Anwar Ibrahim: Tenacious in Dissent, Hopeful in Power

Over 50 years Anwar Ibrahim was a Malay nationalist student, a motor of Islamic activism, a co-opted rising star in government, an ‘anointed successor’ to the premiership, a persecuted reformist, and a revitalized Opposition Leader. He disdained comfortable irrelevance to rouse indignant masses against the regimes of five prime ministers. In September 1998 he was a political prisoner with a blackened eye. In November 2023 he became the Prime Minister. In the 21st century his anti-corruption campaigns fought ruling power structures that fused state, regime and party. His politics used his charismatic and chameleonic personality, and his complex ideas on Islam, a humane economy, coalition politics, and a reimagination of society. He outmanoeuvred his influential ethno-religious opponents through a parlous condition of Malay politics, and now leads a large Unity Government of which the deposed hegemon, UMNO, is only a subordinate partner. This book explores how a tenacious but hopeful Anwar seeks to transform society at an unsteady moment of Malaysian politics.

Khoo Boo Teik is Professor Emeritus, the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, and Research Fellow Emeritus, the Institute of Developing Economies, Chiba, Japan. He was born, bred and schooled in Westlands Primary School and the Penang Free School, Penang, Malaysia, before taking his degrees from University of Rochester, MIT, and Flinders University of South Australia. He is the author of Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad, Beyond Mahathir: Malaysian Politics and Its Discontents, and other books, mostly on Malaysian politics and society.