Professor Farish Noor and Dr. Alan Chong on the Role of Historical Scholarship

Presentism can be a common trap for researchers in the political sciences, declared Professor Farish Noor, UIII Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FOSS). He was introducing the historical scholarship of Dr. Alan Chong, a guest lecturer at FOSS’ BrownBag event on November 7, 2024. He could have been paraphrasing iconic scientist Albert Einstein, who famously asserted that the distinction between past, present and future is simply a “stubbornly persistent illusion”.

Dr. Chong is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Multilateralism Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. His topic was “Between Nationalism and Internationalism: Soekarno and Lee Kuan Yew on Postcolonial Foreign Policy Dilemmas”. But his method, historical biography, or microhistory, formed the dual focus of the talk. The second offered a disciplinary challenge to, or intellectual expansion of, the presentist approach common to many of the social sciences.   

Dr. Chong compared and contrasted the applied thought leadership of iconic leaders Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore and Soekarno in Indonesia. His particular focus was each leaders’ pioneering approaches to nationalism and internationalism in their countries against the backdrop of deep colonial pasts. The biographical research on these two defining leaders, allied by the cross-cultural nature of their Eastern heritage and learned experience of the West, revealed a complex explanation of their strategic similarities and differences. This complexity could be understood deeply, argued Chong, in ways accessible only through an interrogation of their respective pasts contextualized by the broader cultural, political and economic circumstances each faced.  

History within history, or the microhistory of biography, may seem at first counter-intuitive as a method in the omnipresent political sciences. In a world so intricately interconnected it’s reasonable to assume that only macro explanations could hope to capture its practical, real-time meaning for us. But Alan’s revelations of the complexities and contradictions embodied by these two global figures, reminded us that we needed the inductive, often messy, human detail, as well as the deductive explanatory tools of theory, to attempt to paint the whole picture of the profoundly human endeavor called politics. 

Dr. Chong’s talk, Professor Noor’s commentary, and the high level of the engagement of the audience, testified by the rush of questions, reminded this observer of something UIII Rector Prof. Jamhari said at UIII Convocation Day recently. In welcoming new students, he explained that today’s pressing global challenges demanded scholarship beyond the traditional disciplinary silos. Solving complex problems required more complex inter- and transdisciplinary approaches.

Dr. Chong demonstrated how his approach could reveal the complexities of past leadership, not only to shed causal light on the present political situation of Singapore and Indonesia, but to suggest first principles for solving contemporary issues. Those lessons learned from historical thinking can add to and intersect with the insights drawn from other social sciences, humanities and even the natural sciences, to produce the innovative research questions and solutions of the next generation of scholars.

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*) Dr. Elizabeth Summerfield is a visiting research fellow at UIII and a representative of Australian Volunteer International (AVI).

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