Local Responses to Global Challenges in Southeast Asia

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Contents
• Introduction: Local Responses to Global Challenges

Until recently, it has been taken for granted that knowledge is produced in the centres of learning in Europe and North America — or the “West”. In the social sciences, it was even assumed that only Western societies can be legitimate objects of theory-building, since they were considered more advanced and thereby more complete than societies in the rest of the world. Of course, this assumption coincided with European domination in the 19th century and US domination in the 20th century. Since these centres dominated the rest, they had to be more advanced and therefore better-positioned to create knowledge. Whoever questioned this, doubted the obvious, since knowledge that would be generally accepted was created in these centres. A circular relationship between power and knowledge emerged…

The voices of women in the Global South have been undermined in formal knowledge production. Their experiences and perspectives have been muted, ignored, and unrecognised as knowledge. Decolonisation of the methodology is part of the efforts to debunk conventional knowledge production; post-colonial feminist ethnography offers a window through which these hidden voices are uncovered. This chapter demonstrates how the post-colonial feminist ethnographic method reveals the agencies of local women’s movements in expressing their rights to manage natural resources. These women negotiated with the state and other formal institutions by demonstrating how their knowledge and experiences play pivotal parts in conserving their resources. This chapter analyses the narratives of the local women’s movement from two villages in Bengkulu and Sumba, Indonesia. In Bengkulu, the narratives of the women from Pal 8 village who live around Kerinci Seblat National Park (KSNP) convey their efforts to conserve forest cover and gain rights to forest management, ensuring food sovereignty. In Sumba, women’s narratives in the village of Praikaroku Jangga express their experiences fighting against gold mining that polluted their water and land. These voices provide critical perspectives on the existing power relations and their efforts to sustain their culture, identities, and resources. Using a postcolonial feminist ethnographic method, this study reveals the evidence of “colonisation” in natural resource management which places women in disadvantaged positions. The method enables this study to uncover and understand subaltern voices and local knowledge that are otherwise difficult to obtain using other methods. Through various participatory meetings and interviews, the women groups in both locations were able to express their demands to those who held cultural and political influence. Using a series of negotiations, demonstrations, and conversations, these women managed to frame their interest to gain support from various stakeholders and to develop multi-level mobilisation. However, the narratives also show that there is a limit to their agency. This limitation stems from their marginalised positions and limited access to social, cultural, natural, and political resources. This chapter shows that only when these subaltern groups speak, feminist researchers have the chance to explore local women’s movement and knowledge.

Contributing to a nuanced understanding of the life and afterlife of the 19th century Filipino artist Félix Resurrección Hidalgo’s painting, The Church against the State (circa 1904), and also how it has been (re)written by the National Museum of the Philippines, this chapter explores power as an ideological and reciprocal framework that facilitates the dynamic connections between the personal and the political in colonial and contemporary Philippines. It traces how power is manufactured through self and proxy agency and monastic and museological authority which then shape artistic expressions, cultural practices, and knowledge production. As a critical take on knowledge production that is visual and textual, I examine how individual and institutional power manifests itself and how it moves across time and space based on close readings of archival data and anecdotes, analysis of artworks using standard art historical methodologies and critical theory from formalism to semiotics, and embodied research experience. Inspired by a New Area Studies approach that is multi-disciplinary and critical of hegemonic apparatuses such as the church, state, and museum and incorporating a transregional perspective that braids complex systems of contact, exchange, and transfer in Southeast Asia, this chapter on the Philippines constitutes a local response to the colonial and contemporary global challenge of censorship of artistic expression and/or academic and press freedom in other countries like the litigious Singapore and Thailand.

Much has been written about China’s state-funded global network of Confucius Institutes and its alleged attempts to influence how foreign students view and think about the PRC. Less attention has been given to the PRC’s Ministry of Education’s enormous increase in funding of Chinese scholars for conference travel, visiting scholar awards, and research. This funding in itself is not unusual, particularly in the context of China’s East Asian neighbours. South Korea (via the Korea Foundation), Japan (via the Japan and Nippon Foundations), and Taiwan (via the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation) have all sought to project soft power through the strategic funding of scholarship that reflects favourably on their societies and political positions. The result has been a growing perception that pan-Asian scholarly organisations such as the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) over-represent China-related themes and concerns about the potential marginalisation of non-China related scholarly output, particularly work focused on South and Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I examine this alleged impact and reflect on what the future might hold.

