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By OOI KEE BENG, Cover story for Penang Monthly September 2024 A baby should cry at birth. It must be traumatic being born. The compressing comfort of the womb is gone, the noises and lights once gleaned through the mother’s body are now unfiltered. The first journey the former foetus takes is a watery slide, … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG* , pp. 28-33 in Economics & Society Volume 1, 2024: Man & Generations. The Economic Society of Singapore. Singapore: World Scientific. MODERNITY IS MORE often than not defined from a European point of view, milestoned by events selected to highlight the progress of scientific methods, the radical restructuring of society following … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for The Edge Malaysia, 25-31 August 2024 THE MULTIPOLAR WORLD is upon us. And the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has a vital role to play. The need for it to evolve—to finally mature, some would say—to meet new challenges posed by the post-unipolar era is strong, and this is … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Editorial in Penang Monthly, August 2024 WE LIVE IN the Era of Nation-States. At the moment, there are 193 members in the United Nations (UN). Inevitably, we have to compare them to see what we can learn from each of them and to understand their level of comparability. But how? It’s … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG IT IS NOW fashionable in education marketing to add “A’ to “STEM”, as a means to extend and deepen the range of topics a school covers. While teaching Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to the young has been commendable in many ways, albeit mainly in providing talent to corporations, the … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, RSIS Working Papers WP342 18 July 2024 Abstract The last 25 years in Malaysian political history have circled around the personalities of Mahathir Mohamed and Anwar Ibrahim, with several minor (in hindsight) actors playing supportive—or destructive—roles. Although over 20 years apart in age, they have participated in the same protracted play … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, Penang Monthly, Editorial July 2024 The key difference that I observe when visiting a thriving city and a striving one is in the manifest gap in ambition and maintenance between private places and public spaces. In fact, the role of government—be this federal, state or local—is on obvious display when one … Continue reading
OPENING SPEECH by Dato’ Dr Ooi Kee Beng, Executive Director of Penang Institute at the Penang Economic Forum 2024, co-organised by Affin Hwang Investment Bank and Penang Institute. 25 June 2024. OVER THE LAST few months, working with the team from Affin Hwang Investment Bank organising this conference has sparked in us at Penang Institute, … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, “Picking on the Present” column in The Edge Malaysia, 22-29 June 2024. IT HAS CONSTANTLY been said of Malaysia that it is “at a crossroads”. That is more a glib statement about the contingent nature of the country and the compromised nature of its politics than it is an insight about … Continue reading
OOI KEE BENG, Penang Monthly, June 2024 THE THEME FOR June 2024 is non-government oganisations—NGOs. This allows for the publisher of this monthly, i.e. Penang Institute itself, to do some soul-searching and to locate itself within the NGO world in Penang, and even Malaysia, in terms of its functions and aspirations. Penang Institute is known … Continue reading
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