Social Movements in Contemporary Southeast Asia

The last 20 years witnessed a global resurgence in social activism. The Arab Spring and Occupy protests in 2011, the Me-Too movement in 2017, the FridaysForFuture initiatives in 2018, and the Black Lives Matter network in 2018 are just but a few powerful instances of this often transnational phenomenon. Comparatively, Southeast Asia has received little and discontinuous media coverage and scholarly attention, despite the impressive influence that marginalized groups (e.g. indigenous communities, women and children, LGBTQI+ organizations, religious actors, and the urban poor) have exerted over the re-definition of the commons, be they nations, digital spaces, or more-than-human cosmoses. This special issue offers one step forward in addressing this lacuna. It scrutinizes the remarkable florescence of social activism in contemporary Southeast Asia by bringing together case studies from contexts as diverse as Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as in transnational arenas where political mobilization connects local struggles to globally relevant issues and forms of dissent.