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By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge Malaysia, 30 March-5 April 2024. SMACK IN THE middle of this electoral term, Malaysia is going to begin holding the year-long chairmanship for ASEAN. When 2025 comes around, the Unity Government under Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim will have the opportunity to act on themes that best express what … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG. This article first appeared under the column “Picking on the Present” in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 26, 2024 – March 3, 2024 IT IS TRUE that no political party in Malaysia has ever commanded a large enough majority to govern without the help of a coalition. Barisan Nasional … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG JUST RETURNED FROM Singapore after an effective two-week stay there, I am prone not only to wax lyrical about the public transport system the city-state has developed, but also to ponder deeply over the central importance that spatial management has in urban life. Urban life by definition is a crowded one, … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for The Edge Weekly Malaysia. 24-31 December 2023 WE LIVE IN a time of layered crises, each portentous of the Future being worse than the Present. That’s bad enough if you are old. What if you are young? How would that affect your psyche, your life decisions, your morals? Why should … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, 27 November 2023 WHAT IS IT exactly that Malaysians have been fighting about since the country gained independence as the Federation of Malaya on Aug 31, 1957? The segmented nature of the population cannot be denied. We see that undeniably in how no political party has ever … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge Malaysia, 28 October 2023 (Republished in Penang Monthly here). MY YEARS AS a political analyst and historian have taught me to look up every now and then from the quagmire of details and distractions cluttering my head today. I was thinking of the importance of Sociology in enhancing … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG The steady fall of the UMNO-led Barisan Nasional (BN) from power, stretching from 2008 to 2018,and its ability to remain in government thereafter in one role or another tells an incredible tale thatcould not have been predicted and that still leaves most pundits confounded. Some of the implications of UMNO’s recent … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 21, 2023 – August 27, 2023 Seldom had state elections seemed so important to the future of the country as the six that took place on Aug 12, 2023, nine months after federal elections put Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG OVER THE YEARS, as one studies Malaysian history in all its aspects, an uncomfortable feeling grows strong that the ethnic diversity of its post-colonial population, by falling into the nation-state trap of racial ranking, has turned attention away from the geopolitical and geo-economic conditions in which the country develops under. Nothing … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on June 26, 2023 – July 2, 2023: “Picking on the Present” column. THERE ARE MANY ways one can attempt to fathom what it is that ails Malaysian democracy. Is it democracy itself that, when applied in a country newly emerged from colonial control, has allowed … Continue reading
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