Conflict Continuity And Change In Social Movements In Southeast Asia

This book demonstrates how preserving ideology and relationships with other activists affords social movements to persist over time amid limited resources and political opportunities in Southeast Asia. Examining two peace movements in Indonesia – the largest democratic country in Southeast Asia – to illuminate discontinuity, continuity, and change in social movements, the author uses a cultural approach to understanding why social movements persist. He argues that the activists’ memory, relationship with others, collective identity, and emotion are reasons for social movements to ascend and peak. This is a direct response to the argument that the availability of resources and political opportunities is the main ingredient for any social movements to rise. While having different fates, the two movements studied arose in the midst of violence between Christian and Muslim communities in Ambon, Indonesia: The Kopi Badati movement and Filterinfo. The book extends the applicability of the cultural approach in explaining why social movements discontinue, continue, and change over time, without discounting the importance of available resources and political opportunities. Addressing a gap in the existing social movement studies, the book explains why a social movement disbands and why the other manages to continue and change after achieving its immediate goal. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian studies, (new)-media and communications, civil society, and international development.

Téma kontinuity a změn v Asii je obecně přijímané jako důležitý a složitý problém. Asie je považována za jednu z nejdynamičtěji se rozvíjejících částí světa. Rychlé proměny Asijských ekonomických, politických a sociálních či kulturních systémů poskytují řadu námětů ke zkoumání v takových oblastech, jako je antropologie, etnografie, lingvistika a literární studia, či v takových vědních oborech, jako jsou sociální, politická a ekonomická studia. Obzvláště po několika letech opatření proti šíření Covid-19 je důležité porozumět tomu, co zůstalo stejné, či co se mohlo změnit a být navždy ztraceno. The theme of ‘continuity and change’ is generally acknowledged as an important and a highly complex problem. Asia is considered as one of the most dynamically changing parts of the worlds. The quick economic, political and socio-cultural changes are generating interesting topics in those scholarly fields such as anthropology, ethnography, linguistics and literary studies, or in other fields of social, political and economic science. Especially after the years of anti-Covid 19, measures it is important to understand what remains stable or what had been changed and may be lost forever.

This book analyses marginalisation and human rights in Southeast Asia and offers diverse approaches in understanding the nuances of marginalisation and human rights in the region. Throughout the region, a whole range of similarities and differences can be observed relating to the Southeast Asian experience of human rights violation, with each country maintaining particular aspects reflecting the variability of the use and abuse of political power. This book explores the distinct links between marginalisation and human rights for groups exposed to discrimination. It focuses on ethnic minorities, children, indigenous peoples, migrant workers, refugees, academics, and people with disabilities. This book highlights the disparities in attainment and opportunity of marginalised and minority groups in Southeast Asia to their rights. It examines how marginalisation is experienced, with case studies ranging from a regional approach to country context. Paying attention to how broader socio-economic and political structures affect different people’s access to, or denial of, their fundamental human rights and freedoms, the book argues that tackling human rights abuses remains a major hurdle for the countries in Southeast Asia. Providing a broader conceptual framework on marginalisation and human rights in Southeast Asia and a new assessment of these issues, this book will be of interest to readers in the fields of Asian Law, Human Rights in Asia, and Southeast Asian Studies, in particular Southeast Asian Politics.

Introducing a re-conceptualized comprehensive hedging framework, this book analyses the relations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam with China in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the South China Sea dispute. The author argues that ASEAN and the three Southeast Asian governments pursue a hedging strategy towards the rising China. Hedging expands the strategic options of smaller powers which are in Neorealism often restricted to bandwagoning and balancing. A hedging strategy, however, can simultaneously contain both elements of bandwagoning (e.g., in economics) and balancing (e.g., in security affairs). Even though the four hedging strategies and their implementation vary, in principle they all seek closer economic relations with Beijing, while maintaining strong security relations with Washington. A major innovation of the new hedging concept is the inclusion of the perceptions of the hedger on the risks and opportunities stemming from the relations with the hedging target and of the strategic value of potential hedging partners. The comprehensive hedging concept and the important empirical findings will be of interest to researchers in the fields of International Relations, Security, Political Geography, Economics, History, and Asian Studies.

