After the 1990s, in addition to the European cases, scholars working on human trafficking also put major attention to Southeast Asia. This article contributes to the discourse on the nexus between labour migration and human trafficking by analysing the politics surrounding counter-trafficking policymaking in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. This study investigates two interrelated domestic factors influencing the evolution of the state's counter-trafficking framework: (1) the integration of labour protection within a populist policy agenda and (2) the securitisation of labour migration. Combined with the global discourse on labour trafficking, such intertwining factors have resulted in the counter-trafficking approach which tends to criminalise actors within the labour migration sector. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 in multiple sites in Indonesia, this research argues that domestic political dynamics, when considered alongside broader global debates on human trafficking, have significantly shaped the government's direction in counter-trafficking policy development.

China's behaviour in the South China Sea varies systematically among claimant states rather than unfolding uniformly. It often confronts the Philippines with coercive tactics but adopts greater restraint towards Vietnam. This article explains this patterned variation through a comparative framework that integrates realist and constructivist insights. Drawing on maritime incident data and elite-level interactions, it argues that China calibrates its use of coercion and restraint based on its perception of a claimant's threat-enhancing and affinity-enhancing mechanisms. The Philippines’ alliance with the US and reliance on legal internationalisation of the dispute heighten China's threat perception, driving coercion. By contrast, Vietnam's non-alignment and party-to-party ties foster elite trust and crisis management with China. This encourages restraint despite overlapping claims. The article advances the concept of differentiated assertiveness to capture this conditional and relational logic and situates South China Sea disputes within broader structural and ideational patterns.

This article investigates the legitimising role of hydropower dams in authoritarian regimes, with a focus on Cambodia and Laos. Drawing on fieldwork observations conducted between 2018 and 2023, alongside secondary sources, it adopts a content analysis approach to explore how dam-related legitimacy aligns with broader typologies of legitimacy. Although both regimes are authoritarian and utilise hydropower as a socio-economic and symbolic tool to reinforce their authority, they do so in distinct ways. The Laotian government primarily mobilises hydropower to assert performance and identity legitimacy, emphasising developmental success and national identity. In contrast, the Cambodian regime must negotiate between performance and procedural legitimacy, which shapes its hydropower discourse differently. These variations reflect how authoritarian legitimacy is not uniform but contextually shaped by political institutions, economic constraints, and available resources. The study contributes to the literature on authoritarian governance by illustrating how infrastructure projects become instruments of regime legitimation across political landscapes.

This article examines how historical ambiguity becomes a distinctive political resource in post-colonial societies. Analysing presidential communications from 2016 to 2022, I demonstrate how former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte strategically exploited documentary gaps surrounding the hero Lapulapu. Where colonisers destroyed or never created comprehensive pre-colonial records, “narrative vacuums” emerge, enabling populist leaders to construct historical meanings with a flexibility not available in contexts where they must contest established records. Duterte transformed the documentary void surrounding Lapulapu into a political opportunity, recasting him as a Muslim and Visayan hero to bridge ethnic and religious constituencies. This ethnopopulist strategy builds coalitions by connecting divided groups while directing antagonism toward Manila-based elites. Duterte institutionalised his interpretation through the Order of Lapulapu and influenced quincentennial commemorations, demonstrating how leaders convert vacuums into political capital. This pattern illuminates populist movements across post-colonial contexts where similar historical uncertainties provide opportunities for narrative construction and coalition building.

This article explores Thai–Cambodian border relations through the lens of critical geopolitics, challenging state-centric frameworks in International Relations (IR). Drawing on the concept of the territorial trap – which critiques the assumption of self-contained states and elite control over border narratives – it argues that Thai–Cambodian interactions remain shaped by such spatial orthodoxies. While military disputes, notably the Preah Vihear conflict and the recent clashes of July 2025, dominate, they obscure the complex realities of the border. Instead, this article introduces the concept of the Third Space, highlighting diverse actors and lived experiences of borderland. This approach shifts the focus from fixed geopolitical lines to everyday practices of negotiation and contestation. The analysis reveals that although the discussion of Thai–Cambodian relations is historically grounded and economically informed, it can perpetuate the territorial trap if filtered through statist logics. The article thus advocates multidisciplinary, people-centric approaches that reconceptualise borders as contested and socially embedded spaces.

