ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism is a slippery concept. The term is generally conceived as a new set of political, economic and social arrangements that place their emphasis on market relations, minimal states and individual responsibility. Neoliberalism has largely replaced earlier labels that referred to specific politicians and or political projects (Larner 2009), and has since become an identifier for a seemingly ubiquitous collection of market-oriented policies that are blamed for a wide range of social, political, ecological and economic ills. Critical scholars have taken up the mantle, examining the connections between neoliberalism and a vast collection of conceptual categories, including cities (Hackworth 2007; Leitner et al. 2007), citizenship (Ong 2007; Sparke 2006), development (Hart 2002; Power 2003), gender (Brown 2004; Oza 2006), homelessness (Klodawsky 2009; May et al. 2005), labor (Aguiar and Herod 2006; Peck 2002), migration (Lawson 1999; Mitchell 2004), nature (Bakker 2005; McCarthy and Prudham 2004), race (Haylett 2001; Goldberg 2009), sexualities (Oswin 2007; Richardson 2005) and violence (Springer 2008, 2012, 2015), which only begins to scratch the surface (Springer et al. 2016). Given the massive academic industry that has sprung up in response to neoliberalism, it is perhaps easy to forget that the phenomenon itself is quite recent, and its entry into the affairs of Southeast Asia even more so. The policies that are today considered standard practice within the contemporary neoliberal toolkit, namely privatization, deregulation and liberalization, probably seemed incomprehensible as recent as 60 years ago. In the aftermath of the Second World War the global north was thoroughly enamored with Keynesian economics, and owing to the ruination wrought by the Nazis, right wing ideologies had fallen completely out of favor. Within Southeast Asia there was a rise in nationalist sentiment in the wake of the Second World War, where attempts at decolonization resulted in protracted struggles like the war in Vietnam. This history makes the ascendancy of neoliberalism all the more surprising, and particularly so within Southeast Asia where a growing skepticism for ‘Western’ influence was emerging. Yet in the intervening years neoliberalism nonetheless rose to become the contemporary ‘planetary vulgate’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). A number of scholars have traced the unfolding of neoliberalism (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2005; Peck 2010), where the common thread that ties these accounts together is the notion of a distinct historical lineage 28to the development of neoliberalism. In short, neoliberalism came from somewhere, and its trajectories were largely purposeful.
