Economic nationalism is back, according to a new wave of scholarly and popular analyses. Supply chain shocks, China’s rise, and the chaos of Trump’s tariffs have prompted a rush of declarations that industrial policy has returned from exile, and neoliberal orthodoxy is finished.
But in some places, economic nationalism never died. Sustained protectionism across developing Asia has been the subject of many important political economy studies over the years. From the East Asian miracles to dynamic middle-income economies like Thailand and Malaysia, scholars like Stephan Haggard, Richard Doner, Eric Helleiner and Meredith Woo-Cummings have all puzzled over when, why, and how states intervene in markets—and of course whether they should.
In his new book, Rice Politics in Southeast Asia, Jamie Davidson makes an important contribution to this rich tradition. He examines nationalist persistence across Southeast Asia’s rice industry, the region’s most important dietary staple and agricultural commodity. The book asks why governments pursue rice self-sufficiency, even when a cost–benefit analysis would appear to argue against such a policy path. The book compares three rice-deficient nations in island Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. For more than a generation, these countries have protected their rice industries, invested in production, and limited imports. The upshot is that rice prices here remain mostly above global averages. A “rational” economist would ask, why not open the floodgates to imports from their rice-abundant neighbors, which would drive down prices and satiate their large populations?
Davidson’s answer is, ultimately, emotion.
He argues that governments have pursued rice self-sufficiency not primarily because of cultural attachments to local rice production (though he acknowledges the social and spiritual significance of this critical commodity), nor for electoral support in rice-producing regions (though there is plenty of that), nor because protection suits the short-term interests of parastatals or corrupt intermediaries (though many such actors feature across all three countries).
Instead, Davidson argues that self-sufficiency as an idea and driving emotional force makes protectionism a persistent mode of policymaking. There is, he argues, a shared commitment among “production nationalists” to the idea and ambition of securing an independent source of food for the nation. Davidson defines production nationalists as a category of elites—bureaucrats, ministers, presidents, and even civil society actors—who share a sense of nationalist pride in achieving food sovereignty, which in turn gives rise to a lasting commitment to rice self-sufficiency (pp. 10–12).
As Davidson writes, he wants to pay emotions “more causal heed” than prior theories of protectionism have allowed. But, and importantly, rather than just proclaim that emotions matter, Davidson goes on to trace the historical antecedents of this protectionist impulse across three countries. He identifies a shared “critical juncture” that nurtured an especially deep and consequential nationalist attachment to the idea and ambition of rice self-sufficiency—the Green Revolution.
So transformative was the Green Revolution for increasing cultivation and reducing poverty, that it set each country on a trajectory whereby generations of state managers made sovereignty the primary goal of rice policy. In turn, interventionism, subsidies, import controls, all became popular and remained legitimate tools with which to govern this critical staple.
To build this argument, the book is divided into two sections. Given the explanatory weight given to the Green Revolution, Davidson dedicates two chapters to describing the context in which the Revolution was planned and executed. While there are already several major studies of the intervention, Davidson revisits this work with a view to emphasizing the way in which the “performance success” of this policy went on to shape the ambitions and decisions of a new generation of production nationalists.
The second section of the book consists of three chapters, each a deep dive into his three country cases. Malaysia and Indonesia provide strong substantiations for the argument—each participated in the Green Revolution and for decades to come developed a relatively institutionalized set of protectionist policies that weathered global and domestic crises and pressures. The Philippines’ case, on the other hand, is more complicated. For decades, consecutive governments took a protective approach. But populist strongman, President Duterte, broke with historical precedent by liberalizing rice imports in the face of inflationary pressures. Still, Davidson remains committed to the enduring power of nationalist emotions for sustaining extended periods of rice protection across these cases.
Substantiating such an argument is a complex empirical task. As for all works on economic nationalism, the challenge is to identify and weigh up the explanatory power of vested interests on the one hand (like farmers or parastatal importers) and the ideas of policymakers and politicians on the other (free-marketeers or economic protectionists)—an endeavor that requires careful and historically grounded field research. Davidson meets this challenge.
He takes readers deep into the paddy fields, rice mills, and bureaucratic bodies, where rice is made, traded, and ultimately protected. Davidson demonstrates a remarkable intimacy with each case, built through years of reading primary and secondary sources, and interviewing a range of stakeholders from politicians to rice millers. It is a major accomplishment and an exemplary case of deep, small-N comparative political economy work.
The book’s argument is layered, deliberately encompassing, and Davidson is careful to outline the many contingencies and variations among cases, too. This brief review cannot do justice to the nuanced picture that Davidson paints of each country. There is no single, entirely clean causal variable; instead, he argues that among the multiple factors and actors that have over time contributed to Southeast Asia’s protective approach to rice, it is ideology, national pride, and sovereign ambition that overshadow other explanations. This is, ultimately, a story of how ideas emerge, persist, and come to determine the direction of economic policy.
The Philippines’ case is, however, confounding. Duterte’s sudden break with entrenched domestic rice protection is dealt with mostly in the conclusion of chapter 5. Reflecting on the differences between the Philippines’ political economy and his other cases, Davidson determines that a “certain combination of middling executive power, substantial parties, vibrant agrarian nationalism, and ethnically infused policymaking” (p. 223) inhibits reform in Malaysia and Indonesia; thus, the absence of this mix of factors frees up a strong president like Duterte to “break the model.”
Some readers will push back on the scope of the book’s argument, and particularly the multi-pronged explanation for Philippines’ exceptionalism. The comprehensiveness that makes Rice Politics so impressive on the one hand will raise the question of parsimony. If ideology matters (most), but also history matters, and institutions matter, and identity matters too, then what, if anything, does the book rule out? Scholars who want a tighter, more portable model to explain similar or distinctive dynamics across other major agricultural economies may feel some frustration.
But this kind of political economy work is not designed to achieve parsimony. Over two decades, the number of small-N deep comparative studies has shrunk in the face of a hegemonic turn to quantitative causal analysis. The discipline may now be approaching an inflection point; there are diminishing analytical returns to the ever-smaller causal effects on which so many political science papers turn, and statistical models are increasingly designed and run by AI machines, eroding the value of these skills. Davidson’s study reminds us of the value that deep country research holds—spending time in the field, speaking with interlocuters, knowing one’s cases intimately, and speaking local languages allow researchers to unpick the multiple interests and ideas that frontline bureaucrats grapple with every day as they design policies, which, from the outside, may seem puzzling.
Rice Politics is of immense value not only to students and scholars of Southeast Asia’s political economies specifically but also to those studying agricultural policy more generally. Davidson offers a model of how to trace a policy domain across countries and time, how to unpick interests from ideas, and also how to explain those ideas without overly reductive references to culture. Rice Politics is an impressive achievement and important contribution.
