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Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices. Edited by Francis Loh Kok Wah and Khoo Boo Teik. Richmond, Surrey, U.K: Curzon Press, 2002. 274pp.
This edited volume of essays examines democracy in Malaysia in the 1990s. It is both a timely and a welcome addition to the growing body of works that have sought to examine the political, social, and economic processes associated with democracy in Malaysia, particularly during the 1990s. The strength of this volume lies in the broad scope of issues that it brings to bear on the study of democracy in Malaysia. The innovative approaches used by the contributors in pursuing the questions posed in each chapter provide the reader with an insight into a set of issues, actors, and processes associated with the study of democracy in Malaysia seldom found in works of a similar nature. Many of the issues and topics raised in these essays are also relevant for comparative political analysis with other cases in Southeast Asia.
The introductory chapter (Chapter 1), written by the editors Khoo Boo Teik and Francis Loh Kok Wah, provides a concise literature review of democracy in Malaysia since independence. It also lays out the wider scope of this volume of essays, which is to provide "an updated examination of Malaysia's political system, civil society, public institutions and dominant discourses", as well as to offer a comparative "understanding of `discourses and practices of democracy' in Southeast Asia".
The rest of the essays in the volume is divided into two parts. The first part, titled "Discourses of Democracy", comprises essays on developmentalism and democracy, the Asian values debate, and the role of Islam in the democratic politics of Malaysia. This part is comparatively more theoretical in its orientation, particularly in terms of linking some of the political developments in the Malaysian case to the normative and theoretical assumptions found in the literature on democracy. The second part, titled "The Practice of Democracy", is more empirical in nature, and includes examinations of the media, public administration, "political NGOs", and the role of women's movements in democratization.
In "Developmentalism and...