Fung Public Seminar Series: Whispers of Dissent: Quiet Activism under an Absolutist State

Mu'izz Abdul Khalid

2024-25 Fung Global Fellow

PIIRS, Princeton University

Mu’izz Abdul Khalid earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and his master's degree from University College London (UCL). He specializes in comparative politics and history, with a particular interest in monarchical regimes and a focus on Southeast Asia. At present, he is a Research Associate at Global Awareness and Impact Alliance (GAIA), the first non-profit and non-governmental research organization in Brunei Darussalam. Concurrently, he works as an adjunct lecturer at the Department of History and International Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). As a Fung Global Fellow, he is converting his dissertation into a manuscript, which focuses on the interplay between British colonial and Bruneian indigenous forces in forming the sole absolutist state in Southeast Asia.

Meredith Weiss

Visiting Scholar at APARC, 2024-2025; Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia

Stanford University

Meredith L. Weiss joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as 2024-2025 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia for the 2024 fall quarter. She is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In several books—most recently, 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)—numerous articles, and over a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She has conducted years of fieldwork in those two countries, along with shorter periods in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste, and has held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. Weiss is the founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series, Politics & Society in Southeast Asia. As a Lee Kong Chian NUS–Stanford fellow, she will be working primarily on a book manuscript on Malaysian sociopolitical development.