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About Nick Cheesman

A student of law and politics. Researching torture in Myanmar (Burma), and Thailand. Interested in state violence and the rule of law, empirical political theory, and the making of social scientific knowledge. For the public university, organised labour, ideas without marketplace, education toward democracy.
Host, Interpretive Political & Social Science; sometimes contributor, Southeast Asian Studies; for comments or to suggest a book to feature, write to nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au
Nick's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Nick:

Interpretive Political and Social Science March 13, 2023

Marriage Unbound

State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China

Ke Li

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach …
Southeast Asian Studies January 1, 2023

Stories from an Ancient Land

Perspectives on Wa History and Culture

Magnus Fiskesjö

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living …
Interpretive Political and Social Science October 18, 2022

Bread and Freedom

Egypt's Revolutionary Situation

Mona El-Ghobashy

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
A decade has passed since the Arab Spring of 2011, during which an uprising in Egypt ended three decades of rule by Hosni Mubarak without realizing a new political order …
Southeast Asian Studies September 1, 2022

Crimes in Archival Form

Human Rights, Fact Production, and Myanmar

Ken MacLean

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
Though human rights monitors talk of fact-finding missions and reports, human rights facts are, like all social phenomena, not in fact found but made — through processes by which we …
Interpretive Political and Social Science August 9, 2022

Mobilizing in Uncertainty

Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia

Anastasia Shesterinina

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
Anastasia Shesterinina begins Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) with an account of Georgian troops crossing into eastern Abkhazia, in the Southern Caucasus …
Interpretive Political and Social Science April 22, 2022

Rethinking Comparison

Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry

Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
With Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith issue a call for qualitative political scientists to go beyond …
Southeast Asian Studies February 15, 2022

Power, Protection and Magic in Thailand

The Cosmos of a Southern Policeman

Craig J. Reynolds

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies we travel with Craig J. Reynolds to the mid-south of Thailand in the first half of the twentieth century, where …
Interpretive Political and Social Science December 30, 2021

Empires of Vice

The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia

Diana S. Kim

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020) Diana Kim situates the regulation of vice at the heart of colonial state building …
Southeast Asian Studies October 15, 2021

Moments of Silence

The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok

Thongchai Winichakul

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
The massacre of student protestors at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976 is one of the most infamous incidents in modern Thai political history. It is also among the most …
Interpretive Political and Social Science October 14, 2021

Interpreting International Politics

Cecelia Lynch

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
Interpreting International Politics (Routledge, 2014) is a short and lively account of how international relations was founded and developed as an interpretivist discipline, and why it matters that it was …
Interpretive Political and Social Science July 23, 2021

Gendered Citizenship

Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India

Natasha Behl

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
Why do we find pervasive gender-based discrimination, exclusion and violence in India when the Indian constitution builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender equality? This is the puzzle that animates …
Southeast Asian Studies April 15, 2021

Labor and Politics in Indonesia

Teri L. Caraway and Michele Ford

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
How did Indonesia’s labour movement go from being small and divided at the demise of the New Order regime in 1998 to play lead parts in politics some two decades …
Interpretive Political and Social Science April 7, 2021

Interviewing in Social Science Research

A Relational Approach

Lee Ann Fujii

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In this very special episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science we feature Lee Ann Fujii’s Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Routledge, 2018), which …
Southeast Asian Studies March 1, 2021

Fighting for Virtue

Justice and Politics in Thailand

Duncan McCargo

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
Anyone who has taken any interest in the politics of Thailand at all in the last two decades could not help but have noticed the part that the country’s judiciary …
Interpretive Political and Social Science January 11, 2021

Authoritarian Apprehensions

Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria

Lisa Wedeen

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
How has the Syrian regime been able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it? And, what can we learn about the seductions of authoritarian politics more generally …
Southeast Asian Studies October 20, 2020

The Constitution of Myanmar

A Contextual Analysis

Melissa Crouch

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
The tail end of the twentieth century was a good time for constitutional lawyers. Leapfrogging around the globe, they offered advice on how to amend, write or rewrite one state …
Interpretive Political and Social Science October 15, 2020

Interpretive Social Science

An Anti-Naturalist Approach

Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely make a case for why interpretivism is the most philosophically cogent approach currently on …
Southeast Asian Studies August 17, 2020

Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar

Roman David and Ian Holliday

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
Democracy is a popular topic among scholars of politics in Southeast Asia. Liberalism is not. Or at least it hadn’t been up until the last few years, which have seen …
Interpretive Political and Social Science June 3, 2020

Against the Grain

A Deep History of the Earliest States

James C. Scott

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press …
Southeast Asian Studies April 15, 2020

Containing Contagion

The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia

Sara E. Davies

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
At the start of 2020 few of us would have recognized the face of the current director general of the World Health Organization. Three months later, and in the midst …
Interpretive Political and Social Science March 30, 2020

Elucidating Social Science Concepts

Frederic C. Schaffer

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
For the third installment in our special series on interpretive political and social scientific research, Frederic C. Schaffer joins us to discuss his Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide …
Southeast Asian Studies March 10, 2020

Becoming Arab

Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World

Sumit K. Mandal

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In the wake of the so-called war on terror we’ve become accustomed to racialized portrayals of the Arab as an inflexible and threatening other to the mores and ways of …
Interpretive Political and Social Science November 29, 2019

Everyday Exposure

Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley

Sarah Marie Wiebe

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully writes that, “Every once …
Southeast Asian Studies October 22, 2019

Luxury and Rubble

Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon

Erik Harms

Hosted by Nick Cheesman
What happens when market-oriented policy reforms butt heads with a single-party state’s strictly maintained limits on political freedoms? That question sets the terms for Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession …