Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His recent books include The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016).

312 posts

Anwar Fazal: Seeing New Possibilities for Social Activism Post-Pandemic [PART TWO]

7 min read

PENANG MONTHLY CONTINUES the conversation with Penang’s most prolific social activist, Dato’ Seri Dr. Anwar Fazal, on social activism, on having a p...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

It’s been an exhilarating year

2 min read

The revamped PEM has now been around a year since the preview issue came out in September 2009. The response has been consistently good.As we expected, imme...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

How will nationalism evolve?

2 min read

The biggest trick that the nation-state concept has pulled on modern man is the proposal that there is an essential line between the external and the internal...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Present comes before the Past

2 min read

A friend once desperately and exasperatedly wished to know what he had been in earlier lives.“Why?“ I asked him with half a mind.“Well,&rd...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Labour stripped down to bare essentials

2 min read

A cover on migrant workers raises a lot more questions than we can hope to answer in a monthly magazine. But it is a worthy attempt nonetheless. We really nee...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

All you hybrids, emerge from your closet

2 min read

Ethnocentrism is not the opposite of multiracialism. For some reason, we tend to suppose it to be so. The truth of the matter is, the contradistinction betwee...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

A defensive psyche is colonialism’s legacy

2 min read

It has become more and more palpable to scholars that the geography of a place, with the attendant peculiarities of terrain, climate, water supply, transport,...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The age of cities is at hand

2 min read

Urbanisation is not a process that people in Penang think about.This is not strange, since British George Town came into being in 1786 for trading and strat...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Remember Penang

2 min read

The revamped Penang Economic Monthly marks the beginning of reawakening Penang's potential. It’s about remembering its past, rethinking its future, and rebuilding a vibrant, innovative Penang.

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

The Future of Work Will Include Clubbing

3 min read

IN THE FIRST decade or two following Covid-19, which parts of our daily life will go back to the way they were, and which will not?It’s anyone’s g...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

Pandemic or Not, there is No Such Thing as “De-globalisation”

3 min read

WHILE THE COVID-19 pandemic is sometimes portrayed as globalisation hitting a wall, it has at the same time raised public consciousness that globalisation as a...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng

A Synergic Platform is Something Penang Almost Already Has to Build Back Better

4 min read

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has obliged us to rethink the personal, the present and the proximate.Shaken by the arresting of our ambitions, stirred by disruptions t...

by Dato' Dr. Ooi Kee Beng