Meredith Weiss

Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her latest books are Politics in a Pandemic: Governance and Crisis Management in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2025) and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022). She has also edited or co-edited over a dozen volumes, most recently, Youth Activism in Asia: A New Wave (Michigan, Fall 2026) and Politics and Governance in Urban Southeast Asia (NUS, Fall 2026). Her articles appear in Asian Studies Review, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Current Sociology, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Human Rights, World Politics, and other journals. 

Professor Weiss co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements book series on Politics and Society in Southeast Asia and is associate editor for Southeast Asia of the Association for Asian Studies’ (AAS) Journal of Asian Studies. She worked previously at the East-West Center Washington and DePaul University, and has held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. She received her MA and PhD in Political Science from Yale University and a BA in Political Science, Policy Studies, and English from Rice University.

Selected Books

Meredith L. Weiss, Politics in a Pandemic: Governance and Crisis Management in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2025) https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/politics-in-a-pandemic/5B3FD135A63327D98901740C798EE6FC

Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, Allen Hicken, and Paul Hutchcroft, Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/mobilizing-for-elections/EC753A0FC2D6BF9385E1AEB96FB0D043

Meredith L. Weiss, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP and NUS Press, 2020) https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750045/the-roots-of-resilience/

Eva Hansson and Meredith L. Weiss (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023)
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Civil-and-Uncivil-Society-in-Southeast-Asia/Hansson-Weiss/p/book/9780367422011

Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia (ed.), Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression (U of Illinois Press, 2013) https://academic.oup.com/illinois-scholarship-online/book/30184

Selected Articles

Meredith L. Weiss, “Scapegoating Queers: Pink-Blocking as State Strategy.” Current Sociology (2025), http://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231217498 

Meredith L. Weiss, “Malaysia’s Anwar, Anwar’s Malaysia.” Current History 122:845 (2023), pp. 217–23, https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2023.122.845.217 

Meredith L. Weiss and Ibrahim Suffian, “Decline and Fall of Malaysia’s Dominant-Party System,” Pacific Affairs 96:2 (2022), pp. 281-301, https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/perspectives/decline-and-fall-of-malaysias-dominant-party-system/

Allen Hicken, Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, and Burhanuddin Muhtadi, “Buying Brokers,” World Politics 74:1 (2022), pp. 77-120, https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0043887121000216

Meredith L. Weiss, “Legacies of the Cold War in Malaysia: Anything But Communism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50:4 (2020), pp. 511–29.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2019.1709128