During the Q&A that followed his keynote speech last week to the 39th Asia-Pacific Roundtable (APR), Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim riffed on his irritation at the colonial legacy in geography, the naming of the Middle East in particular.
As he explained, that part of the world isn’t east of his country and isn’t in the middle of anything either. For Southeast Asians, that contested region is “West Asia.”
The near-daily references to the Middle East in Western media are an immediate and constant reminder — if not a scab to be picked — of the way that imperialism continues to shape the world and our perception of it. It was a pretty good metaphor for a conference that focused on “accelerating agency and action,” which for the unschooled means how to increase the power and influence of so-called middle powers, countries that are in the second- or perhaps third-tier of international actors — think Malaysia, South Korea, Australia or Canada, to name just the first that come to mind.
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