Tang, EricUnsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC HyperghettoPhiladelphia, PA: Temple University Press234 pp., $24.95 paperbackISBN: 978-1-4399-1165-5Publication Date: October 2015

Abstract

laypeople interested in the military, democratization, and Asia. The book can be criticized. First, in focusing on military defections, it underestimates the role of socio-cultural forces that came to spearhead political change like the Catholic Church in the Philippines and Islamic nationalist groups in Indonesia. Second, the section on Burma/Myanmar needs more elaboration. One could argue that the regime’s purges were designed to maintain the increasingly personalized control of Than Shwe. Third, the book seemingly assumes that militaries only defect to support Asian protest movements opposed to personalized authoritarian regimes. What about Thailand (2006, 2014) when the military defected from power-sharing institutions under civilian rule, staging coups in support of popular protests opposed to the continuation of a democratically elected government? Nevertheless, as a book dismissing notions that militaries in Asia are simply mechanisms of elites, Lee’s work should be read by anyone seeking to understand why they sometimes cohere to support regimes and other times fracture to oust them.