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• Abstract

The 13th General Election of May 2013 in Malaysia produced a curious impasse when neither the Barisan Nasional (BN, or National Front) regime nor the Pakatan Rakyat (PR, or People’s Pact) opposition could decisively attain their strategic goals. The BN had set out to recover its eroded legitimacy but lost further support although it retained power. The PR strove to take power but failed even as it won the popular vote. Not since 1969 has a regime ruled with such dented legitimacy. Never before has the opposition been stronger and yet it is far from triumph. Contestation continues with the regime relying on state resources and coercive powers while the opposition responds with popular mobilization and inventive dissent. As the political terrain is transformed, organizations and individuals in civil society have increasingly become partisan, supporting one or the other side of the fray. How did this impasse arise? Where will it lead? The answers are many and complex. At this Forum, Dr. Khoo Boo Teik will focus on two crucial factors – the social origins of Malaysia’s changed political environment and contrasting features of BN and PR’s leadership – to comment on the prospects for positive or negative outcomes of the contestation.

• Speakers’ Profile:

Dr. KHOO Boo Teik, Professor at The National Graduate Institute of Policy Studies, Tokyo, was born and schooled in Penang, Malaysia, before taking his degrees at the University of Rochester, MIT and Flinders University. Between June 2009 and March 2014, he was Executive Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan. His full career includes teaching in Universiti Sains Malaysia (1994–2009) and Universiti Brunei Darusalam (1987–93), and professional work in other fields. He is the author of Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad (1995) and Beyond Mahathir: Malaysian Politics and its Discontents (2003), editor of Policy Regimes and the Political Economy of Poverty Reduction in Malaysia (2011) and co-editor of Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices (2002). His latest (co-edited book), Between Dissent and Power: The Transformation of Islamic Politics in the Middle East and Asia, will be published in mid-2014.