This article examines state–civil society relations in disaster risk management policymaking in the Philippines. It analyses the extent to which civil society actors can shape policymaking outcomes and how political institutions shape civil society organisations’ strategies, methods, and perceptions in disaster risk management policymaking from the Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Congresses. Using the novel concept of “co-infiltration,” the article argues that while the institutional factors are important, these factors shape only in part the available political space for civil society and state engagement in policymaking. Instead, institutions’ role in shaping engagement outcomes is viewed as more contingent, as seen in the outcomes of different civil society organisations’ (CSOs) campaigns across different administrations. However, the push by CSOs to remain relatively independent has put them at odds with state actors in a political environment where participation and dealing with disasters have become increasingly securitised.

The three articles in this special section on presidentialism and democracy in Indonesia analyse the state of Indonesian democracy through a careful study of the 2024 elections and the presidential transition from Joko Widodo to Prabowo Subianto. The three articles examine this election and its significance using different but complementary approaches, analysing elite politics, voting behaviour, political cleavages and electoral institutions. Together, these articles contribute to ongoing debates about the quality of Indonesian democracy, the drivers of democratic backsliding, and the institutional and demographic factors that shape vote choice in a diverse society.

This paper examines the results of the vote of confidence in the National Assembly of Vietnam and their relationship with the subsequent career outcomes of evaluated officials. Although the vote of confidence has not led to the direct dismissal of any official to date, the findings suggest a notable correlation between confidence scores and career trajectories; however, this relationship appears to have diminished over time. Confidence scores have also shown a steady upward trend across successive votes. These patterns support the interpretation that the vote of confidence was originally intended by then–General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng as a political tool to marginalize his political rival. As Trọng successfully consolidated power within the Party and the government, this function has shown a significant decline. More recently, the vote of confidence serves as a procedure to bolster the regime's democratic legitimacy, though it could potentially regain strategic utility in future elite contestation.

Following the end of the Marcos dictatorship (1965–1986), the 1987 Constitution was adopted to safeguard democratic governance. Since then, the Philippines has witnessed numerous, albeit unsuccessful, attempts at constitutional change. This article examines the relationship between oligarchic interests and efforts to amend the Philippine Constitution from 1987 to 2024. The study documents the various efforts lobbying for charter change and examines how powerful political and economic families have engaged with these initiatives under each administration. Our analysis shows that support or opposition to constitutional change often reflects oligarchic goals, raising concerns about the authenticity of reform efforts. However, competitive-clientelist dynamics among oligarchic families serve as a countervailing force, particularly during election cycles, as factions fear that reforms could restrict their future access to state resources or exclude them from power. This article offers insights into the interplay between entrenched power structures and constitutional reform to highlight the persistent influence of oligarchic families in shaping the Philippine political landscape.

This article adds to the literature considering hunger strikes as performances of resistance. It presents the action of fasting not merely as a form of protest, but also as a strategy for commemorating past struggles and producing movement memory during periods of abeyance. To do so, it leverages a case study on Myanmar under both colonial and military rule. The study draws on archival records and interviews with Burmese activists who staged hunger strikes while in jail or during protest events. The ethnographic data collected suggests that despite occupying a prominent place in Myanmar's protest repertoire, prolonged hunger strikes remain a contested tactic. Rejecting ‘fast-to-death’ forms of hunger strikes, Burmese dissidents have instead performed short-term, non-life-threatening fasts to remember past cycles of protest, pay homage to deceased comrades and martyrs, and use their bodies as living memorials to strengthen collective bonds, and invoke a genealogy of past collective action.