This chapter aims to critically examine the state of academic freedom in Southeast Asia (SEA). It argues that while the exercise of academic freedom should be contextualised, the universal nature of the concept remains unchanged. On top of a review of the relevant literature and official documents, data were drawn from research about the state of human rights and peace education and research carried out in 2019 in 11 countries in Southeast Asia. This chapter finds that despite a certain level of academic freedom enjoyed by academics and students in some countries in the region, on the whole, institutions of higher education in SEA are facing difficulties because of shrinking political space. As such, their academic freedom has been constrained by the political predicament of their respective countries. In addition, several states have implemented restrictive laws and policies. The practice of governmental censorship leads to self-censorship among academics. Some issues perceived as contentious are left undiscussed. Moreover, the current commercialisation of higher education, with its increased precariousness for academics, also contributes to the marginalisation of their voices. This study concludes that even though academic freedom is not explicitly recognised by international human rights treaties and, in many instances, is actually regulated by domestic law and regulations, the universal values of such rights remains.

The question of community has to date remained a matter of major preoccupation for scholars in various disciplines. The meanings attached to this term have undergone various transformations, shaped by shifting political contexts and varying scholarly positionings. We have come a long way from the classical invocations of community as a cohesive unit that represents a stable, localised, distinctive, and homogenous group (Walkerdine 2010). In the last couple of decades of the 20th century, the term community no longer simply connotes the immediacy and intimacy of local interactions but increasingly operates as a marker of collective identity (Amit 2002). This distinctive turn is propelled by Benedict Anderson’s (1983/1991) conceptualisation of “imagined communities”, now regarded as a classic. Anderson argues that through the mediation of mass printing, national belonging emerged. This social process relies on the active works of imagination, according to Anderson (1983/1991, p. 6), “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”…

Over recent years, the Indonesian state has increasingly responded to the global challenge of Islamist movements and the rise of Islamophobia in the West by internationally promoting a locally inspired, moderate Indonesian Islam as a role model. Into this Islamic foreign policy agenda, which also aims at manoeuvring Indonesia out of its peripheral position within the Muslim world, the Indonesian state has begun integrating the national body of Islamic academia as a transregional political actor. Islamic academics are publicly advocating Indonesia as a new centre of the ummah (global Islamic community), teaching Indonesian Islamic academic epistemologies abroad and building new Indonesian Islamic campuses for international students. As traditionally the sphere of Indonesian Islamic higher education has been oriented towards political engagement in domestic affairs, the new development of border-crossing political activities is a sharp break with the past. By tracing the local political history of Indonesian Islamic academia, this chapter analyses what has enabled Indonesian Islamic academia to rise from a local to a global actor. From a Bourdieusian perspective it is argued that the state authorities’ rationale for elevating Islamic academia as an actor to the transregional scale emanates from Islamic academia’s preexisting rich and complex capital endowment and its deep expertise in politics. For the state, these characteristics made Islamic academia an attractive, uncomplicated instrument and low-risk investment option for broadening Indonesia’s presence on the international parquet. This chapter illustrates that tracing history and forms of capital as per Bourdieu is of relevance for understanding contemporary transregional phenomena.

While recent research pays attention to the sociabilities of emplacement — defined as the interactions through which migrants form social relations upon settlement — to moderate the shortcomings of integration theory and the ethnic lens (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016), researchers have largely ignored the sociabilities that happen on digital platforms. This chapter makes sense of the digital sociabilities of emplacement based on a virtual ethnographic study conducted on Facebook groups for Vietnamese migrants in Taiwan. This chapter focuses on the digital sociabilities of low-skilled and mid-skilled Vietnamese labour migrants who face tremendous forms of displacement such as long work hours, isolated employer-provided living arrangements, a lack of language skills, and the risk of exploitation and discrimination. This chapter focuses on the sociabilities of transregional migrants whom I define as migrants who develop and maintain multi-faceted connections linking multiple places, spaces, and scales. In this chapter, I argue that by forging social relations via digital platforms, transregional migrants engage in the processes of building and rebuilding networks of connection within the constraints and opportunities of their specific locales and predicament of displacement. This chapter contributes to understanding how people deal with the growing disparities and displacements of global capitalism by addressing how transregional migrants use digital technologies as multiscalar tools to overcome precariousness and displacement.

