Southeast Asia's Development

Abstract This volume challenges dominant narratives about Southeast Asia’s development by bridging a long-standing intellectual divide. On one hand, liberal political economists rarely engage with the developmental histories and practices of the non-Western world. On the other, Asian scholars and heterodox critics often treat economic liberalism as a ‘neoliberal’ project imported in unsavoury circumstances. Bringing these worlds into conversation, this volume advances a distinct view of liberal development in the tradition of Adam Smith and F. A. Hayek (one rooted in individualism, social pluralism, and negative rights) to expose the failures of the region’s entrenched model of elite-driven political capitalism. While globalisation and partial liberalisation since the 1980s have raised living standards, Southeast Asian states continue to uphold regimes that hollow out individual agency, treating citizens as instruments of national performance, economic units to be optimised, or bodies to be disciplined rather than as persons with ends of their own. Freedom is made subordinate to material prosperity, assumed to be the summum bonum of development. In its place, Bryan Cheang advances a new normative ideal: development as freedom to discover. Unlike prevailing models that prioritise corporate national missions—whether income increases, egalitarian redistribution, or even capability expansion—this vision treats development as the preservation of individual space, so people may pursue their own conceptions of the good within rules they help shape. It is a call to reimagine development not as an end goal to be achieved collectively but as an open-ended process of human discovery and institutional experimentation.