Strongmen of Asia: Democratic bosses and how to understand them

The project closely investigate a set of strongmen – including presently ruling, fledgling, or former strongmen – in order to compare and understand a political style increasingly dominant in South and Southeast Asia and which we preliminarily call ‘bossism’. These strongmen will be explored through fieldwork, online ethnography and media analysis of original language sources. We investigate aspects of their political life in six work packages, each analysing the local avatars of the three global developments.