He lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to his appointment at Singapore. His books include Democracy and Authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia: The Rise of the Post-Colonial State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) and Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), in which he documents various critiques of the state of the social sciences in Asia and critically assesses the prescriptions for alternative discourses that have emerged from these critiques.