Announcement: The Winner of the inaugural ANU Southeast Asia Institute Student Essay Prize

We are pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural Southeast Asia Institute Student Essay Prize. The call received 10 submissions consisting of essays written on a wide array of topics from ‘gastrodiplomacy’ in Southeast Asia, resource extraction policies in West Papua, and bilateral relations between Philippines and Japan. 

William Frangia’s paper titled “The Threat of Salafi Jihadism in Indonesia" emerged as a clear winner. The committee was impressed by the depth of research and nuanced argument advanced in the work including original data analysis of trends from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Global Terrorism Index (GTI). Frangia’s thought-provoking paper highlights how terrorist activities have evolved to counter Indonesia’s current violent extremism strategy to make a case for why terrorism is not in decline contrary to existing views. Rather, it remains a serious threat and one that requires a longitudinal perspective to bear witness to critical transformations in the form and prevalence of this threat.

Frangia’s paper was originally submitted for the course ASIA6516: Indonesia: Politics, Society and Developmentduring the first semester of this academic year. It demonstrates high quality in writing and showcases the research strength of harnessing existing databases to generate empirical work.

The prize committee was comprised of Dr Lia Kent (RegNet), Associate Professor Sue Thompson (Crawford) and Dr Maria Tanyag (Bell School).