Edited by three seasoned scholars with respective expertise in Malaysia/Indonesia, Myanmar, and Cambodia, Education and power in contemporary Southeast Asia is an important addition to the field. Education has multiple and ambivalent relationships with power; it can indeed empower individuals by strengthening ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem-solving’ skills, but it has also been used, in Southeast Asia as elsewhere, as a tool to serve diverse interests and convey various narratives. Diverse forms of education are largely influenced and instrumentalised by various elites, including state, non-state, and private actors, and shaped by both endogenous and exogenous influences. The volume aims to describe various aspects of the interplay between education and power in Southeast Asia, a region characterised by its diversity. This diversity includes access to various forms and levels of education, although overall access has significantly increased across the region over the last few decades.

Tied together and contextualised by an introduction and conclusion by the editors, the 14 contributions of this volume provide relatively good geographic coverage of the region, with one to three chapters on most of its 11 countries. Many of the contributors are early-career scholars and/or originate from the countries studied in this book, often affiliated with their respective universities. The editors’ commitment to harmonising the work presented in the volume is apparent in the contributions’ similar structure, typically with methodological or semi-methodological headings and explicit subheadings that greatly simplify navigation within and between contributions. Unlike most previous edited volumes dealing with education in Southeast Asia, which typically focus on a specific issue (e.g., nation-building or neoliberalism), Education and power in contemporary Southeast Asia covers three main sub-themes, according to which the book is clearly organised.

Part I deals with centralisation/decentralisation, investigating — through contributions on Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar — the motivations for and effects of concentrating or deconcentrating control over education, aiming to better understand how national, transnational, and subnational groups promote their interests, compete, and cooperate through education. Of particular interest to this reviewer (admittedly more familiar with continental Southeast Asia) is Uerpairojkit’s contribution on the disempowered ‘tiny teacher’. Set in the context of Thailand but echoing research conducted in other countries of the region, this chapter vividly describes norms contributing to overwhelmed multitasking teachers, running after ‘policy hyperactivity’, and constrained by cultural expectations of sacrifice and obedience to a largely centralised, top-down hierarchy, which often contrasts with the ‘traditional’ representation of the teacher as a highly respected figure. The chapter by Saw Than Min Htun and Mortensen on challenges in accessing higher education in Karen National Union (KNU)-controlled areas of Myanmar is also of great interest, documenting through interviews conducted in 2020 a situation set to evolve further, as the 2021 coup and its aftermath have reopened conversations on the nature of the Myanmar State, well beyond the limited decentralisation process that was unfolding in the 2011–2020 decade.

Part II is dedicated to privatisation and marketisation, the debates between education as a public/private good, the neoliberalisation of education systems, and the development of parallel ‘shadow’ education systems. Discussing funding models, the aim for ‘autonomy’, and the implications in terms of educational equity and justice, Metro’s contribution on the privatisation of higher education in Myanmar is of particular interest to this reviewer, especially as different forms of private education have gained momentum following the 2021 coup, as alternatives to education under military control. Other contributions on Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and the Philippines provide valuable insights into different forms of private education and the financial implications of access to education for students and households.

Finally, Part III deals with the ways education promotes, or works against, equity and justice, focusing on gender, religion, ethnicity, and disability: the gendered nature of the allocation of prestigious state scholarships in Singapore; women and children from low-income households in Vietnam, who need internationally certified forms of vocational training for higher income and global mobility; (re)education/rehabilitation programmes for ‘deviant’ transgender Muslim individuals in Malaysia; and community learning centres contributing to maintaining and strengthening the Orang Asli identity in Peninsular Malaysia.

In the concluding chapter, reflecting on the power dynamics and actors presented in the 14 contributions, the editors work toward theorising the meaning of education and power in the specific Southeast Asian regional context. It appears that most Southeast Asian states intend to be interventionist and regulate different forms of education to ensure it does not contradict their interests, but vary in their capacity, legitimacy, and credibility to do so. Other influential actors in the realm of education include extra-regional institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, or OECD, local actors sometimes willing to resist or alter the influence of states in education and beyond, and regional movements that entail transnational online solidarities between national forces resisting state demonstrations of power.

This concluding chapter further highlights the main takeaways of the volume regarding the implications and significance of its 14 contributions. Noting the overall gap between academia and policymaking, the editors encourage the chapter authors and scholars of education in general to seek ways to bring their understanding to educational policies and classroom practices. They suggest that scholars and practitioners of education engage with underlying philosophical questions about the meaning of education, such as its role in ‘preserving’ culture and ‘maintaining’ social hierarchies versus ‘advancing’ societies economically and socially. They call for managing both naïve views that ‘education’ equals ‘good’ and pessimistic visions underestimating its transformative power. Finally, they suggest further research on the role of regional actors (such as ASEAN), as well as on alternative conceptions of identities conveyed by educational opportunities outside government systems.

The wide geographical and thematic scope of the book almost inevitably implies that readers will have unequal interest in its different sections and contributions, but this ambitious coverage of the relations between education and power across the region is also a clear strength of the volume, making it a particularly valuable new resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in the field.