Announcing a Southeast Asian Anarchist Library

from Bandilang Itim

The Southeast Asian Anarchist Library is the newest offering from The Anarchist Library which features multilingual anarchist literature from Southeast Asia or in Southeast Asian languages.

Visit the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library!


In time of pandemic and insurrection anarchists are out in the streets in Yangon, Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Metro Manila. Anarchism in Southeast Asia only a little more than thirty years old as anarchism was totally demobilized and eradicated in the region in the early 20th century. Still, anarchism re-emerges as the region’s people looks for liberatory frameworks. To match increased libertarian militancy in Southeast Asia (SEA), The Anarchist Library now offers the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library as a site to collect and collate anarchist literature from the region or in the regional languages.

The SEA Library is a multilingual library that reflects the multilingual and plural diversity of the Southeast Asian region. Here you can find texts in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Tagalog, Bisaya (Cebuano), ภาษาไทย (Thai), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), and 中文 (Mandarin). The Library curates new texts through @SEAanarkis on Twitter.

The SEA Library is also a site for new translations such as the Vietnamese section whose translations are all original. Texts such as David Graeber’s classic “Are You An Anarchist?” has been translated into TagalogIndonesian/MalayVietnamese, and Thai. In this manner, the SEA Library acts as free platform for anarchist propagandists in the region.

Like The Anarchist Library, you can download texts in the SEA Library in ready-to-print zine format or as ebooks. Feel free to download and distribute texts! You can even use bookbuilder to build your own zines and ebooks using any text from the catalog.

As a free platform, you can add new texts to the SEA Library that you think ought be on the platform. An account is not needed. The criteria of the SEA Library is that these texts have to have something to do with the libertarian and anti-statist movement from or about Southeast Asia or such a text in an indigenous regional language.

The SEA Library is also looking for volunteers for translation and acquisition of new texts. For example, the SEA Library currently does not have texts in မြန်မာစာ (Burmese), ພາສາລາວ (Lao), or ភាសាខ្មែរ (Khmer). The SEA Library would appreciate volunteers that can help the library expand its collection. Another pending task is translating the user interface of the SEA Library into indigenous languages.

If you would like to help out, you can email the SEA Library at: <library-sea [a.t] angrylists [d.o.t] com>. You can also hop in The Anarchist Library IRC where the librarians of the SEA Library also hang out.

The future of anarchism in Asia is bright. New anarchist and libertarian collectivities sprout yearly. Where there is authority there is resistance to it and a Southeast Asian Anarchist Library is a project that can help build that militancy.

For a Southeast Asian anarchism!

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