Since the mid-2010s, East and Southeast Asia have witnessed an unending chain of uneven uprisings against interlocking oppressive processes of racial capitalist accumulation. This new conjuncture has emerged during an interregnum of multipolar competition for global military domination and financial hegemony. It is characterized by counter-revolutions of the global right and authoritarian regimes with muscular ethnocentric aspirations for settler and imperial consolidation. The mobilization of US military allies in the Asia-Pacific to suppress support for Palestinian liberation, the Chinese extraction of frontier resources through infrastructural development, and Russia’s imperial rhetoric in its invasion of Ukraine demonstrate such ongoing geopolitical competition. Other Asian states, even those not situated at the extreme end of the rightwing and authoritarian spectrum, likewise participate as sub-empires in the process of global capital accumulation—violently subsuming in the process their peripheral regions and ethnic minorities for resources and labor. This sub-imperial dynamic is evident in the relationships between Japan and Okinawa, Indonesia and West Papua, Taiwan and the country’s indigenous people, and Myanmar and the Rohingya.
In this context, one of the main tasks of historical materialism—and, hence, of this conference—is to provide a more rigorous analysis of the current Asian capitalist conjuncture, along with its class struggles, emancipatory politics, and movements for an ecological commons. Such an analysis must clarify the specifics of capital accumulation in Asia, not as an autonomous process, but in relation to other global conjunctural forces. It must furthermore examine the concrete and contradictory relationships between capital, state, and labor, so as to shed new light on analytical categories relevant for understanding capitalism outside the global geopolitical “center”—categories such as formal subsumption, unfree labor, and surplus population. Yet, an analysis of the Asian capitalist conjuncture is not just a matter of regional concern. Thinking through capitalist dynamics in East and Southeast Asia can help test, refine, or rethink existing normative concepts that have global reach, such as neoliberalism, welfare state, transition, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and abolitionism.
Existing historical materialist analyses have attempted to articulate the political and economic conditions of contemporary Asian uprisings. The tendency, however, has been to valorize a single factor rather than the interconnection of forces. The 2019 Hong Kong protest movement, for example, was both a struggle against the CCP’s imperial authoritarianism as well as a response to capitalist exploitation. This interconnected dynamic is shared by struggles in Xinjiang, Taiwan, and various sites of Belt and Road investment in the Global South. In this spirit, the Historical Materialism Conference in East and Southeast Asia invites papers that will analyze the contradictory forces producing this Asian capitalist conjuncture or that will critique the very capitalist foundations of these conjunctural dynamics. To promote shared analytical insights from the two interconnected regions, we encourage comparative inter-Asian studies of conjunctural forces that we regard as not yet receiving adequate scholarly attention, such as feminism and social reproductive labor, borders and migrant labor, digitization and informal labor, land and peasantry, and oceans and labor circulation. Lastly, in actualizing internationalism, the Conference particularly welcomes works that link East and Southeast Asian struggles against capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, sexism, and racism with other political movements in the world—particularly with our comrades who fight for Palestinian liberation. We highly encourage submissions that foster an engagement between scholar-activists, organizers, and political movements.
We aim for this conference to be both an academic exchange and a step towards creating communities of research and practical action in East and Southeast Asia. Therefore, we will carefully select presentations specific to our geographical focus that help us realize this goal. The conference is an important part of the broader Historical Materialism project—including the journal, the book series, and the global network of HM conferences—and we wish to encourage all conference participants to get involved with these different aspects of the work we do.
The conference is co-organized by IndoPROGRESS, Asian Labour Review, and the Asia Research Centre Universitas Indonesia (ARC UI) with the organizational support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference. IndoPROGRESS is a media collective based on scientific principles committed to promoting class-based social movements in Indonesia. Asian Labour Review is a journal for labour movements across Asia. It contributes to cultivating critical inquiries about workers’ living and working conditions, various forms of labour activism, and emerging divisions and solidarity between many classes of labour in Asia. The Asia Research Centre is an interdisciplinary research centre that aims to strengthen governance and social resilience in Indonesia through comparative analysis developed from collaborative research. The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project works towards the imagination and possibilities of intellectual exchange and collaboration in and beyond Asia.
We are accepting proposals for either individual papers or pre-made panels of three to four papers (each of which needs its own title and abstract). In your abstract, please clearly show how your paper connects with the conference theme. Proposals must include the following:
1) proposal title
2) session abstract/description (250 words maximum) *only for organized panels
3) individual paper title & abstract (200 words maximum)
4) personal information (first and last name, email address, affiliation, position, gender, nationality, and current location *not full address).
Please submit the proposals or direct any questions to hmeastsoutheastasia2025@gmail.com.
The deadline for application is April 1, 2025. We will notify you of the results by early May 2025.
