Area Studies After the Cold War: The Impossibility of Southeast Asian Studies.

Despite decades of trying to discipline Southeast Asia into a coherent field of academic endeavour the future of Southeast Asian studies looks set to change. Individual countries have been admitted and expelled from academic literature on Southeast Asia as the region’s boundaries are redrawn to accommodate changes in the academy and in the region. The geographical imaginaries that were shaped by the rise of area studies during the Cold War are giving way to new spatial configurations that are influenced by the war on terror and its inevitable association with Islam, and the rise of China as an economic power. Southeast Asian studies was integral to the proxy wars and massacres that characterized the Cold War period and it remains to be seen whether its reconfiguration will see it drawn into service in the war against terror. This paper explores the power/knowledge nexus in the maintenance of Southeast Asia and the likely eclipse of Cold War Southeast Asian studies against the backdrop of wider changes in area studies and the passing of the Three Worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]