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This category contains 444 posts

On vibrant port cities and anomalous nation states

Penang Profile One hot afternoon in July, Ooi Kee Beng sat down at a Muslim cafe on Kandahar Street in Singapore for a cold Arabic coffee and a chat with one of Penang’s many big names in the academic world. Professor Ho Eng Seng, a Penang Free School alumnus, shared with him some of the … Continue reading →

How Will Nationalism Evolve?

Editorial, September 2011 By OOI KEE BENG THE BIGGEST trick that the nation-state concept has pulled on modern man is the proposal that there is an essential line between the external and the internal. Sovereignty over precisely demarcated physical territory is the underlying notion. It is here the nation-state is most easily understood. And so, … Continue reading →

The man who industrialised Penang

By Ooi Kee Beng for Penang Monthly, July 8, 2010. A politician may point the way, but without competent and dedicated civil servants to do the work, not much gets done. This gets truer the more adventurous the politician’s goals are. So, when Dr Lim Chong Eu envisaged Penang as the production base for international … Continue reading →

Current Nordic Research on the Malay World: A Bibliographical Sketch

By Ooi Kee Beng, in SARI 21 (2003), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. pp.57-75 [http://www.ukm.my/~penerbit/sari21-05.pdf] Abstract: As interest in Southeast Asia increases in tandem with the region’s economic development, and lately as a result of global tensions, Islam as cultural and political factor is now of such importance that the academic division of Southeast Asia into a … Continue reading →