Southeast Asia’s megacities, long viewed as symbols of progress, are facing crises ranging from floods and ecological damage to displacement and widening inequality. Scholars of contemporary urban politics often attribute these predicaments to rapid globalization that originated in the mid-1980s. Yet APARC Visiting Scholar Gavin Shatkin argues they must be understood in the context of the Cold War era, when urban development agendas were molded by authoritarian regimes exerting political and economic control in the name of anti-communism.

Shatkin, an urban planner specializing in the political economy of urbanization and urban policy and planning in Southeast Asia, is a professor of public policy and architecture at Northeastern University. He recently completed his residency at APARC as a Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford fellow on Southeast Asia. Before heading to Singapore for the second part of his fellowship, he presented research from his new book project, which examines how U.S.-supported authoritarian regimes in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand shaped urban politics in three megalopolises —Jakarta, Bangkok, and Metro Manila — during the 1960s and 1970s, with consequences that reverberate today.

Political Violence as Foundation

Shatkin refers to the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s as Southeast Asia's "hot Cold War." During that time, in tandem with the armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, political violence spread through Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, as the three countries witnessed the emergence of authoritarian regimes that cemented their rule by manipulating laws and institutions and deploying targeted, often extreme violence justified as necessary to combat communism.

In Indonesia, a U.S.-backed 1965 military coup, directed particularly at the Communist Party of Indonesia, led to the massacre of 500,000 to one million people, heralding General Suharto's 32-year authoritarian rule.

In the Philippines, amid leftist demonstrations and a communist insurgency, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, marking the beginning of a decade defined by his administration’s widespread human rights violations, throughout which the United States continued to provide foreign aid to the country, considering Marcos a steadfast anti-communist ally.

And in Thailand, the imposition of the 1958 military dictatorship to counter communist threats and the 1976 crackdown by Thai police and right-wing paramilitaries against leftist protesters were pivotal points in establishing a royalist-nationalist model that defined "Thainess" (khwam pen thai) through loyalty to the monarchy, aligned with military power as well as American military aid and counter-insurgency policy guidance.

According to Shatkin, these were not isolated incidents but defining episodes of political violence that cemented authoritative oligarchic control over urban development. The explosive urbanization in Southeast Asian cities that followed in the mid-1980s must be read through the lens of this earlier period, when authoritarian regimes sought to exploit urban transformation to entrench political and economic power.

Oligarchic Politics

The Suharto regime's approach to Jakarta as a source of profit exemplifies this dynamic. Shatkin explains how, between 1985 and 1998, Indonesia's National Land Agency distributed land permits for extensive urban development across the Jakarta metropolitan region to a small network of oligarchic conglomerates, such as the Salim Group. These crony corporations, allied with Suharto through family ties and political patronage, came to dominate Indonesia’s economy. Many of these same corporate interests continue to influence development agendas in Jakarta today, owning exclusive rights to purchase and develop permitted land.

The same pattern of successive waves of government expansion of metropolitan regions through infrastructure development and the distribution of land to selected major conglomerates has repeated itself in Manila and Bangkok, creating in-country profit centers for economic interests and what Shatkin calls “an archipelago of exclusive gated elite spaces” that reinforces spatial dichotomy and segregation as each of these megacities also experiences a housing crisis.

For example, Shatkin’s research in Metro Manila during the late 1990s and early 2000s revealed that approximately 40% of the population lived in dense informal settlements. A significant portion of these residents were employed in the nearby container port, yet their wages were insufficient to afford legal housing near their workplace. This discrepancy highlights a structural dilemma where low-wage workers are effectively compelled to occupy land illegally.

Environmental crises in the three urban giants are also entrenched in political and social structures rooted in oligarchic and authoritarian legacies of the Cold War era, argues Shatkin. Thus, increasingly devastating floods in Jakarta, Metro Manila, and Bangkok have less to do with sea level rise and far more with the rapid spread of impervious surfaces and the extraction of groundwater resulting from uncontrolled urban sprawl on converted watershed lands within a relatively weak regulatory environment. Moreover, flooding mitigation solutions, like Indonesia’s Great Garuda seawall project, have perpetuated the same pattern of land giveaways to major developers.

