Egyptian left internationalist Samir Amin long called for a “Fifth International” to provide an internationalist coordinating mechanism for organizing against capitalism and imperialism, racism and sexism, toward the collective welfare of the world’s peoples and the planet. This panel acts on Amin’s call by assembling scholars, activists, and organizers – many of whom practice more than one of these roles in tandem – to advance the possibility and actuality of internationalism in today’s global Southeast Asias. In the current conjuncture, we can see what Promise Li calls antagonistic cooperation between Biden’s America, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, the North Atlantic bloc, and other subimperial powers. Against this backdrop, Southeast Asia and its diasporas have become an active site of internationalist realignment. Prominent configurations include the Milk Tea Alliance, Migrante International, inter-Southeast Asian solidarity for platform workers, struggles against refugee deportations, and more generally, a reimagination of the Bandung spirit from below. These actually existing internationalist configurations, with political imaginaries that tend to be left-adjacent more than explicitly leftist, affirm the promise of combining uneven Southeast Asian leftist praxes across national borders - articulating struggles from industrial labor to agrarian dispossession, from gender oppression to environmental degradation. The historical and material legacy of the European metropole also beckons. The imperial metropole long nourished anti-imperial struggle among Southeast Asian exiles and dissidents, and today, trans-European networks of Southeast Asian exiles continue to strengthen ongoing struggles in Southeast Asia. Taking seriously Amin’s insistence on the need for a Fifth International, this panel aims not only to clarify, but also advance, the promise of internationalist Southeast Asias from historical and contemporary perspectives.
We are particularly interested in presentations that address:
- Actually existing internationalist praxis in global Southeast Asias
- Suppressed or erased histories of left internationalism in bourgeois nationalist frames
- The co-constitution of class, race, gender, and ecology in internationalist praxis
- Third world, Tricontinental, or Long Sixties legacies
- Left internationalist critiques of Bandung’s statism and anticommunist liberalism
We specifically encourage scholars, activists, and organizers working at Southeast Asian and non-Western institutions to join our double panel. We intend to build up a diverse cohort of Southeast Asian internationalists that form a nucleus for our collaborative work in the future.
If interested, please send your abstract (250 words maximum) and short CV with information related to the call to Thiti Jamkajornkeiat (tjamkajornkeiat@uvic.ca) and Geoffrey Aung (geoffrey.aung@univie.ac.at) by March 30, 2024. Please include your name, affiliation, contact information, and country of residence when you email us. We will notify you about the decisions before April 10, 2024.
Contact Information
Thiti Jamkajornkeiat (University of Victoria, Pacific and Asian Studies)
Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung (University of Vienna, Social and Cultural Anthropology)