This study, using data on ever-married children aged 23–39 of household heads in four rice-growing villages in Cambodia, examines the mechanism underlying the rapid decrease in agricultural sector employment, or “deagrarianization,” among younger Cambodians during the 2010s. Special attention is devoted to the effects of increased marriage matching at the migration destination (MM), educational attainment, and decreased land availability. The stability of the deagrarianization process is also assessed.

Results of the descriptive and econometric analyses indicate that deagrarianization increased through the migration of younger people outside their home province to work as manual laborers in non-agricultural sectors. MM and decreased parents’ land endowments contributed significantly to deagrarianization, especially in villages where rice farming was an attractive occupation. Changes in parents’ land transfer behavior were not the cause but the result of deagrarianization. These findings suggest that changes in norms related to marital partner selection also underlie deagrarianization and that increased MM accelerated deagrarianization in Cambodia during the 2010s.

Data also indicate the low stability of non-agricultural employment, implying that deagrarianization in Cambodia might stagnate if its economy is impacted by even minor unfavorable shocks.

For decades, the migration of unskilled and low-skilled migrant workers from Southeast Asia to various destinations has continued to increase. Japan, which has long depended on Southeast Asian migrant workers, recruits workers through the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). Migrant workers in this program undertake low-skilled 3D (dirty, dangerous, and difficult) tasks for lower wages and fewer rights than other foreign-worker groups. However, a closer look at their socioeconomic background prior to migration reveals they are often not simply unskilled labor. Using the case of Thailand, this paper shows that many belong to a newly configured middle class who, in terms of income, occupation, and educational attainment, have achieved certain levels of social and economic capital. Through ethnographic research on Thai TITP workers in Japan, this paper examines the relationships between migrants’ socioeconomic backgrounds in their home countries and their aspiration to migrate as unskilled labor. It clarifies how migration aspirations are shaped by their experiences within a new middle class through global cultural flows between Southeast and East Asia.

The emergence of “authoritarian capitalism”—economic development under authoritarianism—across Asia challenges Western ideas of liberal democracy as the acclaimed pathway to prosperity. Cambodia, which is the focus of this paper, witnessed impressive economic growth and rigorous marketization under the authoritarian rule of former Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). In this paper we critically assess the effects of Hun Sen’s authoritarian capitalism on economic development in Cambodia between 1993 and 2019. In doing so, we use Joe Studwell’s study How Asia Works (2014), in which the author draws on the historical development trajectories of various East Asian countries to argue that economic development hinges on the implementation of effective government policy in three economic sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, and finance. Using Studwell’s framework as a benchmark and drawing on an extensive review of secondary sources, this article examines the impacts of the CPP’s development strategy on these three sectors. Ultimately, this article aims to debunk the “strong growth” discourse, arguing that even though the CPP fosters short-term growth, in the long run its patronage-based development agenda merely serves the get-rich-quick purpose of a narrow elite but is not reconcilable with sustainable economic development.

With online media having become influential socially, economically, and politically, there is a tendency for people—especially Generation Z—to engage in political behavior digitally, particularly on social networking sites. The current research is a mixed-method study on 1,000 respondents from a Generation Z sample group in Southern Thailand. The findings show that the sample group relies mostly upon the online media platform X (formerly Twitter) to consume political news, followed by Facebook and Instagram. Most of the respondents have expressed demands for governmental transformation. The Generation Z group display their political behavior by expressing opinions and criticisms to those close to them who are not parents or relatives (friends, lovers, and special persons), sharing their opinions on social networks, or deciding not to express any political views. In addition, the Generation Z group agree that using social networking sites to express political views is rightful, legal, and free for Thai people, as provided in Chapter 3 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand B.E. 2560 and part of the national democracy system.

The act of nation building has often stood at the center of postcolonial efforts to consolidate the governance of multiethnic and multireligious groups brought together under colonial regimes. In the Philippines, unresolved structural and cultural differences during colonialism can be seen in the vacillating treatment of ethnic or religious minorities such as Chinese and Muslims in the construction of the nation. This paper investigates the discursive exclusion of these identities in Philippine textual production, arguing that early postcolonial political assertions of plurality failed to align with continuing forms of discursive othering that aligned with colonial strategies and objectives. Subsequently, exclusivist narratives in the media were unable to reflect the inclusivist rhetoric in politics and academia on national unity. This is demonstrated through an empirical mixed-methods textual analysis involving word embeddings and collocations of identity discourses in digitized archives of multilingual periodicals dating from 1872 (the latter part of the Spanish colonial period, from the Cavite Mutiny to the Treaty of Paris) to 1972 (the end of democratic rule through the implementation of Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law in the Philippines after independence). These representations foreshadow the impact of antecedent narratives on contemporary efforts at imagining the nation.