by Brian Mertens and Robert McLeod
Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2006

Bangkok Design is the first book of its kind, exploring the acclaimed new furnishings from Thailand and the inspiration behind them. This book profiles 36 of the best Thai designers, showing how they translate their own culture and personal experiences into original products. This group explores a wide variety of styles-minimal, expressionist, modernist, neo-traditional, retro and pop-but each designer has an individual signature.

The profiles include several studio artists whose work either has decorative characteristics or else comments on design-related issues such as cultural identity and sustainability. This inspiring book, beautifully photographed by Robert McLeod and lucidly written by award-winning author Brian Mertens, will appeal to interior designers, architects and collectors.

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by Ruth Barnes and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg
Prestel USA, 2012

Including many rare and antique examples, this luxurious volume introduces readers to the intoxicating and complex beauty of Indonesian cloth. Since the 1970s Mary Hunt Kahlenberg has been building her collection of exquisite ceremonial garments and sacred textiles from throughout Indonesia’s chain of tropical islands. Dating from the past five centuries and brought together here for the first time in book form, these woven and batiked hangings, ceremonial mats, jackets, shawls, and head cloths form a stunning array that will draw the attention of anyone with a love of art, fine craftsmanship, and design. Large, elegantly presented photographs show the textiles in incredible closeup detail and full expanse, making it possible to appreciate their technical brilliance and rich colors as well as the dazzling assortment of intricate patterns and motifs. Including essays by leading anthropologists and art historians, this book brings readers into a world ruled by the belief that weavings communicate with and transform those who come into contact with them.

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by Roy W. Hamilton
UCLA, 1998

From the Rainbow’s Varied Hue examines the rich and varied cloth traditions of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. A wealth of illustrations, both contemporary and historical, introduce the reader to traditions that range from the blood-red, polished abaca cloths of the B’laan and the dazzling headcloths of the Tausug to the striking plaids in magenta and orange silk created by the Maguindanao. Essays explore in detail the textile traditions of the Bagobo, the B’laan, the Maguindanao, and the Maranao.

About the Author: Roy W. Hamilton is the curator for Asian and Pacific Collections at the UCLA Fowler Musuem of Cultural History.

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by Mary Connors
Oxford University Press, 1997

Lao Textiles and Traditions focuses on the historical and cultural background of the Lao-Tai, whose exquisitely woven textiles with rich natural dyes and intricately fashioned designs have amazed and intrigued textile connoisseurs for years. Beautifully illustrated, the book tells the story of the people who created these masterpieces and who are still living lives intimately bound to their traditions and textiles.

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by Elizabeth Dell and Sandra Dudley
Art Media Resources Ltd, 2004

Sumptuous textiles have been produced and worn in great variety by the different peoples living in Burma. Through the centuries these have inspired the recordings of artists and writers, from votive temple murals, to the documents of awed visitors. Travelers have brought vivid examples of these textiles back to museums and collections around the world. In Burma today (and for its dispersed communities) woven textiles continue to play an important role in defining personal and group identity. Textiles from Burma introduces the richness of these textile traditions, lavishly illustrated with examples from the James Henry Green collection at Brighton Museum, and from other collections around the world. The volume introduces themes relating to the history, production, meaning, collection and continuing impact of textiles from Burma. It explores these themes in social, cultural and wider contexts. It investigates aspects of collecting and documentation in colonial and modern times, examining the histories and identities that are made and re-made as textiles are collected and written about. The authors’ investigations range from the sumptuary laws of the last Burmese court of the 1880s, to the dress and identity of people in exile on Burma’s borders today. They explore extinct weaving processes, such as the textile texts that once wrapped sacred manuscripts; they discuss the processes of re-invention which give traditional costumes value in a changing modern world. Each thematic case study is underpinned by an introduction to the weaving traditions of its particular region. Technical details are explained in a glossary of technical terms, and an appendix provides an annotated list of key textile collections from Burma around the world.