Lessons from Urban Social Movements

Crucially, Shatkin's research shows that Southeast Asian urban activists themselves frame their struggles through the lens of Cold War legacies. For example, when Jakarta residents along the Ciliwung River faced eviction for flood mitigation in 2015, they challenged the Jakarta administration and the Ciliwung-Cisadane Flood Control Office in court, arguing the eviction was based on a Cold War-era law drafted during counterinsurgency operations that had no place in democratic Indonesia. They partially won the case.

In a similar vein, Thailand's Red Shirt movement, representing working-class people from the northeast, deliberately protested on land owned by the Crown Property Bureau, using iconography that critiqued the military-monarchy-elite alliance forged during the Cold War.

An example from Manila is the 2001 mass protests by urban, low-income groups in defense of President Joseph Estrada, who was impeached for corruption. Their support can be interpreted as a reaction against “anti-poor” discourse that originated in the Ferdinand Marcos era. For the urban poor, Estrada represented a powerful counterweight to this legacy of elite disdain.

"We need to listen to these protest movements on the ground,” says Shatkin. They do not primarily critique globalization but rather contest entrenched oligarchy and state paternalism forged by Cold War political violence. Thus, an alternative framework for understanding debates in urban politics of Jakarta, Manila, and Bangkok is to view them not merely as capitals shaped by globalization but as Cold War frontline sites.

Beyond Southeast Asia

The implications of Shatkin’s theoretical framework extend beyond Jakarta, Metro Manila, and Bangkok, and even beyond Southeast Asia. It illuminates how periods of political upheaval create enduring social, economic, and environmental inequalities.

Moreover, these three urban giants, which produce outsized shares of their nations' GDP, rank among the world's largest cities. Their futures will not only affect Southeast Asia but also global urban development patterns. Shatkin's work suggests that this future cannot be charted without reckoning with the past.

Motivation & Overview

India’s services sector is internationally renowned and has helped propel the country’s economic growth. Indeed, in recent years, a majority of the value added to India’s GDP has been concentrated in services. Especially noteworthy are India’s software and computing services, which include large multinational conglomerates like Infosys and Tata Communications Services. 

Yet as Indian software has flourished, the growth of its computer hardware and manufacturing has been sluggish. Tellingly, India is still a net importer of hardware and other electronics. At first glance, this divergence is puzzling because both the software and hardware sectors should have benefited from India’s educated labor pool and infrastructure. How can these different sectoral outcomes be explained?
 

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Fig. 1: Electronics production value compared to software and software service revenues.
 

In “Comparing Advantages in India’s Computer Hardware and Software Sectors,” Dinsha Mistree and Rehana Mohammed offer an explanation in terms of state capacity to meet the different functional needs of each sector. Their account of India’s computing history emphasizes the inability of various state ministries and agencies to agree on policies that would benefit the hardware sector, such as tariffs. Meanwhile, cumbersome rulemaking procedures inherited from British colonialism impeded the state’s flexibility. Although this disadvantaged India’s hardware sector, its software sector needed comparatively less from the state, building instead on international networks and the efforts of individual agencies.

The authors provide a historically and theoretically rich account of the political forces shaping India’s economic rise. The paper not only compares distinct moments in Indian history but also draws parallels with other landmark cases, like South Korea’s 1980s industrial surge. Such a sector-based analysis could be fruitfully applied to understand why different industries succeed or lag in emerging economies. 

