Activism and Social Movements in South-East Asia

Abstract

South-East Asia has been characterized by rapid economic growth and enduring so- cio-political disruptions. After the Second World War, many independent movements in the region ended up in or were replaced by authoritarian regimes. Only in the past few decades, mass protests have led to the fall of some of these authoritarian regimes, including the Philippines and Indonesia. Social movements and collective activism have played a crucial role in these upheavals. The region has seen an emer- gence of various forms of collective action and social activism ranging from small- scale mobilization to mass movements concerned with social justice, political and democratic freedom, gender, minorities, and the environment as well as civic, ethnic, indigenous, and human rights.The history of social movements is deeply connected with the struggle for social change. Forming a heterogeneous compound of collective actors with a variety of demands and strategies, social movements essentially represent the conscious, con- certed, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of their soci- ety by using extra-institutional means (Goodwin & Jasper, 2009, p. 3). As a complex system of relations and networks, social movements transcend local, regional, and national borders and connect very different actors on various levels (Van Dyke & Mc- Cammon, 2010). The heterogeneous groups and networks demonstrate manifold pro- cesses of emergence, formation, organization, and transformation, which render any analysis of internal and external dynamics a significant challenge to the researcher.In the past, research on collective action and social activism was mainly focused on issues of labor, class, and the nation, referring mainly to Marxist and structural- functionalist traditions (Delia Porta & Diani, 2006). In South-East Asia, this overlap of the working class movement and emerging nationalism became obvious, for exam- ple, with the strong independent movements in Burma/Myanmar, French Indochina, Indonesia (with the third largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union and China), or the Philippines (Anderson, 1998, pp. 7-8). The emergence of the so called social movements, which mobilized actors across class boundaries, including women, students, ethnic minorities, migrants, or peasants, prompted a quick and innovative response with regard to empirical and theoretical analysis and has led to the proliferation of a range of social movement theories (Delia Porta & Diani, 2006). In this context, collective action and identity theory, for example, points to the social psychology of collective behavior (McCarthy & Zald, 2009, p. 193; cf. Calhoun, 1994; Cohen, 1985; Melucci, 1995), while resource mobilization theory addresses the more deliberate and strategic behavior and rational choices of conscious actors, notably in the early work of Mayer Zald and Charles Tilly (Freeman, 1979; Jenkins, 1983; Mc- Carthy & Zald, 1977). The political process theory focuses on the political and insti- tutional environment in which social actors operate (McAdam 1982; Tilly, 1978) and the new social movement theory highlights the structural origins of social conflict (Melucci, 1989,1996; Touraine, 1981). Each of these approaches gives some proliferate answers to questions with regard to the structural conditions and pre-requisites for the emergence of collective action, the cultural and symbolic production of meaning and identity, the role of political and economic regimes, and the availability or non- availability of organizational and individual resources. These theoretical advances open a broad space for innovative analytical frameworks for the study of social activ- ism and protest originating in the global South - a site rarely regarded as the place of production of social movements theory (Boudreau, 2004). Indeed, existing discrepan- cies between the geographical and historical roots of social movements theory and social movement activity today have been increasingly addressed by scholars from both social studies and area studies (Ford, 2013; Foweraker, 1995). …