In Search of Oppositions: South East Asia in Focus

Abstract

ANY INVESTIGATION OF POLITICAL OPPOSITIONS IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC must necessarily begin, if not end, with the obvious. First of all, there is the evident weakness of political oppositions in much of this part of the world today — whether we focus on the commonly capitalized ‘Opposition’ denoting ‘a political party opposing,and serving as a check on, the party in power’ (Webster's, italics added), or on the more variegated lower case ‘alternative oppositions’ often associated with so-called ‘non-governmental organizations’ of some sort or another. To a considerable extent, therefore, this question involves the compounded difficulty of not merely explaining the careers and conditions of manifest political groupings and their respective trajectories but also, significantly, of retrieving the historical traces, lived experiences and collective memories of oppositionsdisplaced— whether by means of incorporation or of exclusion. Secondly, despite its remarkable recent rise in political, financial and academic discourse, ‘the Asia-Pacific’ remains a highly elusive — and eminently elastic — conception in terms of historical, economic and cultural content. Significantly, for the present discussion, no ‘wave’ of regime transitions comparable to those witnessed in other regions — Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Tropical Africa — can be discerned across the countries encompassed within ‘the Asia-Pacific’.