In 1965 the first sexual moral panic was created in Indonesia: the slander that communist women would have castrated and killed army generals. In reality the generals had been abducted and killed by army personnel. This moral panic served to help legitimise the rise to power of General Suharto and incited militias to murder possibly one million people. Since late 2015 another sexual moral panic has been raging. It is again directed from above by political and religious elites. This time the LGBT community is targeted. Though same-sex relations between consenting adults has never been criminalised, and Indonesia has been known as relatively tolerant of homosexuality, raids on gay saunas and bars are held, and lesbian couples evicted from their boarding houses. Activists are targeted, foreign funding is blocked, and anti-LGBT legislation is being prepared. The old communist phobic campaign persists and is even combined with the present homophobic campaign. Right after the re-election of President Joko Widodo conservative forces in the Parliament produced a revised draft of the Criminal Code in which both homosexuality and the spreading of Marxist literature would be criminalised. The passing of this bill was only prevented by student demonstrations, at the cost of the loss of several young lives. In this chapter, I will compare both campaigns, discuss the political and religious motivations behind them and sketch the current human rights climate in Indonesia.

The following sections are included:

• Southeast Asia as a Laboratory of Current Political Dynamics between Democracy and Autocracy
• Politics and Power
• Populism in Asia
• Concluding Thoughts
• References

In this chapter, we elaborate on how collaborations between Southeast Asian artists and academics in the region and the diaspora engage political and social issues in our respective countries, while projecting out towards the international community. As such, they are a form of trans-regionality that emanate from below and reach out to other parts of the world. We tackle how our collaborative work and multiple subjectivities unsettle various borders, while subverting and questioning power and authority in creative ways that respond to the urgency of issues related to censorship, repression of civil society, state-violence, violent othering, capitalist extraction, corruption, and labour migration. This is a process animated by co-learning, as the partners of collaboration learn from each other how to transcribe, translate, and transmit knowledge that is accessible to the public, and opens new ways of understanding, imagining, seeing, and feeling. Our method of inquiry and collaborative writing process are akin to quilting, where we recognise our similarities and differences in terms of discipline, forms, talents, politics, and contexts and draw comparative insights from these without glossing over differences, nor offering easy generalisations. We conclude by maintaining the importance of insights grounded in local knowledges, embodied experiences, and urgencies to inform collaborative works and transregional analyses, while highlighting the need for more spaces and opportunities for transregional knowledge exchanges that are mindful of imbalances in power relations between variously positioned actors in the global economy of knowledge production.

In January 2014, a general strike brought one million workers on to the streets of Cambodia in support of wage rises in the garment sector. Dispersed using lethal force, the longer-term response of state authorities to workers’ increasingly vocal dissent was the passing of the Law on Trade Unions in 2016. Cambodia’s use of the law to stifle opposition exemplifies wider trends in Southeast Asia and beyond towards an authoritarian variant of neo-liberal development. Caricatured as the “return of the strongmen” in popular discourse, academic scholarship too tends to privilege a totalising and top-down narrative of this shift. In this chapter, I call for better appreciation of local geographies of authoritarian change and argue that an anti-geopolitics frame can help elucidate its ground-up dynamics. Drawing from data collected as part of a 3-year institutional ethnography of the trade union movement in Cambodia, I show how the Cambodian “crackdown” was shaped, provoked, and resisted by a hitherto marginalised and overlooked force in national society: garment workers. I argue that an anti-geopolitics approach can better elucidate the contingent nature of Southeast Asia’s authoritarian (re)turns, as this strengthening of the state simultaneously engenders its growing fragility by eroding the vestiges of façade democracy on which the regime’s legitimacy is based.

