Intellectual Origins of the Postcolonial State

My dissertation asks: what were the questions to which the postcolonial state was an answer? It examines elite theories of the state in Indonesia, Malaya, and Singapore in the years of decolonization in the region, 1945–circa 1965. Through new readings of the political speeches and writings, and associated archival materials, of Southeast Asia's political elite, I argue that their state theories originated as responses to the social problems of immiseration and inequality, and then shifted to respond to the challenges of democratic legitimation that decolonization opened up. Social questions came first, democratic ones later.

More broadly, my work brings postcolonial politics and political thought together to shed light on both. It places the postcolonial state at the center of twentieth-century state theory and democratic thought, and illuminates how ideas about the state and democracy shaped the early postcolonial state as it came into being in the mid-1950s and beyond.