The Covid-19 pandemic has presented major challenges to societies around the globe, disrupting economies, raising obstacles to human mobility, and contributing to political upheaval on a scale that finds few parallels in living memory. Though scholarship has not been exempted from these disruptions, Hyun Bang Shin, Murray Mckenzie and Do Young Oh have succeeded in putting together a diverse spread of commentary that responds critically to this moment of global crisis. Written by scholars and activists at different career stages, with a variety of disciplinary persuasions and geographic expertise, the resulting scholarship sketches out some of the major challenges faced by Southeast Asian societies during the pandemic and fruitfully points to future directions deserving of further study, all while remaining highly accessible to non-specialists. The fissures and disjunctures revealed by the pandemic are, as this volume demonstrates, rooted in broader ‘social challenges, risks, or inequities that were already in place’ (p. 3). The research presented here tempers state-centred narratives of success, drawing attention to issues, groups, and places that have received ‘selective and inequitable visibility’ (p. 3), pointing to instances during the pandemic where people have fallen through the cracks.

The book, an anthology of 26 chapters, including the introduction and conclusion by the editors, is organised into three parts: the first addresses the impact of the pandemic on ‘urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment’ (p. 18). The second section deals with key but often less visible groups of people—border-crossing transients and migrant workers. The third addresses forms of community-led collective action and mutual aid that arose during the pandemic, often to alleviate hardships related to gaps in state capacity.

As a region with great diversity in terms of political systems, languages, and economic structures, Southeast Asia is a particularly instructive object of study for social scientists. While its dynamic cities have seen significant growth and greater integration into the global economy, uneven development especially in ‘peripheral urban areas’ (p. 42) also created vulnerabilities to Covid-19 and other forms of socioeconomic hardship (chapter 2). As a result, while many Southeast Asian societies displayed significant technological innovation, civil society and grassroots-level initiative (chapters 18, 20, 22 to 25) in their fight against the pandemic, it must be remembered that this period also saw the deepening of authoritarian forms of governance, exploitation of transnational labour (chapters 11 to 15), and greater political unrest (chapter 19). Moreover, the studies here also reveal limits to the considerable power of technology and the modern state to mitigate negative outcomes related to the pandemic—even in reasonably well-connected Malaysia, the roll out of online learning experienced major difficulties that curbed effectiveness on the ground (chapter 3). Many contributors also point to crucial questions that policy-minded readers may find useful while thinking over future solutions—the need to consider greater digital transparency, the future of state–civil society relations, and attention to socioeconomically marginalised groups.

Focusing on Southeast Asian experiences of Covid-19, as this volume sets out to do, accomplishes more than pointing out areas for policy improvement. The essays here provide a needed counterbalance to ‘an immoderate dependence on sophisticated analytics that caused the neglect of other forms of public health knowledge’ including ethnography and ‘field experience’ (p. 11). Policy failure and unjust outcomes are thus linked to the ways in which states and societies construct (and fail to construct) knowledge of how the pandemic and its associated policy countermeasures affect people. In invoking Dipesh Chakrabarty's call to ‘provincialize Europe’, an important aspect of the book's critique is accordingly a postcolonial one. Generating data and observations on the ground of the ‘global South’ redresses the relative underrepresentation of Southeast Asia in Covid-19 scholarship so far and provides correctives to theory generated and centred in the ‘global North’. This is especially clear in the chapters on overseas Filipino workers (chapters 7, 13 and 14), where the authors point to the importance of Filipino labour to the economies and health systems of countries outside Southeast Asia, including the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and these workers’ unique vulnerability to the pandemic. At the same time, several chapters’ consideration of highly connected, wealthy Southeast Asian cities and societies like Singapore remind us that the line between global North and South runs through the heart of ‘Southeast Asia’ itself (chapters 11 and 12).

As is natural for ‘first responder’ studies involving rapidly developing crises, there remains room for further investigation and the gathering of higher quality and more detailed data. This will hopefully be increasingly possible as barriers hampering scholarly inquiry begin to lift with restrictions. The contributors also acknowledge the difficulty of making long-term assessments at this stage, for instance, regarding the sustainability of otherwise encouraging community-led initiatives and other forms of collective action. Whether these grassroots initiatives indeed constitute a basis for an ‘[alternative] urban development paradigm’ (p. 214), as several essays are optimistic about, remains an open question that requires more sustained analysis to begin to answer. Nonetheless, this volume is an excellent foundation for thinking about the pandemic's effects on the complex, interconnected societies of Southeast Asia that should be of broad interest beyond the contributors’ already wide disciplinary affiliations, including undergraduate students and members of the public looking to make sense of the strange world the pandemic has created (and revealed).