Ethnicity,Relig,Cnflct:SEAsia

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Southeast Asia, a region comprised of 11 independent countries of Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam, is home to some of the greatest ethnic, linguistic, religious, and biocultural diversity in the world. This diversity has shaped the region’s social, cultural, and political formation as well as its dynamics and experience of conflict and violence. Diversity is indeed a regional challenge as political cleavage often occurs along the lines of ethnicity and religion. In some extreme cases, ethnoreligious identities have become a pretext for atrocities and even genocide. This course will introduce students to key issues and approaches to the study of ethnicity, religion, and conflict in the region. It offers a broad and comparative survey of cases that show various ways in which different actors in the region—both state and non-state actors—contend with this diversity. This course will also consider how ethnicity and religion are implicated in the broader issues of democracy, state formation, migration, and economic development. Drawing on readings from anthropology, sociology, political science, history, and media studies, this course will also allow students to explore the questions of how ethnicity and religion are made and unmade, how they are used to establish social groupings and hierarchy, and lastly, how religion and ethnicity have been mobilized for various political projects.