This article critically engages with ‘apolitical warriors’ as a conceptual tool for understanding how Gurkhas and their families are discursively embedded in political discourses. The analysis offered will shed light on the limited scholarly attention given to the implications of this soldiering community's ‘impartial’ and ‘martial’ identity in shaping ideas of (non-)belonging within Southeast Asia. By focusing on remembrances, this article draws out how a nation's past is produced vis-à-vis commemorative events and, within this context, it comparatively examines how Gurkhas, as military migrants, are remembered and represented during ceremonies held at, for example, the Gurkha Cemetery in Ipoh, Malaysia and the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore. A central question involves evaluating the role of historical memory in informing the extent to which the Gurkha community is incorporated within the national narratives of countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei. Herein, I argue that their perceived apolitical tenor has long served a dual purpose which, in turn, forms the axis of their ambivalent belonging. While Gurkhas are celebrated as foreign warriors reputed for their invaluable contribution to these nations, they are excluded through policy measures that rule out the prospect of citizenship and govern their status as transient migrants.

Studies of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) over the last dozen years or so have seen the rise to prominence of a new orthodoxy to explain its outcome. This new orthodoxy argues that population control under the Briggs Plan's resettlement programme (mid-1950 to mid-1952) became increasingly effective and was the principal reason that the Malayan Communist Party was forced to change policy by issuing the October 1951 Resolutions. These events, it is contended, turned the tide in the fighting and led to the government's eventual victory. Paying particular attention to the sources used, this analysis shows how the research of a wide range of scholars over the years since the end of the Emergency, challenges the core propositions of the new orthodoxy. The analysis also illustrates that the focus on the new orthodoxy has inhibited the examination of alternative explanations for the course and result of the Emergency, which could usefully be explored.

This article uses the career and writings of political philosopher Wu Teh-yao (1916-1994) to argue that Singapore in the 1970s–1980s embodied crucial aspects of conservatism as a modern, transnational ideological project in post-Second World War Asia. Wu opposed radicalism and was sceptical towards liberal democracy and Westernisation, all while promoting culture and tradition to legitimise a less-than-democratic political and social order. His worldview was shaped by a peripatetic life that spanned Asia and the United States and found expression in his propaganda work for the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, presidency of Tunghai University, and, above all, contributions to nation building in Singapore. Indeed, during this period, no intellectual lent as much discursive and administrative support, in English and Chinese, to legitimising authoritarianism and social conservatism in the city-state. Both intellectual biography and social history of ideology, the article explains how Singapore represented the realisation of what we typically call ‘Asian Values’ and was embedded within a wider conservative ideoscape. It questions the conventional temporality and genealogy of Asian Values, arguing that they did not simply flow downwards from upon high, but were also produced and circulated by figures who operated between the state and public.