Different Sectors, Different Needs

In order to become competitive — both domestically and (especially) internationally — hardware manufacturers often need much from the state, what the authors call a “produce and protect regime.” This can include the construction of factories and the formation of state-owned industries (SOEs), as well as tariffs to reduce competition or labor laws that restrict union strikes. Perhaps most importantly, manufacturers need a state whose legislators and bureaucrats can coordinate with each other in response to market challenges. Such a regime is incompatible with excessive “red tape” or with the “capture” of regulators by narrow interest groups. Because customers tend to view manufactured goods as “substitutable” with each other, firms will face intense competition as regards price and quality.
 

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Fig. 2: Inter-agency coordination required for sectoral success.
 

The situation is very different for service providers, whose success depends on building strong relationships with customers. States are not essential to this process, even if their promotional efforts can be helpful. Coordination across government agencies is similarly less important, as just one agency could provide tax breaks or host promotional events that benefit service providers. Compared with manufacturing, customers tend to view services as less substitutable — they are more intangible and customizable, which renders competition less fierce. Understanding India’s computing history reveals that the state’s inability to meet hardware manufacturers’ needs severely constrained the sector’s growth. 

The History of Indian Computing

Although India inherited a convoluted bureaucracy from the British Raj, the future of its computing industry in the 1960s seemed promising: political elites in New Delhi supported a produce-and-protect regime, relevant agencies and SOEs were created, and foreign computing firms like IBM successfully operated in the country. 

Yet by the 1970s, some bureaucrats and union leaders feared that automation would threaten the federal government’s functioning and India’s employment levels, respectively. Strict controls in both the public and private sectors were thus adopted, for example, requiring trade unions — which took a strong anti-computer stance — to approve the introduction of computers in specific industries. The authors make special mention of India’s semiconductor industry. It arguably failed to develop due to lackluster government investment, the need for manufacturers to obtain multiple permits across agencies, decision makers ignoring recommendations from specialized panels, and so on.

Meanwhile, implementing protectionist policies proved challenging. For example, decisions to allow the importation of previously banned components required permission from multiple ministries and agencies. After India’s 1970s balance-of-payments crisis, international companies deemed inessential were forced to dilute their equity to 40% and take on an Indian partner. IBM then left the Indian market. At the same time, SOEs faced growing competition over government contracts and workers, owing to the growth of state-level SOEs.

The mid-1980s represented a partial turning point as Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister and liberalized the computing industry. Within weeks, Rajiv introduced a host of new policies and shifted the government’s focus from supporting public sector production to promoting private firms, which would no longer face manufacturing limits and would be eligible for duty exemptions. Changes to tariff rates and import limits would not require approval from multiple agencies. Meanwhile, international firms reengaged with Indian markets via the building of satellite links, facilitating cross-continental work, such as between Citibank employees in Mumbai and Santa Cruz.

However, this liberalizing period was undermined and partially reversed after 1989, when Rajiv’s Congress Party (INC) lost its legislative majority and public policy became considerably more fragmented. Anti-computerization forces, especially the powerful Indian trade unions, worked to stymie Rajiv’s reforms. Pro-market reformists were forced out of their positions in Indian bureaucracies. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991, after which Congress formed a minority government with computer advocate P. V. Narasimha Rao as PM. Yet all of this occurred at a delicate time, as India was at risk of defaulting and had almost completely exhausted its foreign exchange.

By the late 1990s, both the hardware and software sectors should have benefited from the rising global demand for computers, yet India’s history of poor state coordination hindered manufacturers. Meanwhile, software firms were able to take advantage of global opportunities given their comparatively limited needs from state actors and political networks — for example, helping European Union banks change their computer systems to Euros. Ultimately, the Indian state has powerfully shaped the fortunes of these different sectors.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

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The book, now available from Stanford University Press, revisits Cold War history by examining the identities, cultures, and agendas of the many refugees forced to flee their homes across East, Southeast, and South Asia due to the great power conflict between the US and the USSR. Moon's book draws on multilingual archival sources and presents these displaced peoples as historical actors in their own right, not mere subjects of government actions. Exploring the local, regional, and global contexts of displacement through five cases —Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — this volume sheds new light on understudied aspects of Cold War history.

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