Young South-east Asians today know so very little about the region they live in, and assume that they know their neighbouring countries simply because they share a common border. This assumption is a dangerous one for it is premised upon the notion that proximity equals knowledge, and nothing could be more distant from the truth at ground level. In this commentary, Dr Farish A. Noor, an Associate Profesor at RSIS and NTU’s Department of History, calls for a pan-Asean effort to create a common South-east Asian history textbook. Such generation of a common knowledge and awareness can lay the groundwork for an authentic politics of inclusiveness and accommodation among South-east Asians in the years to come, and that may well be the best antidote for the wave of hyper-nationalism on the rise today.

…Dr Farish A. Noor is Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the School of Humanities’ Department of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This article was first published by the Asian Peace Programme, an initiative to promote peace in Asia, housed in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.