Southeast Asia's Development Towards Liberal Individualism and Inclusive Governance

This volume challenges dominant narratives about Southeast Asia's development by bridging a long-standing intellectual divide. On the one hand, liberal thinkers 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, Southeast Asia's Development advances a distinct view of liberal development in the tradition of Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek--rooted in individualism, social pluralism, and negative rights--to expose the failures of the region's entrenched model of elite-driven political capitalism. While globalization and partial liberalization since the 1980s have raised living standards, Southeast Asian states continue to uphold regimes that hollow out personal agency, treating citizens as instruments of national performance, economic units to be optimized, or bodies to be disciplined, rather than as persons with ends of their own. This volume advances a new normative ideal: development as freedom to discover, treating development as the preservation of individual spaces that enable people to pursue their own conceptions of good within the rules they help shape. It is thus a call to reimagine development not as a collective end-goal but an open-ended process of human discovery and institutional experimentation.

Dr. Bryan Cheang is Director of the Hayek Program and Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, where he teaches courses on the ethics of capitalism, history of economic thought, and public policy. He is also Assistant Director and Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King's College, London, where he obtained his PhD in Political Economy. He has published various interdisciplinary books and articles exploring the relationships between markets, culture, institutions, and development, with a focus on Asia. He is particularly interested in the challenge of industrial planning under conditions of radical uncertainty and social complexity. He is also a graduate of the National University of Singapore and brings with him policymaking experience from the Singapore civil service.