POL351 Comparative Politics in Southeast Asia End-of-Course Assessment 2026 | SUSS, Singapore

POL351 End-of-Course Assessment 

Instruction To Students:

1. This End-of-Course Assessment paper comprises 4 pages (including the cover page).
2. You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of the ECA, SUSS PI No., Your Name, and Submission Date.
3. Ensure that you submit your End-of-Course Assessment by the deadline. After the 12-hour grace period, 10% of the total End-of-Course Assessment mark will be deducted for each 24-hour block or part thereof by which your submission is late. Submissions with more than 50 marks deducted will be awarded 0 marks.
4. You are allowed multiple submissions to Turnitin before the deadline. After the deadline, only one submission is allowed, and only if you have not already made a prior submission.
5. If you fail to submit your End-of-Course Assessment, you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course.

IMPORTANT NOTE

ECA Submission Deadline: Saturday, 04 April 2026 12:00 pm

ECA Submission Guidelines

Please read this information before you start working on your ECA.

This ECA carries 50% of the course marks and is a compulsory component. It is to be done individually and not collaboratively with other students. You must submit it on time.

Submission

You are to submit the end-of-course assignment (ECA) in exactly the same manner as your tutor-marked assignments (TMA), i.e. using Canvas. Submission in any other manner such as hardcopy or any other means will not be accepted. Ensure that you submit your ECA by the deadline. After the 12-hour grace period, 10% of the total ECA mark will be deducted for every 24-hour block or part thereof by which your submission is late. Submissions with more than 50 marks deducted will be awarded 0 marks. You are allowed multiple submissions to Turnitin before the deadline, after which only one submission is allowed, and only if you have not already previously submitted. If you fail to submit your ECA, you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course.

You are reminded that electronic transmission is not always immediate. It is possible that network traffic may be particularly heavy on the cut-off date, and connections to the system cannot be guaranteed. Hence, you are advised to submit your work no later than the day before the cut-off date in order to make sure that the submission is accepted and in good time.

Once you have submitted your ECA, the status is displayed on the computer screen. You will receive a digital acknowledgement message. Please note that it is the digital time-stamp— and not the acknowledgement message—that indicates that you have submitted your ECA. To ensure a timely submission and to have your ECAs marked, you should therefore not jeopardise your course result by submitting your ECA at the last minute.

Do ensure that you have the correct files for submission. Any submission, extra files, missing appendices or corrections received separately after the submission of the ECA will not be considered in the grading of your ECA assignment.

Plagiarism and Collusion

The University takes a very serious view of plagiarism (passing off someone else’s ideas as your own, or recycling of contents from your own earlier marked TMA from the same course or another course) and collusion (submitting an assignment which is the same or very similar to another student’s). Both are forms of cheating, and neither is acceptable in any form in a student’s work, including this ECA assignment.

Avoid plagiarism by giving yourself sufficient time to research and understand the material so that you can write up your assignment in your own words, and ensure that you provide appropriate references when necessary. You can avoid collusion by ensuring that your submission is based on your own individual effort.

Penalties for plagiarism and collusion are severe. Serious cases will normally result in the student being referred to SUSS’s Student Disciplinary Group. For other cases, significant marking penalties or expulsion from the course may be imposed. For more information about the University’s policies on plagiarism and collusion, refer to the Student Handbook (Section 5.2, paragraph 1.3).

Supplementary Notes

• The word limit for this assignment is strictly 3,000 words (excluding bibliography). Please indicate the word count at the end of this assignment.
• Use proper APA in-text citation correctly and consistently for ALL sources, including any AI-generated text (see example below), and provide a list of end-text references to support your citations. Your references should include at least FIVE academic sources (books, book chapters or journal articles). All materials sourced online (including academic journal articles, reports from agencies like World Bank etc, book chapters and articles from academic websites, among others) must include working hyperlinks.

IMPORTANT!

Permissible Use of Gen-AI

• Brainstorming for ideas and basic outlines with proper acknowledgement as shown in the table below;
• Summarising research materials for reference only;
• Correcting minor spelling and grammatical errors

Example of a table detailing the name of the AI tool used, the approach to using the tool (e.g., what prompts were used), the full output provided by the tool, and which part of the output was adapted for the assignment.

Unacceptable Use of Gen-AI (AI Cheating)

• Wholesale or substantial lifting of AI-generated content, including text, images and videos;
• Generation of references without conducting research or verification;
• Extensive rewriting and/or restructuring, including changing from one writing style to another and reorganising content

WARNING: Submitting answers that substantially regurgitate or reproduce information from any sources, including generative AI tools, constitutes plagiarism (refer to the Student Handbook for details). Once a plagiarism offence is established, the student’s work will be heavily marked down. A Fail grade will be awarded for cases found to contain fabricated content, including bogus references, false information, or non-existent arguments attributed to cited reference sources.     

Resources for Writing

• Purdue Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL)
• APA guide
• Academic integrity

(Full marks: 100)

Question 1

A study by Lars-Erik Cederman, Andreas Wimmer and Brian Min opined that: “conflict with the government is more likely to erupt (1) the more representatives of an ethnic group are excluded from state power, especially if they have experienced a loss of power in the recent past; (2) the higher their mobilizational capacity is; and (3) the more they have experienced conflict in the past.”

Applying theories and approaches of Comparative Politics covered in this course, respond to the following questions:

1. With reference to the statement above, evaluate the view that ethnic and religious identity issues are among the most significant challenges being faced by Southeast Asian countries. You should clearly state how far you agree with the view and why. Show at least two reasons why these have not turned into interstate conflicts.
2. Using information from the Minorities at Risk Report (http://www.mar.umd.edu/assessments.asp?regionId=3) as well as the Ethnic Power Relations (EPA) data and report on Myanmar and Thailand (https://icr.ethz.ch/data/epr/core/), compare and contrast the nature of ethnic and religious identity issues and their impact on identity, security and politics in both countries.

(100 marks)

—END OF ECA PAPER—