Drawing on English, Chinese, and Malay newspapers, this article examines the ‘oily man’, a figure who shifted between sexual assailant, ghost, and intruder across twentieth-century Singapore and urban and semi-urban peninsular Malaya/Malaysia. It situates him not as a timeless ‘Malay’ entity but as an elastic label and repertoire, assembled and reassembled through rumours, retellings, and recurring events. Departing from most studies of Malay-world monsters, which reduce such figures to allegories or cinematic symbols of gender, modernity, or social change, this article demonstrates how the oily man’s historical force lay in intrusions, panics, and community responses—events mediated, disputed, and reworked across time and place. His history is framed through three registers: experience, person, and myth, which trace how this elastic label took shape through encounter, attribution, and retelling. Experience captures sightings, rumours, and assaults that animated fear; person traces how individuals were accused or apprehended as oily men; myth designates the narratives and repertoires that amplified these encounters in film, fiction, and folklore. Across these registers, the article shows how monsters emerge through lived circulations of testimony, attribution, and storytelling. It highlights the value of historical research that privileges experience and offers a framework for future scholarship: monsters as unstable, context-specific composites of encounter, narrative, and transmission that illuminate the entanglements of state, society, culture, and religion in post-colonial Malaysia and Singapore, with resonance for the study of rumour and monstrosity elsewhere in Asia.

Despite the increasing popularity of self-directed accounts within pension plans, little is known about what drives voluntary participation in such accounts. This paper examines how financial trust influences the usage of self-directed accounts in Singapore’s national pension scheme using data from the World Values Survey and instrumental variable methods. We find that financial trust drives self-investment of pension monies: A one-unit increase in trust increases the likelihood of participation by 45 percentage points, controlling for covariates. This finding remains robust when potential endogeneity and alternative empirical specifications are considered. Our findings highlight the critical role of trust in shaping retirement investment behavior and pension choices.

This article examines how Singapore manages US pressure over semiconductor diversion without adopting US extraterritorial export-control logic. Taking AI-server diversion cases as its starting point, it contrasts a US regime that follows controlled items, end users, affiliates, and computing access across borders with Singapore’s territorial, list-based framework, anchored in the multilateral non-proliferation baseline beyond which US controls have moved. It introduces the concept of ‘hub economies’. Unlike chokepoint economies, which are asked to restrict what they produce, hub economies are asked to police what they host, handle, and route. Alignment turns on political judgment, not legal capacity. The article argues that Singapore regards the costs to its strategic autonomy and hub standing as too high. It preserves ‘doctrinal independence’ by retaining multilateral categories, and practices ‘doctrinal substitution’ by reaching diversion through general criminal law and, potentially, cybercrime law. Transactions through Singapore are constrained not by the regulatory divergence but by extraterritorial US controls, licence conditions, and anticipatory firm compliance. Whether this balance holds remains open: remote-access controls, proposed legislation concerning chip traceability and corporate affiliation, and Pax Silica may narrow the space for non-alignment. The findings illuminate how States manage asymmetric extraterritorial pressure without converting it into domestic legal obligation.

Caregiving behaviour is critical in companion animal welfare. Using the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation and Behaviour (COM-B) model of human behaviour change (HBC), this study investigated the influence of Capability, Opportunity and Motivation on dog owners’ engagement in welfare-enhancing practices. In an online survey, a self-selected sample of 240 Singaporean dog owners rated their engagement in 20 caregiving practices, and responded to 31 statements on their Capability, Opportunity and Motivation in dog care, using a five-point Likert scale. Responses on practices were aggregated into relative Welfare Scores for each respondent, with higher scores indicating greater engagement. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to derive first principal components’ (PC1) scores representing respondent’s Capability, Opportunity and Motivation. To investigate the relationship between engagement in caregiving practices and their behavioural determinants, a Generalised Linear Model was performed with Welfare Score as the response variable and PC1 scores for Capability, Opportunity and Motivation as predictor variables. All three COM-B components emerged as significant positive predictors of Welfare Score, with Opportunity showing the largest effect size, followed by Capability and Motivation. Descriptive analyses indicated moderate engagement in caregiving practices, alongside high Capability, fair Opportunity and strong Motivation among respondents. As the first study to apply HBC to dog welfare in Singapore, this research highlights the collective importance of Capability, Opportunity and Motivation in shaping caregiving and suggests that Behaviour Change Wheel-informed interventions and policies should target all three components, in particular Opportunity, to effectively promote dog welfare.

