Beyond Mahathir: Malaysian Politics and Its Discontents

Beyond Mahathir is a timely response to the planned retirement in October 2003 of Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and poses vital questions about "Malaysian politics after Mahathir." It examines Malaysia's long-term social transformation, the global disruptions of July 1997 and September 11, 2001, key leaders' calculations of power, and the pitfalls of leadership transition that intersected to produce the political dramas of Mahathir's final decade in power. Organizing arguments around the critical but unstable fortunes of a thirty-year nationalist-capitalist project, it brings to life Mahathir's predicaments, contradictions in Anwar Ibrahim's career, Reformasi's creative dissent, and the cultural imperative behind the Alternative Front's "rainbow coalition". The result is an instructive guide to the momentous events that ultimately revolved around competing conceptions of what the future portends or should portend for Malaysia, and the bitterly contested ways of getting there.