eva hansson

The military junta in Thailand is busy building a system of "Guided Democracy", which will entrench the power of the military in years to come. The only hope in reversing this process lies with building a pro-democracy social movement linked to the working class. This is yet to be achieved and unfortunately, the trend towards authoritarianism in Thailand is mirrored by events in other South-East Asian countries.

Asia’s political landscape is in flux. Conventional, institutional taxonomies are limiting: classifying regimes along an authoritarian–democratic continuum suggests a static, homogenous categorization that aligns imperfectly with the experience of most citizens. Policy access, civil liberties, and political empowerment are less broadly disseminated in the illiberal regimes predominant across Asia than in liberal democracies, and unequal even in the latter.
Authoritarianism cannot preclude political participation, but it may push engagement into informal, less visible, more creative, less readily suppressed niches. Even in more liberal polities, the core attributes of ‘democracy’ are unevenly distributed; not all actors have equal chance of being heard or influential. What most characterizes these struggles across regimes is the asymmetry of available resources, options and alliances. Moreover, a dichotomous division of civil society and political society fits poorly at best where new online media, transnational networks, and other dimensions of political space—the discursive and material terrain of politics—transcend or sidestep both territorial and institutional boundaries. Such a division is further complicated by the mix of formal and informal organizations and networks within ‘civil society’, including in authoritarian regimes, and the fact that actors from civil society, and not just the state itself, participate in policing political space.
In the face of these complex dimensions and ongoing transformations, political space bears closer examination. That need is especially keen in authoritarian or hybrid (electoral authoritarian or semi-democratic) contexts, where political space may be obscured, manipulated, or subject to novel or subtle means of construction, policing, and constraint.
This panel aims to deconstruct and disentangle political space across interactive subnational, national and transnational scales; across categories of individuals and groups, including those with greater or lesser access to decision-making power; and across modes and media, from street protests and rallies, to documentaries and blogs, to petitions and press conferences. Our focus in these papers—on China, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Burma—is primarily outside formal, or electoral politics, although a given actor or group may also use available institutional channels for influence.
Among the key questions the papers in this panel explore are: How do activists navigate across scales and institutional forms, to find venues and allies? What actors benefit from new technologies of participation, and in what ways? How do categorical inequalities structure access to voice, given changes in available political space and allies? Who creates, controls, and polices political space—as some of these arenas may be outside the purview of the state itself? And taking the papers as a group, the task for our discussants: given the mutability of political space, how do we best conceptualize patterns of participation and representation across Asian political regimes?