By: Niveja Assalaarachchi, News Writer

Editor’s note: The Peak’s arts & culture editor, Phone Min Thant, co-led this event. He was not involved in the editorial process of this article. 

The School for International Studies’ newly formed Southeast Asian research initiative will host its first event at SFU’s Vancouver campus on February 11. The ice breaker event aims to provide students curious about Southeast Asia a chance to discuss research regarding the region. It also aims to express the initiative’s future direction and bring together scholars from different post-secondary institutions in the Lower Mainland who study Southeast Asia, such as international studies professor Dr. Tamir Moustafa, political science professor Dr. Shivaji Mukherjee, and Capilano University political science professor Dr. David Matijasevich.

The Peak reached out to the event’s organizers and co-founders of the initiative, Phone Min Thant and associate professor Darren Byler, to learn more. Min Thant’s research focus is on China-Southeast Asia relations in the 21st century, while Byler’s is “the role of infrastructural state power in contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.”   

Min Thant explained that his experience at the 2025 Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies conference partly informed the creation of the Southeast Asian research initiative. “There’s so many universities with a very active Southeast Asian Studies program or at least a Southeast Asian collective,” he claimed. “I saw so many people from SFU who are really interested in Southeast Asia as a regional studies. I thought, why don’t we create a collective — a gathering of all these Southeast Asianists and group them into one place so that we can collectively inform each other of conferences and other events happening around Canada.” 

Both Min Thant and Byler highlighted the region’s importance to the study of international relations, with Byler noting the “hundreds of millions of people that live in Southeast Asia.” He said, “This is a site that has a number of growing economies that could be referred to as middle powers in the way that Canada is positioned.” 

Southeast Asia “offers lessons which can be applied to countries like the US,” Min Thant added. “You can see a lot of resurgence of authoritarianism, right-wing ideologies — Southeast Asia has seen all of that and has been seeing all that since independence” from several colonial powers in the 20th century.

Min Thant highlighted that the ice breaker will serve as a stepping stone for future Southeast Asia-centred events. “We were debating if we should jump right into action, maybe do a conference, a mini-SFU conference, or a research symposium. But, we realized we don’t really know who’s going to study Southeast Asia as a region,” he said. 

Byler said, “We’re hoping that because this is a student-led initiative, that keeping it a bit more informal, where everyone has a chance to contribute and we hope all voices can be heard, that students will feel a kind of ownership over the process and that they’ll want to get invested in building it.”

Min Thant emphasized that the event serves as a great opportunity for all students, regardless of their knowledge of the region. “You can learn from your peers, you can see what’s going on in Southeast Asia,” he said. “We might have discussions on current events in Southeast Asia, maybe co-authoring opportunities for papers.

“If you’re simply interested in Southeast Asia as a region, if you’re from Southeast Asia, drop by and see how it is and maybe consider joining the initiative!”

— Phone Min Thant, event organizer and collective co-founder of the Southeast Asian Research Initiative