Syed Farid Alatas is Head of the Department of Malay Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. His books include Democracy and Authoritarianism: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State in Indonesia and Malaysia (Macmillan, 1997), Alternative Discourse in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism (Sage, 2006) and Ibn Khaldun (Oxford University Press, 2012).