ASEAS 15(1) | 1 Editorial Dayana Lengauera , Alexander Truppb & Richard S. Aquinoc a Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria; b Sunway University, Malaysia; c University of Canterbury, New Zealand ► Lengauer, D., Trupp, A., & Aquino, R. S. (2022). Editorial. Advances in Southeast Asian Studies, 15(1), 1-4. ASEAS 15(1) launches the first issue of the Journal under its new title, Advances in Southeast Asian Studies. Since its inaugural issue, which was published 15 years ago in 2008, ASEAS has promoted the emancipation of knowledge and thematic pluralism in Southeast Asian Studies through an open-access and free of paywalls publishing system (Gerstl & Schweitzer, 2008). Issued by the Society for South-East Asian Studies (SEAS), based in Vienna, ASEAS initially published in German (and English), and primarily attracted submissions from German- speaking scholars based in Austria and Germany who worked on Southeast Asia from different disciplinary angles. Over the years, the authorship and reader- ship of ASEAS has transformed significantly and now represents a truly global audience. Indexed in Scopus under the general social sciences since 2015, ASEAS is now ranked in additional subject categories, reflecting the journal’s interdis- ciplinary orientation within the social sciences (Table 1). ASEAS continues to critically discuss and examine a variety of issues in the fields of cultural and social anthropology, communication, development, geography, cultural studies, regional studies, politics, and tourism, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. We thus believe that the new journal name Advances in Southeast Asian Studies provides a more apt description of the contributions in ASEAS. Category Rank Percentile Social Sciences – Anthropology #67/443 84th Social Sciences – Communication #135/467 71st Social Sciences – General Social Science #80/264 69th Social Sciences – Development #111/287 61st Social Sciences – Geography, Planning and Development #295/747 60th Business, Management and Accounting – Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality Management #80/137 41st ASEAS 15(1) features a thematically open collection of contributions covering legal issues, historical discourses, and contemporary developments in the region. Drawn from various perspectives, the contributions scrutinize legal regulations, such as on the placement and protection of Indonesian migrant workers and on Editorial w w w .s ea s. at 10 .1 47 64 /1 0. A SE A S- 00 70 Table 1. ASEAS Scopus CiteScore categories and ranking 2021. (https://www.scopus.com/ sourceid/21100405571) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0731-5975 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6189-9078 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1093-2824 https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100405571 https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100405571 2 | ASEAS 15(1) Editorial agricultural land appropriation in Vietnam, provide gendered analysis on knowledge production, and examine prospects of poverty alleviation of low-income households in Indonesia and remote fishing communities in the Philippines. Annisa Ayuningtyas and Mailinda Eka Yuniza investigate the constitutional justification of the latest law on the protection of Indonesian migrant workers, Law 18/2017. This legislation allows the state to intervene in the management of Indonesian migrant workers’ remittances. While emphasizing that the Indonesian Constitution is an economic constitution, the authors indicate that there is insuf- ficient constitutional basis for the state intervention in the allocation of human resources. Hence, their main argument is that government intervention in the management of remittances is not constitutionally justified. As the authors indi- cate, additional tension arises in relation to the private nature of migrant workers’ remittances and their significance as a component of national income. By making constitutional and administrative laws their main object of discussion, the authors not only evade general skepticism regarding the justification of the government’s intervention, but also contribute to other studies of migrant workers’ remittances by employing a constitutional and administrative legal perspective. The strength of the paper lies in the analysis and interpretation of different legal documents on the placement and protection of Indonesian migrant workers abroad. In the background of numerous studies pointing at the positive effects of con- ditional cash transfers (CCTs), Agus Heruanto Hadna and Media Wahyudi Askar analyze the impact of CCTs on low-income households in Indonesia through a case study based on some of the poorest districts of Yogyakarta. They focus on the Family Hope Program (Program Keluarga Harapan [PKH]), which had been shown to positively impact per capita expenditures. By assessing households’ consumption expenditures, the authors discover that the current CCT design in Indonesia benefits recipients disproportionally resulting in further inequality among households situ- ated in the lowest section of the wealth ladder. Their examination of the distribution of consumption expenditures casts new insights into why CCTs do not automatically reduce poverty. In response to studies that point at gender disparities in terms of knowledge production in the disciplinary fields of political sciences and international relations in Western contexts, Ella Prihatini and Wendy Prajuli scrutinize the publication and authorship patterns in international relations journals published in Indonesia, exploring similar tendencies in a non-Western context. In Indonesia, as the authors indicate, the space of women’s professorship in the discipline of international relations is marginal, with only two women holding