Meredith Weiss
Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her latest books are The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020) and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022). She has also edited or co-edited over a dozen volumes, most recently, Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023) and Putting Women Up: Promoting Gender Equality in Myanmar Politics (ISEAS, 2024). Her articles appear in Asian Studies Review, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Current Sociology, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Human Rights, World Politics, and other journals. Her primary current projects include collaborative studies of urban governance and public-goods delivery, of civil society in Southeast Asia, and of youth politics in Asia; and a monograph on Malaysian sociopolitical development.
Professor Weiss co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements book series on Politics and Society in Southeast Asia and is associate editor for Southeast Asia of the Association for Asian Studies’ (AAS) Journal of Asian Studies. She was co-founder and inaugural chair of the Southeast Asian Politics related group of the American Political Science Association (APSA), has chaired the Southeast Asia Council of the AAS and APSA’s Asia Workshops steering committee, and was a co-founder of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS) network. Having worked previously at the East-West Center Washington and DePaul University before joining the department in 2008, she has also held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. She received her MA and PhD in Political Science from Yale University and a BA in Political Science, Policy Studies, and English from Rice University.
Selected Books
Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, Allen Hicken, and Paul Hutchcroft, Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/mobilizing-for-elections/EC753A0FC2D6BF9385E1AEB96FB0D043
Eva Hansson and Meredith L. Weiss (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023)
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Civil-and-Uncivil-Society-in-Southeast-Asia/Hansson-Weiss/p/book/9780367422011
Meredith L. Weiss, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP and NUS Press, 2020)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750045/the-roots-of-resilience/
Cheng Chen and Meredih L. Weiss (ed.), The Political Logics of Anticorruption Efforts in Asia (SUNY Press, 2019)
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6819-the-political-logics-of-anticor.aspx
Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia (ed.), Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression (U of Illinois Press, 2013)
https://academic.oup.com/illinois-scholarship-online/book/30184
Meredith L. Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP and NUS Press, 2011)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100328300
Meredith L. Weiss, Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia (Stanford UP, 2006)
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6943
Selected Articles
Meredith L. Weiss, “Scapegoating Queers: Pink-Blocking as State Strategy.” Current Sociology (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231217498
Meredith L. Weiss, “Malaysia’s Anwar, Anwar’s Malaysia.” Current History 122:845 (2023), pp. 217–23, https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2023.122.845.217.
Meredith L. Weiss and Ibrahim Suffian, “Decline and Fall of Malaysia’s Dominant-Party System,” Pacific Affairs 96:2 (2022), pp. 281-301, https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/perspectives/decline-and-fall-of-malaysias-dominant-party-system/.
Allen Hicken, Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, and Burhanuddin Muhtadi, “Buying Brokers,” World Politics 74:1 (2022), pp. 77–120, https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0043887121000216
Meredith L. Weiss, “Legacies of the Cold War in Malaysia: Anything But Communism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50:4 (2020), pp. 511–29.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2019.1709128
Meredith L. Weiss, “Duelling Networks: Relational Clientelism in Electoral-Authoritarian Malaysia.” Democratization27:1 (2020): 100–18, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1625889.
Lee Morgenbesser and Meredith L. Weiss, “Survive and Thrive: Field Research in Authoritarian Southeast Asia,” Asian Studies Review 42:3 (September 2018), pp. 385-403. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10357823.2018.1472210