The Albatross File Exhibition is bad history that diminishes Lee Kuan Yew


Academic Views

Historian THUM PING TJIN argues that The Albatross File Exhibition and its accompanying book turn Lee Kuan Yew from a historically consequential actor into a passive victim of circumstance, thus diminishing him. By trying to protect him from moral scrutiny, Singaporeans are given a comforting story instead of an educational one where power, fear, race, ambition, and moral compromise destroyed Malaysia.

2026-06-08

Syed Hussein Alatas’s enduring vision for a functioning intelligentsia


Academic Views

As Hussein Alatas and other Muslim thinkers recognised, only a working community of public intellectuals can save societies from shallow, populistic, and paranoid reactions to contemporary challenges such as inequality and identity politics, argues YAACOB IBRAHIM (National University of Singapore). This is the text of his closing remarks at the launch of a new book inspired by the late Syed Hussein Alatas.

2026-03-16