 2003 in the United States. In response to accusations that the United States was inadequately informed about the countries about which it was making foreign policy, the author and his friend were challenged about their own knowledge of Singapore's neighbours. Vadaketh's response was the realisation that he did not in fact know as much as he felt he ought, and a desire to go beyond stereotypes and to experience Singapore and Malaysia from 'the ground'. While the reader might then expect the book to be a linear description of events, conversations and misadventures of this trip, such vignettes do not actually constitute the majority of the text. Rather, a selection of conversations and insights are presented within chapters that seek to address wider socio-political developments in Singapore and Malaysia, such as the recent faltering of the Barisan Nasional's and the People's Action Party's political dominance in recent years. These discussions are also informed by the experiences and interviews the author conducted in the subsequent years, including for example his excursion to Kelantan in the days before Malaysia's 2008 general elections. …

Narrative is, as Nigel Rapport (2003, 29) puts it, ‘the placing of data, of details of perception and cognition, in a particular order such that connexions are seen between them’. Socio‐cultural an...