Social development

Vietnam’s minorities lose right to farm forests

One afternoon at the end of 2017, officials in Dakrong district in Central Vietnam’s Quang Tri province visited Ho Thi Nieng’s house. They claimed she and her husband had “burned the protected forest to do farming.” “We had been cultivating that land for a long time ...

Nguyen Dac Thanh

Myanmar junta bans Irrawaddy news agency after months of harassment

Myanmar’s junta has officially banned online news outlet The Irrawaddy and charged the outlet’s registered publisher for violating national security laws, state media reported over the weekend, following months of legal harassment. The ban is the latest on at least 20 media groups – news agencies, ...

RFA Burmese

Southeast Asia remains world rice bowl as pockets of region suffer crop disasters

Rice crops in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have taken a hit from flooding and conflict this year, casting a shadow on a mostly sunny outlook for Southeast Asia’s output of the key grain as the region deals with other potential longer term supply troubles, farm ...

RFA Burmese, RFA Khmer and RFA Lao

The cost of Laos’ quest to be Southeast Asia’s ‘battery’, and the World Heritage town at risk

With electricity exports to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia and even Singapore, Laos has arguably realised its ambition to be the battery of Southeast Asia. The bulk of these exports are from hydropower. Nearly 80 dams dot the landlocked country, and more along the Mekong River are in ...

Lee Li Wan

Why LGBT Rights Trump Environmentalism in Vietnam

Since its adoption of a market economy in the last 1980s, Vietnam has become what some have referred to as a new “Asian Tiger.” Over the last 25 years, Vietnam’s economy has enjoyed an average annual growth rate of more than 6 percent. Between 1994 and 2014, ...

Fight for truth: battling false and misleading information in Southeast Asia and beyond

From cries of “fake news” in the United States and Brazil to the Marcos family’s return to power in the Philippines, the growing role of misinformation and disinformation in the global political landscape is a very real concern. The spread of deliberately deceitful and unintentionally ...

STEW POST

As Laos inches closer to economic default, underage girls face a higher risk of child marriage

Houa* sat on the doorstep of her bamboo house helping her grandmother pluck a chicken. She is not even ten years old, but she is learning how to become a ‘good wife.’ As the Covid pandemic and economic crisis hit the family hard, Houa dropped out ...

BEATRICE SIVIERO

Indigenous Cambodians stripped of ancestral land

In the remote and densely forested northeastern province of Mondulkiri in Cambodia, Song Pro, a member of the indigenous Bunong community, stares at a rubber plantation that was once a sacred forest. When the war in Indochina came to Cambodia in the 1970s, the forest saved ...

Nehru Pry

From Thailand to the Mekong Region, Netflix and Purin Pictures Expand Reach of Second Short Film Camp

Twelve teams of directors and producers from Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have been selected to take part in a ten-day filmmaking workshop this December. This is the second year running that Netflix is a major sponsor of the Short Film Camp led by Purin ...

Netflix

The Peculiar Gender Dynamics of Hanoi's Male-Dominated Cờ Tướng Scene

On a sunset wander through Hanoi, you may be surprised by the peculiar sight of men haphazardly perched in nooks and crannies playing the ancient game of xiangqi. The strangely spectacular Chinese strategy game has for generations been hugely popular in Hanoi, though interestingly it seems only ...

Elise Luong

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