Strategies Of Authoritarian Survival And Dissensus In Southeast Asia

This book analyses how authoritarian rulers of Southeast Asian countries maintain their durability in office, and, in this context, explains why some movements of civil society organizations succeed while others fail to achieve their demands. It discusses the relationship between the state-society-business in the political survival context. As the first comparative analysis of strategies of regime survival across Southeast Asia, this book also provides an in-depth insight into the various opposition movements, and the behaviour of antagonistic civic and political actors in the region.

COVID-19 has presented huge challenges to governments, businesses, civil societies, and people from all walks of life, but its impact has been highly variegated, affecting society in multiple negative ways, with uneven geographical and socioeconomic patterns. The crisis revealed existing contradictions and inequalities in society, compelling us to question what it means to return to “normal” and what insights can be gleaned from Southeast Asia for thinking about a post-pandemic world. In this regard, this edited volume collects the informed views of an ensemble of social scientists – area studies, development studies, and legal scholars; anthropologists, architects, economists, geographers, planners, sociologists, and urbanists; representing academic institutions, activist and charitable organisations, policy and research institutes, and areas of professional practice – who recognise the necessity of critical commentary and engaged scholarship. These contributions represent a wide-ranging set of views, collectively producing a compilation of reflections on the following three themes in particular: (1) Urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment; (2) Migrants, (im)mobilities, and borders; and (3) Collective action, communities, and mutual action. Overall, this edited volume first aims to speak from a situated position in relevant debates to challenge knowledge about the pandemic that has assigned selective and inequitable visibility to issues, people, or places, or which through its inferential or interpretive capacity has worked to set social expectations or assign validity to certain interventions with a bearing on the pandemic’s course and the future it has foretold. Second, it aims to advance or renew understandings of social challenges, risks, or inequities that were already in place, and which, without further or better action, are to be features of our “post-pandemic world” as well. This volume also contributes to the ongoing efforts to de-centre and decolonise knowledge production. It endeavours to help secure a place within these debates for a region that was among the first outside of East Asia to be forced to contend with COVID-19 in a substantial way and which has evinced a marked and instructive diversity and dynamism in its fortunes.

Although authoritarian countries often repress independent citizen activity, lobbying by civil society organizations is actually a widespread phenomenon. Using case studies such as China, Russia, Belarus, Cambodia, Malaysia, Montenegro, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, Lobbying the Autocrat shows that citizen advocacy organizations carve out niches in the authoritarian policy process, even influencing policy outcomes. The cases cover a range of autocratic regime types (one-party, multi-party, personalist) on different continents, and encompass different systems of government to explore citizen advocacy ranging from issues such as social welfare, women’s rights, election reform, environmental protection, and land rights. They show how civil society has developed adaptive capacities to the changing levels of political repression and built resilience through ‘tactful contention’ strategies. Thus, within the bounds set by the authoritarian regimes, adaptive lobbying may still bring about localized responsiveness and representation. However, the challenging conditions of authoritarian advocacy systems identified throughout this volume present challenges for both advocates and autocrats alike. The former are pushed by an environment of constant threat and uncertainty into a precarious dance with the dictator: just the right amount of acquiescence and assertiveness, private persuasion and public pressure, and the flexibility to change quickly to suit different situations. An adaptive lobbyist survives and may even thrive in such conditions, while others often face dire consequences. For the autocrat on the other hand, the more they stifle the associational sphere in an effort to prevent mass mobilization, the less they will reap the informational benefits associated with it. This volume synthesizes the findings of the comparative cases to build a framework for understanding how civil society effectively lobbies inside authoritarian countries.

This book represents a pioneering interdisciplinary effort to analyze Asian civil society under authoritarianism, a regime type that is re-appearing or deepening after several decades of increased political liberalization. By organizing its approach into four main themes, this volume succinctly reveals the challenges facing civil society in authoritarian regimes, including: actions under political repression, transitions to democracy, uncivil society, political capture and legal control. It features in-depth analyses of a variety of Asian nations, from ‘hard’ authoritarian regimes, like China, to ‘electoral’ authoritarian regimes, like Cambodia, whilst also addressing countries experiencing democratic regression, such as the Philippines. By highlighting concrete responses and initiatives taken by civil society under authoritarianism, it advances the intellectual mandate of redefining Asia as a dynamic and interconnected formation and, moreover, as a space for the production of new theoretical insight. Contributing to our understanding of the tensions, dynamics, and potentialities that animate state-society relations in authoritarian regimes, this will be essential reading for students and scholars of civil society, authoritarianism, and Asian politics more generally.

"From 1975 to 1979, while Cambodia was ruled by the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime, torture, starvation, rape, and forced labor contributed to the death of at least a fifth of the country's population. Despite the severity of these abuses, civil war and international interference prevented investigation until 2004, when protracted negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations resulted in the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or Khmer Rouge tribunal. The resulting trials have been well scrutinized, with many scholars seeking to weigh the results of the tribunal against the extent of the offenses. Here, Bernath instead deliberately decenters the trials in an effort to understand the ECCC in its particular context-and the degree to which notions of transitional justice generally must be understood in particular social, cultural, and political contexts. She focuses on "sites of resistance" to the ECCC, including not only members of the elite political class but also citizens who do not, for a variety of tangled reasons, participate in the tribunal-and even resistance from victims of the regime and participants in the trials. Bernath demonstrates that the ECCC both shapes and is shaped by long-term contestation over Cambodia's social, economic, and political transformations, and thereby argues that transitional justice must be understood locally rather than as a homogenous good that can be implanted by international actors"--

Ethnic tensions in Southeast Asia represent a clear threat to the future stability of the region. David Brown's clear and systematic study outlines the patterns of ethnic politics in: * Burma * Singapore * Indonesia * Malaysia * Thailand The study considers the influence of the State on the formation of ethnic groups and investigates why some countries are more successful in 'managing' their ethnic politics than others.

The first analysis of how Indonesia's labor movement overcame organizational weakness to become the most vibrant in Southeast Asia.

A brilliantly crafted picaresque novel, sensual, harrowing and even comic, of an Asian-American woman's exile