NGOs and Civil Society in Thailand critically examines the relationships of civil society to nongovernmental organisations in Thailand, and examines the ‘NGOisation’ of civil society, how NGOs are funded and governed, and in what way the NGOs has been shaped to work with the funder. NGOisation is a phenomenon by which the funded organisations are impelled to transform suit their funder as reliable partners. Focusing on Thailand, an Asian country where NGOs have been heavily relied on the public sector for funding, the book analyses the relations between NGOs and their significant funder, Thailand Health Promotion Foundation (THPF), one of the biggest and most influential players in the NGO sector. As the NGO funded organisations are impelled to transform and adapt to become more professionalised, institutionalised, bureaucratised, and depoliticised to suit their funder as reliable partners, their characteristics and relations with the state are complex and interactive. Engaging with key stakeholders in the field of NGO and public governance in Thailand, the book demonstrates how THPF changed the NGO landscape, integrating them and innovatively coordinating non-state initiatives into public governance system. A novel contribution to the study of NGOs and the state, the book also addresses NGO transformation, politics, and governance. It will be of interest to academics working on Asian Politics, civil society, public policy and public management.

As social media scholarship matures, early optimism has been replaced by a more complex and arguably gloomier picture of the role of digital media platforms in our lives. This incisive Research Handbook showcases the academic community’s responses to key societal challenges posed by evolving social media ecologies.

This book explores middle power engagement in peace processes through the cases of Australian, Japanese and Norwegian engagement in Myanmar’s peace process, a core event in Myanmar’s contemporary recent political history. The book asks to what extent, and how, middle powers have engaged in Myanmar’s peace process as a form of peacemaking entrepreneurship. Underpinning this study is a concern for the lack of clarity surrounding the middle power concept. Traditional conceptions of middle powers, steeped in idealist thinking, locate such states as capable peacemakers, without elucidating the motivations that drive middle powers to peacemaking beyond mere status seeking. Drawing on recent fieldwork interviews from within Myanmar as well as political economy literature, the author scrutinises this notion while concomitantly offering an incisive analysis of Myanmar’s peace process. Based on the Myanmar context, the book argues that middle powers can better be conceptualised as "peace-making entrepreneurs," as actors that use peacemaking as an instrumental tool to cement their status and craft an image, which they can then trade upon to secure additional, namely, commercial, benefits. Significantly, this notion of peacemaking entrepreneurship problematises core theoretical assumptions of middle powers as capable peacemakers, presenting implications for future scholarship on middle powers. A timely addition as Myanmar continues to grapple with its own future, the book is located within the fields of International Relations and Development Studies. It will be of interest to researchers studying Asian Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Myanmar Politics.

This book examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through ‘infracycles’, maintenance practices that tinker with the social and capitalist order, and postcolonial ways of doing politics that co-constitute predominant waste fantasies from which naturecultures ooze out, shaping urban life in their own way. In this context, socially marginalized waste pickers contest the capitalist system by creating tropes about freedom, labor autonomy, and the will to survive. In this regard, they are also meddling about a new social order that represents the fine line Cambodia is sashaying between tradition and modernity. Waste fantasies that are a result of environmental problematizations, however, perpetuate postcolonial ways of doing politics by exuding notions of waste as detached from its sociocultural context. But ultimately, waste slips through the cracks of these dominant imaginaries and global waste reduction models enacting new versions of what waste and the city is, providing opportunities for another future waste policy. This book is a unique contribution to the field of infrastructure studies emphasizing the importance of perceiving infrastructure as circular in smaller ‘infracycles’, rather than linear. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, urban studies, and Southeast Asian studies. The Introduction of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license