Welcome to my personal website.
I am using this website to disseminate my academic work and to build a network with different scholars and practitioners who are interested in my work and expertise. Apart from academic activities, I also share my professional consultancy and community activities.
If you wish to acquire additional information as to how we can engage and or keep in touch, please send me a message.
I have a new book with Palgrave Macmillan entitled "Strategies of authoritarian survival in Southeast Asia: Weak men versus Strongmen". It compares the political-economic institutions of how rulers cling to power in Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia for several decades. Within this context, it discusses how and why movements of civil society organisations fail or succeed in achieving their objectives. The book can be purchased or download here (if you have institutional access)
Here is what senior scholars say about this book:
“This book is a valuable contribution to the literature on authoritarian persistence and its relation to popular opposition and protest. With its unique comparative analysis of regimes across Southeast Asia, this book uncovers important empirical information about political leadership and state-society relations in countries that have received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature, while simultaneously providing new theoretical insights of interest to scholars, practitioners, and the general public alike.”
Teresa Wright, Chair and Professor, California State University Long Beach, USA
“This book offers excellent insights into complex political developments and regime durability in Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Not only does the book make a contribution to the academic fields of comparative politics, political economy, and social movements, it is also well-written and accessible to anyone interested in Southeast Asian politics.”
Sorpong Peou, Professor, Ryerson University, Canada
“In this fascinating and timely intervention, Sokphea Young takes stock of the region's political landscape in a sobering account of the difficult path ahead. Insightful, engaging, and an urgent appeal for political change at a moment when Southeast Asia is quickly rising in global strategic and economic importance.”
Simon Springer, Professor, University of Newcastle, Australia
“Why do some civil society organizations fail and others succeed in authoritarian settings? In a comparison of two episodes of contention over land in Cambodia, one in which subaltern groups succeeded in achieving their objectives and another in which they failed, Young convincingly demonstrates that it is not the specific tactics adopted by each of these groups that explains the different outcomes but the embeddedness of the economic actors appropriating the land in the patronage network that sustains the Hun Sen regime. Young persuasively shows the portability of this theory in chapters on Malaysia and Suharto’s Indonesia. By connecting the literatures on contentious politics and regime durability, Young sheds new light on why authoritarian regimes respond differently to the demands of similar civil society organizations.”
Teri Caraway, Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, USA
