Ong Weichong - Malaysias Defeat of Armed Communism: The Second Emergency, 1968-1989

The Malayan Emergency was a watershed in postwar counterinsurgency campaigns and has informed modern thinking about todays wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Second Emergency in Malaysia is not as well known, but also has important implications for the future of counterinsurgency. Ong Weichong has done a real service to global strategic studies by writing this important reminder that, while counterinsurgency campaigns are messy and slow, they can succeed.

John Nagl, Headmaster of The Haverford School, Retired Lt. Col., U.S. Army, and author of Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War

[Ong Weichongs] peerless examination of the Second Emergency (19681989) is convincing in breadth of sources and depth of analysis. Malaysias Defeat of Armed Communism is a must-read for serious scholars of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare.

James D. Kiras, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, USA

The Malayan Communist Partys (MCPs) decisive defeat in 1960 led many academics and counter-insurgency (COIN) experts to overlook the resurrection of its armed struggle in 1968. Most scholars continue to regard the so-called Second Emergency in Malaysia (196889) as a non-event, and most of the recently published work on the MCP tends to focus on the earlier Malayan Emergency (194860). This book looks at the Second Emergency through recently released archival material from the National Archives in London, the National Australian Archives and the Australian War Memorial, as well as interviews with military and diplomatic officers from the UK and Thailand. It presents the first serious strategic and operational study of the Second Emergency, and analyses three areas of historical significance: the Communist Party of Malayas (CPMs) strategy for armed struggle in the Second Emergency; the effectiveness of the CPMs subversive propaganda on its target population; and, most importantly, the counter-insurgency response and strategy of the Malaysian state and, to a lesser extent, the counter-subversion strategy of Singapore in the post-colonial era.

Ong Weichong is an Assistant Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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