GRIP
GRIP
Recent years have seen reinvigorated authoritarianism across Southeast Asia. In February 2021, the Myanmar military seized power in a coup, ousting the recently re-elected National League for Democracy. In June 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. rode to electoral victory a wave of nostalgia for the presidency of his father—dictator and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted from office by a people’s power uprising in 1986. And in 2023, the Thai military’s political and legal machinations prevented the progressive Move Forward party, which had won a decisive electoral victory, from taking office, while securing the military’s continued political role in a coalition of conservative and arch-royalist, as well as formerly oppositional parties.
How to make sense of these and other authoritarian developments in the region? Are they a continuation of past authoritarians? Or are they expressions of specific conditions in the present? Should they be understood primarily in terms of domestic developments in their respective countries? Or are they part of more regional, even global, trends and processes, which, as we know, have become more authoritarian too? And what analytical insights might we gain from considering recent authoritarian developments in Southeast Asia in relation to the region’s changing political economic conditions and class dynamics?
In this workshop, we will investigate these questions through empirically grounded and theoretically informed studies of specific Southeast Asian countries. We foreground the political economy of authoritarianism in contrast to outmoded culturalist explanations. But political economy is never a perfectly determining structure. We are therefore interested in how regional actors have engaged with shifting political economic conditions to advance authoritarian politics. We ask whether and how authoritarianism can be understood not just as a historical legacy but rather as part of the politics of inequality in the region as it engages with the imperatives of accumulation within the global and regional division of labor. How do these authoritarian trends link up, or not, with class, gender and ethno-racial inequalities? How are they intervening in them? While we are interested in country-specific case studies, we also aim to unsettle a methodological nationalism that would take the nation-state as a default, bounded unit of analysis.
The workshop is a part of GRIP’s wider engagement with the topic of illiberalism that was the main theme of Annual GRIP Lecture and Symposium 2024.