By Ooi Kee Beng, for Crisis Managment, Penang Institute, 19 May 2020. Read here
By OOI KEE BENG, Penang Monthly Editorial, June 2020 THE NOTION OF “Rights” is as close to the essence of politics as one can come in a word. This is because “Rights”, like “Respect”, are earned, not granted. The loser in a political struggle may maintain the illusion that he is granting rights to the … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for The Edge Malaysia, 1 June 2020. Governance in Malaysia suffered a double whammy when the country went through a parliamentary coup that saw an insecure government take power on 1 March just in time for radical measures against the spread of Covid-19 to be put in place nationwide. In having … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, Penang Monthly Editorial, April 2020 THE PENANG STATE Government has adopted “Next Normal” as the working term to denote the immediate post-Covid-19 era. This is exciting in that it proposes that normalcy in the coming years should be perceived as dynamic – and therefore continuously transitional – rather than static. The … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, in The Edge Malaysia, 26 April 2020 There were forewarnings that something like the COVID-19 Pandemic would hit the world; and yet, it came as a big surprise to most governments. To those that did act early, it was still too little and too late in most cases. The virus was … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, April 2020 Editorial, Penang Monthly. IT IS STRANGELY hard to decide what a sport is; and when we do settle on a definition, it is only acceptable if we do not consider the many forms of human activities – usually from other cultures and times – which we therewith have excluded. … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for The Edge Malaysia, March 30, 2020 Malaysian politics is largely racial. It is racial to such an extent that religion is popularly connected to race. And so, the greatest challenge that the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government faced when it took power in May 2018 was in developing and propagating for … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, in HESB (Higher Education in Southeast Asia and Beyond) March 2020 ISSUE #07: pp.13-15 Globalisation’s Historical Consequence The atypical ambition to make human development sustainable would not have come about in our time, if not for the pervasive sense we all feel that human insatiability has gone too far. Human interference—or … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for TODAYONLINE, Singapore. 9 March 2020 If Malaysia’s new government under Muhyiddin Yassin is a solid one, then one could perhaps begin declaring a new era in the country’s politics. But it is not, and it in fact depends heavily on parties like the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) and the … Continue reading
Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly editorial, March, 2020 ENTREPRENEURSHIP. THIS IS a word more used than understood. But it is a word that is hugely popular today. It connotes some psychological quality that we wish that our young people have more of today, something akin to innovativeness, adaptiveness and creative. And there does not seem … Continue reading