a professorship in about 70 international relations departments in 2021. By analyzing bibliographic data of 783 published jour- nal articles, the authors find that men outnumber women in terms of publishing. They also discover a certain level of gender bias in co-authorship, which additionally limits women’s performance. Indonesian women scholars share with their male col- leagues a high interest in themes such as security, military, and governance, which indicates that certain sub-fields of the discipline would stimulate a mixed-gendered co-authorship, but also render existing competition stronger. In the last current research contribution with a focus on Indonesia, Muhammad Yuanda Zara takes us back to the foundation of the Indonesian state, more concretely ASEAS 15(1) | 3 Dayana Lengauer, Alexander Trupp & Richard S. Aquino to the period between 1945 and 1947, and the incorporation of Indo-Europeans as ‘new citizens’ into an ‘indigenous state’. By employing a historical discourse analysis, Zara explores how Indonesian nationalists publicly imagined, framed, and persuaded Indo-Europeans of their place in the emerging nation. The author shows a systematic attempt to ‘attract’ Indo-Europeans to become part of an Indonesian multicultural nation, which stands in stark contrast to earlier studies emphasizing acts of violence by the native militia towards Indo-Europeans during the Dutch-Indonesian war. The author interprets the attempt of Indonesian nationalists to integrate Indo-Europeans in the new state in the light of their aspirations to construct an Indonesian iden- tity that spans the multi-ethnic archipelago. Convincing support for this argument comes from the extensive review of public documents, including newspaper arti- cles and opinions, but also propaganda booklets, such as the one issued by one of Indonesia’s founding leaders and first prime minister, Sutan Sjahrir. Still in archipelagic Southeast Asia, Brooke A. Porter, Mark B. Orams, Michael Lück and Enrico Maria Andreini present a qualitative exploration of gleaning by-products in tourism supply chains in remote Filipino fishing communities. Combining their respective expertise in conservation, development, and tourism, the authors indi- cate potential opportunities for small-scale revenues from the sale of discarded shells in four remote fishing communities sharing certain levels of poverty. By adopting supply chain theory and qualitative interviews as a method of inquiry, the authors investigate the post-consumption use of shells and discover gaps in the supply chain that impede the transition of ‘waste’ shells into souvenir products that have become part of consumptive tourism in many coastal destinations. In line with earlier pub- lications focusing on community-based tourism, local businesses, and sustainable development (Trupp & Dolezal, 2020), this article discusses its findings in the light of tourism development and poverty alleviation through souvenir production. Moving to mainland Southeast Asia, Tran Tuan Nguyen and Gábor Hegedűs scrutinize land appropriation in Vietnam under the Land Law 2013 by investigating the project of VSIP, situated in the province of Nghe An, through a survey of offi- cials and affected land users. A review of the legal system of land laws in Vietnam since 1986 is complemented with farmers’ opinions in one particular commune. The authors, hence, juxtapose legal regulations on agricultural land appropriation and their implementation to acquire agricultural land-use rights from the perspec- tive of the affected households, showing that it is mostly the indirectly affected households that utter a dissatisfaction with the procedures of land acquisition. The government, however, has no satisfying compensation for households with adjacent farmland, leaving conditions of inequality between directly and indirectly affected families unsettled. In an interview with Suhono Harso Supangkat – professor of information tech- nologies at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and leader of the Smart City and Community Innovation Center – Arif Budy Pratama questions the notion of the ‘smart city’ and its apparent equivalence with the operation of information technolo- gies to solve urban problems. Being involved in the Indonesian Government’s project to develop smart cities since 2007, Supangkat explains top-down propensity towards information technologies while stressing the importance of ‘smart’ resource manage- ment to improve urban quality of life and sustainability. 4 | ASEAS 15(1) Editorial In the last section of this issue, William N. Holden contributes a timely review of Vicente L. Rafael’s recently published monograph, The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022), as the Philippines sees the exit of President Rodrigo R. Duterte as this Editorial is being written. In his critical review, Holden points to the strength of Rafael’s work in his explanation of Duterte’s war on drugs by looking at the relationship between life and death – two concepts that run as a red thread throughout the book. Finally, the ASEAS Editorial Board would like to express their gratitude to Vissia Ita Yulianto, Muhadi Sugiono, and Hakimul Ikhwan for their editorial assistance, and Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia for the financial support in this issue. The Editorial Board also thank the contributors, anonymous reviewers, and readers for continuously supporting the Journal.  REFERENCES Gerstl, A., & Schweitzer, E. (2008). Südostasienwissenschaften publizieren: Open-Access, thematischer Pluralismus, Internationalität. Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 1(1), 1–3. Trupp, A., & Dolezal, C. (2020). Tourism and the Sustainable Development Goals in Southeast Asia. Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 13(1), 1–16.