Organizer: University of Hawaii-Manoa Center for Southeast Asian Studies

Type/Location: Hybrid/Hawaii

Description:

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 maybe 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 supports 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. 

Speaker: Meredith Weiss, Professor, Political Science, SUNY - Albany

To register, click here.