Taking Singapore’s Nanyang University (Nantah) as a case study, this article examines Cold War American efforts to reshape higher education in Southeast Asia, and the efforts of local elites to leverage these resources for their own agendas. Best known as the only ‘Chinese’ university outside of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Nantah has been variously critiqued as an institutional home for leftist-student activism and Chinese communal interests in decolonizing Southeast Asia. This article argues that it was also a centrepiece in an American-led political agenda to contain communist China by supporting ‘Free Chinese’ educational facilities in the diaspora. It demonstrates how American policies aimed at supporting Chinese higher education outside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) encountered the local politics of decolonization in Singapore, producing new educational infrastructures in the region oriented towards American universities. While Nanyang University was initially the locus of American attention in the early Cold War, its strategic significance as a ‘Chinese’ university in Southeast Asia was increasingly sidelined by an assertive Singapore government eager to leverage American resources for its own developmental needs. Arguably, the longer term legacies of this episode can be discerned through Singapore’s centrality in the globalization of American higher education in Asia, and the broader reorienting of intellectual networks and epistemologies in Singapore which endures to the present day.

The rules-based international order faces an existential paradox. Eight decades after its founding, international law has never been more vital to human flourishing, yet it has also never been more imperilled. Developments in recent years such as the invasion of Ukraine and the erosion of the multilateral trading system represent more than institutional failures – they expose critical fault lines that, if left unaddressed, threaten to fracture the foundational architecture of international law. This article explores what these trends reveal about the future of the international rule of law and contends that the way forward requires a spirit of sober optimism – one that neither abandons hope nor ignores hard realities about the existing legal order. It suggests that this approach represents our best hope for securing humanity’s shared future.

Decolonization left the future of small, city-states uncertain. Without large domestic markets to turn to, some city-states developed financial industries. Comparing Kuwait and Singapore, I examine how these states developed their financial sectors after decades of colonial underdevelopment. While both states sought to develop international financial centers, Singapore was far more successful in doing so. Kuwait opened numerous merchant-owned, domestic commercial banks but with sluggish rates of growth, while Singapore saw the emergence of new state-run banks; the consolidation, modernization, and growth of privately owned banks; and the establishment of a rapidly growing global financial center. I identify three processes to explain this divergence: (1) the state’s ability to discipline merchant-capitalists; (2) the institutional legacies of colonialism and postcolonial maneuvering; and (3) the incorporation of transnational experts into ruling coalitions. By unearthing the mechanisms of financial development, this article contributes to sociologies of development, finance, expertise, and small states.

Research on nonprofit advocacy in non-Western settings is still rather limited. In this article, we address this limitation by examining the advocacy practices of nonprofit charitable organizations in Singapore, a non-liberal democratic city-state in Southeast Asia with a history of colonial rule. We ask the following questions: What are the key environmental and organizational factors that influence the scope and intensity of advocacy activities of nonprofit organizations? In particular, what is the effect of the political context on the advocacy strategies and tactics among these organizations? To answer these questions, we present a three-factor explanatory model of nonprofit advocacy incorporating cause, capacity, and context. The research methodology entails a survey of nonprofit executives from a random sample of Singapore human and social service organizations. Our findings shed light on how the various aspects of the political context—perceived opportunities and threats from government intervention and dependence on government funding—shape nonprofit advocacy in a non-Western setting.

A few years after Singapore was founded, Lady Sophia Raffles sponsored a school for girls started by the wife of a London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary. This and several other early attempts at female education by missionary women linked to LMS or the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) were largely forgotten by historians. Then there were girls’ schools operated by the Protestant Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE) in Britian; the secular Singapore Institution founded by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles; and the Catholic Convent of Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ) linked to Sœurs de l’Enfant Jésus-Nicolas Barré (EJNB) in France, followed by others. As there were many pioneering schools and some better-known ones tend to overshadow others, recent studies often contain inconsistent information as to which were the earliest schools, when they started, and who and which organisations were involved. This article uses primary sources from several archives to reconstruct the stories of the first Western-style girls’ schools on the island to hopefully clarify matters and close some knowledge gaps for readers interested in the history of female education in the early decades of colonial Singapore.

While ageing in place emphasises autonomy and the preference of older adults to remain in familiar environments, and ageing and place shifts attention to their movement across multiple locations, both frameworks have paid insufficient attention to the role of social networks in shaping the spatial practices of ageing. In this article, we propose ageing in networks as a complementary approach that foregrounds relationality. Rather than supplanting place-based models, ageing in networks highlights how older adults navigate spaces—both near and far—through their social ties, and how these ties mediate access to emotional and practical support. Drawing on original survey data from 1,199 residents aged 60–92 in two Singaporean public housing areas (Hougang and Taman Jurong), we examine how older adults mobilise both strong and weak ties—including friends, co-workers, and digitally mediated contacts—across everyday sites such as hawker centres, markets, malls, and churches. These connections often span neighbourhoods, suggesting that older adults are not merely attached to their residential areas but are actively sustaining dispersed, networked geographies of care and companionship. Crucially, we find that expansive social ties can buffer the challenges of living alone. We argue that social isolation, more than spatial isolation, poses the greater risk to older adults’ well-being.