Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is 99, unelected, and continues to defy the Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim government. When Paradoxes of Mahathirism was published in 1995, Mahathir was at the crest of his power. His decline came with the East Asian financial crisis and his persecution of Anwar Ibrahim. In 2018 a restive Mahathir came out of retirement to become the ‘7th Prime Minister’. Yet he resigned in 2020 and was defeated in the 2022 general election.

The Epilogue in this new, revised edition of Paradoxes of Mahathirism follows the nationalism and nativism that Mahathir promoted in thought and practice as he resumed his premiership. But has he succeeded in pushing nationalism only to fail in cultivating nativism, as this Epilogue argues? Today, with Malaysia’s parlous Malay politics, troubled ethnoreligious relations, and discordant coalitional government, would that success and failure be the final paradox in the politics of the country’s most complex politician?