Reading Indigenous Southeast Asian International Relations: Prowess and Prestige in "Sejarah Melayu".

Contemporary research on the International Relations of Southeast Asia has neglected the latent possibilities of ‘writing’ indigenous forms of international relations. Drawing upon one pre-colonial account of Southeast Asian political practices in the Malay Archipelago, the Sejarah Melayu, this article proposes that Southeast Asia has actually philosophised about “inter-societal relations” that privilege noble prowess, knowledge accumulation, and hierarchical justice through interdependence of trade and religion within the region, and with India, China and the Arab world. As a consequence, this pattern of non-western precedents poses intellectual challenges to the baggage of modern thinking about border security in Southeast Asia. [PLEASE EMAIL ME DIRECTLY AT polccs@nus.edu.sg IF YOU WOULD LIKE A COPY OF THE FULL PAPER.] ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]