Civil Society and Efforts at Regime Change in Southeast Asia

This chapter focuses on differing trajectories of civil society organisations in Indonesia and Malaysia. In both cases socio-economic developments have resulted in shifting social structures and global pressures for economic and political reforms. A strategy of export-oriented industrialization was combined with a strong control of labour organizations, yet there was a remarkable mushrooming of civil society organisations since the 1970s, a growing salience of Islamist and ethnicist groups and, in the late 1990s during the Asian economic crisis, an emergence of broad social movements for reform. This chapter also highlights the ambiguous role of civil society during democratization. The relationship between civil society and the state is often blurred. Civil society activists may even more or less willingly back authoritarianism or engender autocratization. This dark side of civil society includes groups that may seem to be innocuous at the beginning, but could become increasingly anti-democratic, and of groups that were from the start only established to obstruct democratization or to undermine already existing democracies. A differentiated understanding of regime change in Southeast Asia thus necessitates an analysis of the various, often contrasting impacts of civil society organisations.