Congratulations to Htet Thiha Zaw for being selected as the winner of the Southeast Asian Politics Related Group (SEAPRG) Best Paper Prize in the Emerging Scholar category!
The Southeast Asian Politics Related Group (SEAPRG) was organized in 2014 after several years of informal meetings and lunches among Southeast Asian specialists at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association. They are a small and supportive group of political scientists. Their work is grounded in Southeast Asian contexts; they utilize a variety of methods and span across multiple subfields. SEAPRG sponsors panels at annual APSA meetings, offers paper prizes, and organizes other events at APSA such as short courses and meetings. They also host a syllabus bank on Southeast Asian politics. SEAPRG gives two Best Paper Prizes for papers related to politics in Southeast Asia, presented at APSA in the prior year. Click below to learn more.
Htet Thiha Zaw is a U-M Political Science Ph.D. Alumni and Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. He studies how institutions created and maintained by indigenous societies shaped historical state development in the Global South, with regional expertise in Southeast Asia. His research shows that Indigenous political and social institutions (many of which preceded colonial rule) are key to understanding how colonial elites constructed state institutions, from allocating infrastructure to wield coercive power to replacing Indigenous schools with state-controlled schools. Thiha provides empirical evidence for my arguments with original data from pre-colonial and colonial records, integrating quantitative analyses of cross-section, panel, geospatial, and text-as-data with qualitative analyses from archival research. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Education Review, and International Journal of Educational Development, among other venues.