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by Geoffrey Robinson
Princeton University Press, 2011

This is a book about a terrible spate of mass violence. It is also about a rare success in bringing such violence to an end. “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die” tells the story of East Timor, a half-island that suffered genocide after Indonesia invaded in 1975, and which was again laid to waste after the population voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999. Before international forces intervened, more than half the population had been displaced and 1,500 people killed. Geoffrey Robinson, an expert in Southeast Asian history, was in East Timor with the United Nations in 1999 and provides a gripping first-person account of the violence, as well as a rigorous assessment of the politics and history behind it.

Robinson debunks claims that the militias committing the violence in East Timor acted spontaneously, attributing their actions instead to the calculation of Indonesian leaders, and to a “culture of terror” within the Indonesian army. He argues that major powers–notably the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom–were complicit in the genocide of the late 1970s and the violence of 1999. At the same time, Robinson stresses that armed intervention supported by those powers in late 1999 was vital in averting a second genocide. Advocating accountability, the book chronicles the failure to bring those responsible for the violence to justice.

A riveting narrative filled with personal observations, documentary evidence, and eyewitness accounts, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die” engages essential questions about political violence, international humanitarian intervention, genocide, and transitional justice.

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by Richard Pierre Claude
University of the Philippines Press, 1997

The author shows how the Philippine Constitution: first, gives non-governmental organizations the legal foundation they need to pursue community-organizing and self-help programs, and second, calls on all schools to educate the citizenry about rights while also obliging government to teach human rights to the police and military.

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by Tam Mai
LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2010

“Human rights,” the common value of human beings, are based on human wants-on those things necessary. The meaning of human rights is contested and how to apply the contested idea of human rights is more contested not only in Vietnam but also in many countries in the world. For human rights in Vietnam, many scholars and activists had different approaches, ideas, and conceptions. By using historical, comparative method and analysis, I call for all sides to carry out constructive dialogues to narrow differences in human rights and bring common ground on which to work out solutions to old problems and contend. It is wrong to use human rights as a political tool and oppose each other. As human rights or human dignity is inviolable and to respect and to protect human dignity is duty of all human being.

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by Human Rights First Staff and Eric R. Biel
Human Rights First, 2006

Thailand emerged as a leader in democracy and human rights in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. But respect for human rights has lost considerable ground over the last five years. Reverting to authoritarianism and a growing disregard for human rights, the government has allowed human rights defenders to become increasingly subject to violence and harassment. Defenders under threat include grassroots activists targeted by local elites for pursuing economic and social justice, as well as those persecuted for their criticism of abuses by the state, especially in the conflict-ridden southern provinces. In the south, where a violent insurgency and the government response to it has claimed more than a thousand lives, human rights defenders play an important role in addressing detentions, torture, disappearances, and other human rights violations.Over the last five years, Southeast Asian governments contended with a genuine threat from terrorists and insurgents in ways that often exacerbated existing conflicts and undermined respect for human rights and the rule of law. A global emphasis on security, often with insufficient regard to human rights, as well as the goodwill gained by the Thai authorities from cooperation on counterterrorism, largely insulated Thailand from criticism for its human rights violations and has encouraged authoritarian trends.

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by Morten B. Pedersen and Thant Myint-U
Rowman and Littlefield, 2007

Since 1988, when Burma’s military rulers crushed a popular uprising, Western governments have promoted democracy as a panacea for the country’s manifold development problems, from ethnic conflict to weak governance, human rights abuses, and deep-rooted, structural poverty. Years of escalating censure and sanctions, however, have left the military firmly entrenched in power, the opposition marginalized, and the general population suffering from deepening poverty. In the first book-length study of Western human rights policy in Burma, Morten Pedersen argues that Western democracy rhetoric has not supplied the solution to these problems. Each year, Burma’s human and natural resources are further eroding, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is mounting, and the prospect of turning the situation around is becoming less and less likely. Based on extensive field research, Promoting Human Rights in Burma proposes an alternative model of “critical engagement” that emphasizes more pragmatic efforts to help bring a deeply divided society together and promote socioeconomic development as the basis for longer-term political change. Although the focus is squarely on Burma, the fallacies in Western policy thinking that this case study reveals, as well as the alternative policy framework it offers, have wider relevance for other poor, conflict-ridden countries on the periphery of the global political and economic system.

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