Asian Politics & Policy最新文献

Studies on religious discrimination have focused on the nature, causes, and dynamics of repression, asserting that perceived threats and cross-cutting influences of religious ideology and rational calculation are predictors for governmental discrimination against religious minorities. Yet, research on how the dynamic interplay of repression and pushback shapes the contestation between governments and minorities is lacking. This article explores this issue with a case study of a small indigenous religion group in culturally heterogenous Indonesia. Building on civic space theory, this article argues for the importance of coping strategies in resisting state-led discrimination and asserting civic space. This article carefully examined complex micro dynamics while also offering new insights to better understand the interplay between repression and pushback in the context of religious freedom.

Election-related violence (ERV) is a recurring concern in the Philippines—considered to be one of the most violent countries in Asia. National and midterm elections which happen every 3 years are the most violent. As such, a thorough analysis on the nature of ERVs in the country is necessary to address the causes facilitating electoral violence. While there have been several ERV studies in the Philippines after the post-1986 democratization period, this article is the first that looks at electoral violence data at both the individual and aggregate levels. This study examines incidences of ERV in the Philippines from 2013 to 2019 by creating a novel incident-level data set, the Philippine Electoral Violence data set, constructed from online media reports. A total of 394 incidents were found over the three election periods covered in the data set, which includes at least one incident in 65 out of the 81 provinces in the country.

The changes in Thailand's policy on labor migrant control appeared optimistic for refugee and human rights issues in recent years. This article argues that such positive adjustment is to take control of refugees and migrants outside the space of the global refugee regime. Using the case of Chiang Mai, Thailand, it discussed how the movement of Shan people in this area indicates mixed migration and how the Thai authorities and local Thais' views of them affect their status in Thailand. It examined the role of international norms that influence Thailand's policy and treatment of the Shan refugees and migrants in education and healthcare. Recent adjustments demonstrated that the Thai government began altering migration restrictions, although this is an attempt to seize control. In the refugee regime complexity, Thailand interacts with the regimes in two areas: education and healthcare, to maintain the control and manageability of refugees and migrants.

What accounts for the survival and long-term participation of activists in contentious movements under repression? I argue for the role of an important yet oft-neglected factor: protective support by civilian bystanders. I propose that, mainly motivated by victim-oriented sympathy, bystanders engage in high-risk protection that helps activists to escape crackdowns and bolsters their dedication to the movement. To test my theoretical claims, I examine hard cases for activist survival at the height of state violence during military rule in Myanmar between 1988 and 2010, with an original qualitative data set consisting of oral history interviews and written accounts by more than 100 protest observers and former pro-democracy activists. The data set presents an unprecedented number of voices from the average, non-contentious general public, which are mostly missing in existing research on social movements. This approach generates a fresh perspective to better understand opportunities and constraints around movement entrepreneurs in hostile environments.

A national “war on drugs” under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte killed an estimated 12,000 to 30,000 victims. Duterte used state terror tactics, generating an unprecedented level of violence within a broader process of democratic backsliding. The violence peaked early, within the first few months of his term of office, then declined and remained low for years afterwards. How do campaigns of large-scale state violence decline? This article explores the context-specific drivers of the drug war's implementation in the Philippines. It presents findings from a model predicting violence escalation and de-escalation using a Poisson regression to estimate the weekly number of killings from 2016 to 2021. The study's main finding is that the violence declined, and remained low throughout the rest of Duterte's term, due to the mobilization of accountability mechanisms—particularly over corruption controversies. This study offers insights into how resistance can impede autocratization, even in weak democracies.

Joseph Nye's soft power has become popular among academics and practitioners in Thailand for decades. Despite its pervasiveness in Thai society, the soft power concept, which is predicated on the outcome-based definition of power, has been misconstrued by Thai policymakers as synonymous with the resource-based definition of power. This policy review examines key strategic blueprints of the relevant Thai state agencies and argues that they misunderstand soft power in its entirety. Mistaking soft power as cultural resources gravely affects how the Thai state agencies outline policy evaluation criteria, which neither conform to Nye's expectations nor achieve the Thai government's objectives. This policy review, however, discovers that “Thailand Foundation,” which is the affiliated organization of Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, appropriately designs soft power indicators that can be emulated by the other Thai state agencies to make soft power strategies work for Thailand.