democracy discourse fellow
Thum Ping Tjin
Dr Pingtjin Thum is founder and Managing Director of New Naratif, a movement to democratise democracy in Southeast Asia. A historian, award-winning writer, Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel, his work centres on Southeast Asian governance and politics. Thum is also host of the popular The Show with PJ Thum, a video series on history and governance in Singapore, and creator of The History of Singapore podcast, thehistoryofsingapore.com. For his academic and pro-democracy work, he was repeatedly attacked and harassed by Singapore’s PAP government and currently lives in political exile in Manila, Philippines.
Country
Singapore
Categories
Multimedia
Political Literacy
The Principles of Southeast Asian Democracy
What is Southeast Asian democracy? Every Southeast Asian government ostensibly commits to democracy – but they also reject it as “foreign” or “western” in its inception and practice. This project asks Southeast Asians how we conceive of and practice democracy. It will document how Southeast Asians define democracy, how we practice it and fight for it, and how Southeast Asia’s great anti-colonial nationalists and intellectuals – from Aung San to Jose Rizal to Lee Kuan Yew to Sukarno – articulated it as they fought for independence. In so doing, it seeks to build, from the ground up, a framework for understanding what Southeast Asian democracy is.
This project will produce a) a series of articles on the meaning and practice of Southeast Asian democracy by Southeast Asians; and b) organise a series of trans-national workshops for Southeast Asians to discuss these principles and come together to fight for the issues they care about, providing pathways for Southeast Asians to easily take part in democracy promotion.
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