The 2024 AMSEAS
Early Career Book Prize
The Association of Mainland Southeast Asian Scholars offers a prize for the best first book on a Mainland Southeast Asian Studies topic by a scholar specialising in the area. The winner of the prize received $500.
In total, 7 nominations were submitted for the 2023 -24 Prize . These were read by the three esteemed panelists consisting of Prof. Sango Mahanty (ANU), Prof. Tyrell Haberkorn (University of Wisconsin – Madison) and Prof. Justin McDaniel (University of Pennsylvania). AMSEAS is truly grateful to these eminent scholars for the time they put into the book prize for this year.
The winner of the 2024 AMSEAS book prize is Andrew Ong for their book titled “Stalemate: Autonomy and Insurgency on the China-Myanmar Border”.
The judges had the following to say about the book: Powerfully bridging the empirical and the theoretical, Andrew Ong offers an inspiring new understanding of the unretractable conflict in Wa state along the China-Myanmar border. He defines the concept of stalemate from an inactive stasis to instead a state of heightened activity constituted by political dynamism that underlies the seeming impasse among the (UWSA), the Chinese government and the Myanmar military. In tracing the unexpected alliances, economic stability amidst political instability and accidents of rule that structure the polity, he denaturalizes existing understandings of insurgent armies and life under sustained conflict. Grounded in years of ethnography and humanitarian work, Ong models a method of doing and writing scholarship that refuses easy answers of position and responsibility. Stalemate: Autonomy and Insurgency on the China-Myanmar Border is essential reading for scholars within and beyond Southeast Asian Studies who wish to understand civilian life and the politics of rule under entrenched violence.
The jury also awarded the runner up an honorary mention which goes to Jane Ferguson for the book titled “Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred”.
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