49th Southeast Asia Seminar

Global Disruptions and Southeast Asia:
Exploring histories, narratives, and transdisciplinary challenges

Phnom Penh/Sihanoukville, Cambodia
November 19-24, 2025

CONCEPT

Humanity faces a web of interlocking crises—climate change and disaster risk, surging energy use and environmental collapse, global migration and demographic shifts, and mounting tensions between the drive for capitalist growth and the need for social welfare. These challenges demand urgent, systemic action. Parallel to this, we face the destruction of our ecosystems, the marketization of food production, unprecedented urbanization, extreme weather events, pandemics, community breakdown and widening inequality, forces that now profoundly shape our contemporary lives. In response, actors across international bodies, national governments, academia and civil society are collaborating to develop new frameworks and policies that respond to these polycrises. Yet, such efforts are too often centered upon Western academia, the international community and nation-state interests creating a stark division between those whose actions drive crises and those who bear their consequences. It is precisely this gap -a collision of causes and effects- that we characterize as “Global Disruptions.”

Southeast Asia has long been shaped through dynamic negotiations with external forces. Owing to its geographical position between India and China, the region has interacted and absorbed advanced civilizations and through the fusion of animist traditions and nature worship, forged a distinct cultural sphere. Cultural contact during the colonial period was another critical external influence that shaped Southeast Asian’s self-understandings of their societies. The postcolonial era witnessed the region navigate the ideological divides of the Cold War and projected its own values -centered on multicultural coexistence and harmony with nature- as forms of resilience unique to Southeast Asia. However, in today’s age of Global Disruptions, we cannot uncritically treat this cultural and social distinctiveness as a given or rely on it as a framework to anticipate the future. New challenges demand new imaginaries and approaches.

This seminar aims to reconceptualize both knowledge production and social engagement, to ensure concrete contributions in the era defined by polycrises by integrating two academic approaches: Area Studies (AS) and Transdisciplinary Studies (TD). Area Studies grounds our understanding in specific regions, nations or communities -shaped by their environments, histories, culture and society. Not only does it aim to understand local uniqueness, but also fully address multi-scale connections to global dynamics. Since 1965, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) of Kyoto University pioneered Area Studies with the special emphasis on interdisciplinarity in its research activities forging bridges between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (e.g., agricultural and medical research, informatics). Moreover, its former flagship G-COE project “In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa (FY2007-2011)” was one of the first programs at CSEAS to extended multi-disciplinary collaborations into energy and disaster-related fields. Transdisciplinary Studies, meanwhile, mobilizes diverse academic disciplines and transcends siloed fields by engaging international organizations, central and local governments, civil society, and the private sector in collaborative problem-solving. Building on this, the Japan-ASEAN Platform for Transdisciplinary Studies (FY2016-2021), one of recent flagship projects of CSEAS, presented us with core problem-driven research alongside international organizations, local governments, and civic groups, demonstrating the real-world impact of this integrated approach.

Cambodia, the site of this seminar, offers a particularly compelling lens through which to examine the relationship between the Global Disruptions and Southeast Asia -both historically and present. Understanding Cambodian society and culture requires grappling within the enduring influence of external powers. Following independence from French colonial rule in 1953, Cambodia was drawn into civil conflict under the shadow of the Vietnam War and suffered prolonged international isolation due to the Cold War geopolitics. Its current political framework was established through elections orchestrated by external powers such as the United Nations. While all Southeast Asian countries have developed through a combination of indigenous cultural traditions and external interventions, Cambodia exemplifies a case where foreign involvement has been especially decisive.

Today, three major forces -each emblematic of broader Global Disruptions- are shaping Cambodia’s trajectory: the institutional power of international development agencies, a precarious export-oriented capitalist economy central to national development policy; and China’s growing hegemonic influence. The political and economic reach of the Chinese state and capital is a critical factor across contemporary Southeast Asia. And nowhere is this more visible than in Sihanoukville.  In this coastal city, massive Chinese investment in casinos, hotels, and condominiums has dramatically transformed the urban landscape. To visit the city provokes reflection on the tangible, uneven and accelerating effects of Global Disruptions taking place across the region today.

PROGRAM

ABOUT SEA SEMINAR

The Southeast Asia seminar has been held annually by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University since 1977. For more information on the long history of the Southeast Asia Seminars, please visit our website.