Seminar
Title: What Should We Expect of Civil Society in Southeast Asia?
Location: HSS Meeting Room 5
Date: Thursday, 7 November
Time: 14:30-16:00
Speaker: Professor Meredith Weiss
Speaker Bio: Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore.
Abstract: Predating but intensifying with the public-health and economic crises COVID-19 sparked was a political one, of democratic decline or autocratic consolidation, across much of Southeast Asia. Increasingly in recent years, concerned actors and organizations from civil society have acted as firewalls against democratic decline or autocratization, even as fellow civil society organizations (CSOs) have exerted countervailing, anti-democratic pressure. Indeed, CSOs may be no more progressive than the state, nor fully autonomous from it, and may be 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, through a range of modalities. Regardless of their ideological stance, CSOs’ political engagement represents the promise or exercise of diagonal accountability. This check interacts with vertical and horizontal dimensions and retains the potential for meaningful intervention—but need not pull in a liberal direction.