The Minangkabau are an ethnic minority in Indonesia, famous for their matrilineal system — by some even described as matriarchal. Minangkabau women are known in Indonesia and beyond for their powerful status within the community. Yet, this power does not seem to transfer into an extensive representation of women in the political arena, as the proportion of parliamentary seats held by women in West-Sumatra suggests. This chapter analyses in which way the matrilineal system influences women’s political participation, focusing on political participation through candidacy and taking into consideration the differences regarding local or regional politics and Indonesia’s national political sphere. As the matrilineal inheritance system is often regarded as the main ordering mechanism in Minangkabau, this chapter takes into consideration what effect the positions of different adat organisations and gendered clan obligations can actually have on the accessibility of Minangkabau women to politics. Through this focus, this chapter addresses the current fights against patriarchal political domination, by analysing alternative society structures and their abilities to address gender inequality in politics.

“Fake news”, or disinformation, is a contemporary phenomenon whose potential to impact on societal and political institutions have been widely documented by scholars. How have governments in Southeast Asia responded to the threat posed by disinformation? To address this, this chapter employs securitisation theory to evaluate political responses in Singapore and Malaysia towards disinformation. It has two key focuses: first, what empirical insight can securitisation theory provide towards explaining the heightened political salience of disinformation in both countries? Second, how have political actors in Singapore and Malaysia securitised disinformation, and what are the subsequent socio-political implications? The securitisation of a political issue gives credence to the urgent need for emergency measures and the mobilisation of resources to resolve a purported existential threat. While disinformation has been evidenced to be a societal problem, this chapter advances that the securitisation of disinformation by the Singapore and Malaysian governments can be construed foremost as politically expedient decisions within the unique socio-political contexts of each country. Specifically, it argues that state actors have sought to instrumentalise disinformation to justify the passing of wide-reaching legislation. In both cases, the passing of these laws has allowed the governments to consolidate political power, increase regulatory oversight and censor criticisms against the state. More broadly, this chapter highlights how authoritarian states have increasingly sought to respond to the global challenge of disinformation by adopting securitisation as a transregional response. The findings problematise the notion of securitisation as an optimal societal response to disinformation, and emphasises the need to guard against consequential encroachments upon media freedom and civil liberties arising from such political responses.

Liberals do not like populism, but strictly defined, populism has many faces and outcomes. These must be studied in context. One — which may be labelled “reformist” and was associated with the rise of the Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo — even came with openings for welfare and democracy. Now it has crumbled and much of previous openings and leaders have given up much of the advances to retain power. What were the dynamics and lessons? The new wave of populism in Indonesia since the mid-2000s grows out of two counter movements, one major effort among pro-democrats, and one set of new institutions. The protests were against the neo-liberal growth-strategies and employment relations after the Asian Economic Crisis but also against the elitist character of post-Suharto democratisation. The efforts were to overcome the confinement of progressive groups to civil society and their inability to gain access to organised politics and thus make a difference — the related keyword was “go politics!”. The new opportunity structure was about the decentralisation of public governance and the introduction of direct elections of political executives. The new openings were reduced, however, when the progressive movement behind Jokowi was weakened. Rival right wing populism arose and Jokowi was only able to remain in power by accommodating nationalist military officers and loyal yet conservative Ulamas — at the expense of universal welfare and democracy. This chapter argues that the crumbling of reformist populism primarily relates to two more general characteristics of populism: one, its focus on defining and unifying active citizens on the basis of identity against others rather than behind transformative reforms; two, its additional preoccupation with direct democracy/participation rather than democratic representation.

