Hybrid: What Should We Expect of Civil Society in Southeast Asia?

Date and Time: August 25, 2023 | 3:00-4:30pm HST

Speaker: Maredith Weiss

Register online: https://go.hawaii.edu/m7X

In-person participation: Moore Hall, Room 258

Alongside and overlapping the public-health and economic crises that COVID-19 sparked, has been a political one, of democratic decline or autocratic consolidation, across most states in the region. To what extent have actors and organizations from civil society acted as firewalls against democratic decline or autocratization in Southeast Asia—including when fellow civil society organizations (CSOs) have exerted countervailing, anti-democratic pressure—and how best we might understand those roles? We can see civil society as working in any of three directions, in any combination, and contingent on prevailing circumstances and opportunities: proactively to promote liberalization, reactively to forestall or slow autocratization, or to advance or accept democratic regression or exclusivism. CSOs may be no more progressive than the state, nor fully autonomous from it, and may be debilitatingly fragmented or polarized. And yet across the region, CSOs still disrupt regimes’ would-be panoptic scrutiny and authority, by presenting alternative spaces and premises for mobilization and voice—especially salient amid pandemic-induced dislocations—through a range of modalities. Even when the balance of CSOs ultimately support the state, their doing so represents the exercise of diagonal accountability, which interacts with vertical and horizontal dimensions and retains the potential for meaningful intervention, especially when the state is in flux or under strain.