Bryan Cheang

Southeast Asia's Development

This volume challenges dominant narratives about Southeast Asia's development by bridging a long-standing intellectual divide. On the one hand, liberal thinkers rarely engage with the developmental histories and practices of the non-Western world. On the other, Asian scholars and heterodox critics often treat economic liberalism as a "neoliberal" project imported in unsavoury circumstances. Bringing these worlds into conversation, Southeast Asia's Development advances a distinct view of liberal development in the tradition of Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek--rooted in individualism, social pluralism, and negative rights--to expose the failures of the region's entrenched model of elite-driven political capitalism. While globalization and partial liberalization since the 1980s have raised living standards, Southeast Asian states continue to uphold regimes that hollow out personal agency, treating citizens as instruments of national performance, economic units to be optimized, or bodies to be disciplined, rather than as persons with ends of their own. This volume advances a new normative ideal: development as freedom to discover, treating development as the preservation of individual spaces that enable people to pursue their own conceptions of good within the rules they help shape. It is thus a call to reimagine development not as a collective end-goal but an open-ended process of human discovery and institutional experimentation.