Southeast Asia is highly resource-rich region particularly in minerals. Optimum management of resources, one that ensures sustainable economic growth, provides secure livelihoods, prevents environmental degradation, and also leads to political stability is a key concern for many nations. In most cases the important factor is not the availability of resources or lack thereof, but rather the capacity of the nations to negotiate the deployment of resources in a manner that not only balances competing interests, but also ensures a sustainable path to economic growth. An inability to manage resources effectively, may result in corruption, inflation, waste and most significantly disputes; resulting in a “resource curse” rather than blessing. Resources related issues are usually context specific, however, since resources, whether natural or human, are not confined within the boundaries of nation states and their management has spill-over effects, there is always a possibility of disputes. Effects of climate change and demands of rapidly rising population are also making it tougher for countries to reach agreements on resource sharing. Water scarcity has become one of the most pressing challenges that most countries are facing, consequently making it the most politicised resource. Oil, gas, and minerals are resources that straddle boundaries within and between countries. Successful management of resources across countries can result in benefits that have much broader reach in the form of regional peace and stability, whereas inability to successfully deploy resources can cause domestic conflict, regional instability, and environmental degradation. Resources are also crucial in shifting the focus of geo-politics in the region, while having implications for global politics. Since trade of natural resources is a key driver of economy, restrictions or concessions — in form of sanctions and agreements — are employed as tools of geo-politics. In the current global scenario, Southeast Asia particularly, has a strategic location as it is sandwiched between world’s two rising powers — India and China. It has therefore an important role to play developing linkages between these two countries, one being the largest democracy and other having a major economic influence in the region…

For a country long-renowned for its abundant natural resources, Myanmar in recent years has accorded less priority and attention to this sector. Agriculture (including forests and fisheries) still employs much of the workforce and provides livelihoods for the rural population, but yet it does not get the inputs including the investment that it requires. What has resulted is a weak and inadequate response to urgent circumstances not only in an important economic sector but also in environmental, conservation and sustainability concerns and affecting a large population segment and strata. Millions of the rural workforce have become migrant workers in neighbouring countries. The economy as a whole is still buoyed up by natural gas exports, construction, and service industries. But these favour mostly urban areas and populations; for the extensive rural economy, road-building and electricity alone will not halt the downward slide. Many studies have been done on natural resource management and conservation, but policies where they exist are hampered by weak state capacity, corruption and the persistence of armed conflict. There has been advocacy for shared management of natural resources but together with the lack of political will, there is still a long way to go. China’s role in illegal logging, gold-dredging, and jade mining have been pointed out, but these are secondary to that country’s focus upon strategic infrastructure. Central to the picture is the “style” of governance by the Myanmar state, particularly the incumbent government. A paternalistic neglect of local views, mistrust of civil society, and very centralised decision-making exacerbate the situation. The private sector continues to be dominated by crony capitalists who keep to their rentier, extractivist practices. Ending the armed conflict and attending to displaced populations are critical issues to be sure, but using these as excuses is not going to be enough. A more plural, open, and inclusive approach to the business of government is the only way Myanmar can meet its overwhelming challenges. The present centralised, hierarchical, and bureaucratic business-as-usual will not work. Neither will mass party mobilisations, which are a thing of the past. A drastic re-think is desperately required.

Over the past two decades, as global demand for agrofuel and food has increased, Indonesia’s forests and agricultural lands have been massively converted into oil palm plantations. This, in turn, has led to a growth in policy discourse on frontier areas as zones filled with opportunities for economic growth and development. Examining the expansion of oil palm plantations under the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) project in southern Papua, Indonesia, this chapter discusses the construction of remote and marginal areas as zones of opportunity in order to understand the complex and interrelated processes through which land, resources, and society are reshaped and integrated into wider political-economic arrangements. We challenge the idea that frontier-making is a linear process, reaching from the centre to the periphery or from the global to the local. Using relational thinking, we see frontier-making as an interconnected and complex process of spatial reconfiguration that involves multi-levelled discourses and actors with diverse interests. Through this lens, we also see frontier-making and territorialisation as mutually constitutive processes, arguing that the expansion of oil palm plantations under MIFEE has used a trans-regional logic and connected actors, places, and resources to create space for extensively commodifying nature.

