Senior Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Asian Studies Koh Sin Yee recently published a journal article entitled Post-2020 Mainland Chinese Student Mobility to Malaysia: Trends and Drivers in Asian Population Studies. The article is co-authored with Professor Brenda Yeoh (National University of Singapore). The article provides a brief report on the recent trend characterised by a substantial increase in application and enrolment numbers from Chinese students to Malaysia for tertiary education. It argues that this trend must be viewed through the lens of historical and contemporary interactions between Malaysia and China, alongside Malaysia’s evolving higher education landscape and internationalisation efforts.

Assistant Professor of the Institute of Asian Studies Dr Nobumichi Teramura recently published an open access book chapter on JICA’s Legal Technical Assistance Projects in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Since the 1990s in Liam C Kelly and Gerard Sasges (eds), Vietnam Over the Long Twentieth Century (Springer 2024). Dr Teramura also co-authored an open-access journal article entitled Lawyers and Non-Lawyers in International Arbitration: Discovering Diminishing Diversity in Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review. The abstracts of the two publications can be found below:  - Nobumichi Teramura, ‘JICA’s Legal Technical Assistance Projects in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos since…

Senior Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Asian Studies Koh Sin Yee recently published an open access journal article on The Trends and Patterns of Informal Housing Practices in Australia in Urban Policy and Research. The article is co-authored with researchers from Monash University, Australia: Fuad Yasin Huda, Liton Kamruzzaman, Sanaz Nikfalazar, Dharmalingam Arunachalam, and Dickson Lukose.   The article reports on a study documenting informal housing practices in Australian cities using 2021–2022 data gathered through web scraping. The findings reveal a significant weekly gap between demand and supply, seasonal demand spikes, and spatial mismatches. These insights highlight the need for targeted population-, place-, and time-based…

Assistant Professor Angela Tritto together with Dr. Punto Wijayanto from Trisakti University in Jakarta have recently published a chapter titled “The Maritime Silk Road: Tourism, Heritage, Symbols and the People-to-People Dimension of China’s Heritage Diplomacy in Indonesia” in the book Heritage Conservation and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Routledge).The chapter examines the nexus of economic, cultural, and diplomatic activities that constitute China’s heritage diplomacy in Indonesia and is set in the context of the rising importance of Chinese tourists and investments in Indonesia’s tourism, which became a prominent part of the diplomatic talks in BRI forums to direct Chinese investments…

Senior Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Asian Studies Koh Sin Yee has recently published a co-authored editorial on “Way-finding agendas through Transactions” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.The piece is the first in a series of occasional editorials where readers are guided through groups of papers recently published in the journal that the editorial board considers as being ‘way-finding’ contributions to geographical debates. In spotlighting these groups of curated papers, the editorial invites readers to use the papers to navigate and engage with ongoing conversations and discussions in the field.

Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam has recently published a chapter entitled “Tianxia as Anticosmopolitan and Protoracial: A Case Study of Late Imperial Vietnam” in a book entitled Tianxia in Comparative Perspectives: Alternative Models for a Possible Planetary Order that was edited by Roger T. Ames, Sor-hoon Tan, and Steven Y. H. Yang (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023).“Tianxia/Thiên Hạ” is a very old concept in East Asia. It literally means “All Under Heaven,” and it is a term that was used to refer to such concepts as “the empire” or…

Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) has recently co-edited a special section of four articles for the journal Suvannabhumi: Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies on “Globalization, Vietnam and ASEAN.”The four articles were first presented at the 12th Engaging With Vietnam conference, an annual conference series that Dr. Kelley co-organizes with the conference founder, Senior Professor Phan Le Ha of the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education (SHBIE) at UBD, and jointly a research associate at IAS.The 12th Engaging With Vietnam conference was held virtually in 2021, in…

Senior Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Asian Studies Koh Sin Yee has recently published an article on “Crisis Infrastructuring” in Applied Mobilities.The article uses the case of the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme to examine how various stakeholder groups respond to, defend, challenge and contest the programme’s impending infrastructural breakdown and transformation.The article advances the concept of “crisis infrastructuring” to capture the repair work and the exploration of alternatives undertaken by constitutive actors when an established migration infrastructure is perceived to be under threat.

Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (IAS @ UBD) has recently published an article on “Sinology in Vietnam” in the Journal of Chinese History.Sinology is the study of “China,” and although the Vietnamese educated elite read and wrote classical Chinese for centuries, this paper argues that it is only in the twentieth century that a body of knowledge emerged in Vietnam that we can refer to as “Sinology,” as it was only at that time that nationalist concepts took hold and the educated elite came to see the world in terms…