Welcome to the Asia Research Centre

Murdoch University’s Asia Research Centre is celebrating twenty years of research into capitalist development and political conflict in Asia this year. The Centre was formed with Federal funding as a Special Centre of the Australian Research Council in 1991, the same year that the Soviet Union collapsed, Keating unseated Hawke, and the web browser was invented.

Since that time, the Centre has developed to become one of Australia’s leading concentrations of expertise on South East Asia, with a thriving programme of research on Japanese studies also. Murdoch University has some of the world's leading scholars working on Asia. Highlights of the recent research agenda include an AusAID funded project conducted by a team of Centre members led by Emeritus Professor Richard Robison on the political economy of aid effectiveness; an Australian Future Fellowship awarded to Professor Vedi Hadiz to study populist Islam in Indonesia, the Middle East and North Africa; and an Australian Professorial Fellowship awarded to Professor Garry Rodan to study the politics of representation in South East Asia. The Asia Research Centre also recently became a member of an international consortium of universities investigating the emergence of an Indian Ocean economy from the 10th century onwards, through a project led by historian Professor James Warren.

The Centre was established with a mission to investigate the impact of the new middle classes that were emerging in Southeast Asia following a decade of economic boom in the 1980s. This resulted in a book series entitled The New Rich in Asia, which comprised eight volumes dealing with different aspects of the new political conflicts spawned by the demands and interests of new social forces in Asia. In the 1990s, also, businesses in Australia were first becoming interested in Southeast Asia as an export market, and the Asia Research Centre hosted an array of conferences and briefings for WA businesses eager to learn about tax regimes, investment laws and labour relations in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam.

The end of the 1990s brought the Asian Financial Crisis, and Centre researchers were at the forefront of attempts to explain the suddenness with which Asia’s economies went bust, hosting a workshop on the issue which was addressed by then-Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. The Centre’s pioneering studies of the relationship between class, capital and the state in Southeast Asia gave researchers a particular framework for explaining the nature of political contestation in Asia as well as the fortunes of Asian economies. This framework, sometimes referred to as the ‘Murdoch School’ of political economy, has become increasingly influential, attracting the attention of scholars in Europe and the US as well as across Australia.

In 2012, the resource boom that is tying the state and the Commonwealth ever more closely into the economies of Asia, the emergence of non-traditional security threats such as infectious diseases and organised crime, the politics of poor people’s movements in Southeast Asia, and the governance of Asia’s dwindling natural resources are among the issues currently investigated by Centre staff and research students.

The Asia Research Centre is located in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities and affiliated with the Institute for Sustainable Societies, Education and Politics at Murdoch University. The Centre encompasses researchers from across Murdoch University and regularly engages in collaboration with researchers from other universities around the world.