As elsewhere, in South and Southeast Asia the anthropological dimensions and related practices of labour, livelihoods, and mobilities are shaping this late and liquid modernity (Bauman 2000; Giddens 1991) in decisive and, most importantly, irreversible ways (Castles 1998). This has not only drawn an impressive deal of scholarly attention in recent decades (see for example, McDowell and de Haan 1997; Olwig and Sorensen 2003; Hugo 2012) but also fundamentally challenges the notion of nation states and geographic areas as spatial containers, a critique prominently put forward by proponents of the concept of New Area Studies (Derichs 2017; Fleschenberg and Baumann 2020). This era’s flows of people, capital, and ideas have been connecting and integrating localities, nation states, regions, and the globe to an extent that urges researchers not only to analyse these phenomena from multi-scalar perspectives but also to engage in inter- and transdisciplinary (Dannecker et al. 2020) as well as transnational research in order to decipher the trajectories and impacts these transformations bear for both the human condition(s) as well as the planetary ecosystem…

Global economic development has encouraged a large group of women from the global south to work in the global north and in many parts of the global south, where they are gainfully employed to perform roles in line with the social construction of women’s gender. Migration is considered as a global phenomenon while at the same time it remains geographically concentrated, as most regulatory frameworks directing migration are bilateral agreements, governing migration flows between two countries, rather than regional. Focusing on Indonesia, this labour migration has created “vacancies” in the migrant workers’ communities back home, where they ask other women to fill in the “emptiness” caused by the migrants’ departure for overseas employment. At the same time, the migrants’ spouses continue life and work as usual in those communities, prompting a lively debate among scholars of international relations, namely on the feminisation and (re)masculinisation of global migrant workers. I argue that Indonesian women’s migration and entrance into domestic work constitute an international division of reproductive labour. Whereas class-privileged women from other countries purchase the low wage household services of Indonesian female migrant domestic workers (FMDWs), these women simultaneously purchase the even lower-wage household services of poorer women back in Indonesia. Meanwhile, the FMDWs’ spouses keep their status as the head of the households and value the caring work as low. This chapter discusses the experiences of Indonesian FMDWs deployed to a range of different countries and pays attention to the impact of their absence on social constructed gender roles back home.

This chapter explores the global–local challenge nexus through a case study of Indonesia’s domestic worker movement, concentrating on its use of street protest as a means of gaining visibility, local legitimacy, and political purchase. Since the 1990s, research on domestic work in Southeast Asia has highlighted the growth and significance of the continuing flow of female workers across national borders within and beyond the region, exposing how migrant domestic workers are subjected to disciplinary and regulatory processes which seek to turn them into “ideal maids” and pinpointing forms of resistance. However, this scholarly focus has obscured developments inside Indonesia which employs at least four of the estimated ten million domestic workers in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Drawing on press and NGO photographs, the available “archive”, and the testimony of participants, this chapter demonstrates the multi-scalar nature of the connections and genealogies which underpin Indonesia’s domestic worker movement and traces the development of what I identify as a politics of presence which supported the articulation and emergence of a nascent Indonesian domestic worker class.

The connectivity and relationality between knowledge, religion, mobility, and professionalisation in today’s globalised economy is just as remarkable as the active and formative role that Muslim women from different regions of Asia play in this field. Taking this observation as anchoring point, this chapter addresses the nexus between religion, knowledge, and professionalisation. Deploying a gender lens that draws attention to women from Asia as mobile agents connecting multiple fields of work, knowledge and piety through entrepreneurial activities online, we introduce “Muslim professionalism” as a new analytical concept to emphasise the co-constitutive relationship between individual and societal Islamisation and global capitalist development. The text also contours the methodological and conceptual scope of a new and cross-cutting research field that links new area studies approaches with mobility, gender, and religious studies. Grasping Muslim professionalism empirically, the chapter illustrates how Muslim women create and shape new fields of entrepreneurship across geographical borders and social boundaries. Being mobile (physically and virtually) is a crucial facilitator for and enabler of women’s professional agency. In conceptual terms, “Muslim professionalism”, as a lived reality, draws attention to the multiple border-crossing settings in the women’s professional everyday life that transcend the nation-state, gender norms, institutionalised social orders, as well as the academically constructed boundaries of Asia and the Middle East. The latter region shapes the centre curve of the loop that stretches from South, East, Southeast, to Central Asia.

The following section is included:

• Index