A map of Southeast Asia highlighting Brunei and its neighboring countries. Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are on the top left; Malaysia and Singapore on the left; Indonesia on the bottom left, Brunei near the center; the Philippines on the right; and Timor-Leste on the bottom right.

Region map Brunei

1.1 Countries and Cultures of Southeast Asia

The term “Southeast Asia”Footnote 1 is a neologism. It was used occasionally in academic texts in the 1920s but only entered more general use after the Allied Forces established the “South East Asia Command” (SEAC) in December 1943 to coordinate their campaign against the Japanese Imperial Army in the region north of Australia, south of China, and east of India. Southeast Asia as a region is an extraordinarily diverse collection of states, which vary widely in history, demographics, culture, economy, political systems, and the political challenges they face. From pre-colonial through colonial times and to the present day, the region has been marked more by contrasts and differences than by commonalities. Geographically, Southeast Asia is divided into an insular or maritime region. The former includes Brunei, Indonesia, parts of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste.Footnote 2 Mainland Southeast Asia comprises Burma,Footnote 3 Cambodia, Laos, the Malay Peninsula, and Vietnam. Malay-Polynesian cultural and linguistic influences have shaped maritime Southeast Asia. With the exception of the predominantly Catholic Philippines, Islam is the dominant religion of this part of the region. Chinese–Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman, Shan, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese) and Mon-Khmer languages as well as the religious influence of Buddhism historically shaped mainland Southeast Asia. Cultural differences further subdivide Southeast Asia into highland and lowland regions. While the lowlands have historically been the economic, political, and cultural centers, the highlands have been home to many ethnic minorities. Until now, most highland areas are sparsely populated and economically less developed than the central lowlands. Highland areas have also been more resistant to state penetration than the lowlands (Scott, 2009).

The precolonial chieftains, kingdoms, and empires of Southeast Asia were not “modern” territorial states in the Western, Weberian sense, with unitary and centralized administrations, and the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force over a clearly demarcated territory. No single model of state formation existed in Southeast Asia before the arrival of European powers. Rather, as Kulke (1993) explains, processes of state formation in pre-colonial Southeast Asia usually passed through three successive phases: chieftaincy, regional states, and imperial kingdoms. The first phase included the successful consolidation of a solid local power within a limited territory but without an institutionalized bureaucracy. In the second phase, local leaders succeeded in extending their authority into new territories and establishing permanent and legitimate relations with the conquered areas and their leaders. Importantly, these “states” were characterized by polycentric relations between multiple political centers and shifting loyalties of their leaders, particularly at the peripheries of what has been defined as the “mandala state” (Wolters, 1999). In the mandala (derived from the Sanskrit term “circle”), the authority of the center, outside its own core region, was ritual and symbolic in nature rather than administrative. In this type of polity, it was impossible to make a clear distinction between internal relations among the polity's “segments” and external relations between separate polities (Christie, 1995, pp. 239–240). The mandala state has thus been described by Wolters as an unstable “circle of kings” in a territory without fixed borders and in which each subjugated unit state remained a complete, potentially independent, polity with its own center and court (Wolters, 1982, pp. 16–32).

These states dominated the political map of Southeast Asia throughout the first millennium A.D. Beginning in the late ninth century and continuing throughout the first centuries of the second millennium, a third phase of state formation resulted in the creation of imperial kingdoms. The significant new feature of the imperial kingdoms, such as Angkor, Ayudhya, Java, and Majapahit, was that it forcibly unified two or more core areas of former independent regional kingdoms and replaced the established leaders of these areas with members of the central dynasty or its military-administrative elites. In this process, the annexed areas lost their character as autonomous authorities (Kulke, 1993).

1.2 Southeast Asia in Colonial Times

European colonialism expanded over Southeast Asia from the 1510s to the 1910s and reached its apex between 1870 and 1914 (Osborne, 1990). The colonial experience was a dominant influence for most of the region’s inhabitants. Until today, colonial legacies remain essential to understanding national politics in Southeast Asian countries. Identifying a specific year as the onset of colonial rule is difficult and often not helpful because Western powers extended their rule incrementally, sometimes following a strategic plan and sometimes reacting to local developments. In Netherlands’ East Indies, today’s Indonesia, Dutch merchants, and mercenaries took almost three hundred years from establishing Batavia (1619) to subjecting Aceh (1912) (Andaya, 1999; Tarling, 1999). In the Philippines, Spanish colonial rule began in 1565, but the Spanish crown failed to conquer much of the south, including three independent Muslim sultanates in present-day Muslim Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. With the Treaty of Paris (1898), Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States, but it took the American government until 1913 to consolidate military control over its new dominion. Even after that, the annexed sultanates in the south were administered separately from the rest of the Philippines (Abinales & Amoroso, 2005). For the sake of clarity, Table 1.1 provides the decade in which significant early events signaled the beginning of some kind of colonization by Western powers in the following decades and, in some places, centuries.

Table 1.1 Colonial rule over Southeast Asia
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After 1870, Southeast Asia witnessed a horizontal as well as a vertical expansion of colonial rule. European powers were now willing to invest more resources into their colonial possessions than before. Furthermore, as a direct result of the emergence of European nationalism, new European attitudes vis-à-vis the colonial subjects developed in which the exercise of sovereignty over all Asia and the reform of Asian societies were seen as necessary and proper objects of government. The new colonialism of European powers did not only introduce new economic, legal, and political institutions to the region, but also changed the character of colonialism itself. While European powers extended the geographic reach of their rule, they also became more involved in internal affairs of the colonized territories and their people.

Almost everywhere, the practices of colonial rule reflected a compromise between the interests of the colonial power and local conditions. However, there are some common features. Most colonial powers sought to introduce some modified form of their own state models into their colonies. Main instruments to achieve this goal were military presence, the development of a modern infrastructure and a Western civil administration; standardization of law, tax, monetary, and credit systems; and encouraging the use of the European language as lingua franca of their territory. Where modern institutions of education were introduced, access was restricted in numbers and to certain social groups. Legal systems often differentiated between different groups, with specific laws and courts for “Europeans”, “Asian aliens” and “locals”. The colonial governments generally placed Europeans in a superior legal position and limited the participation in local affairs by indigenous people. Political activities were usually discouraged, or, as in the Philippines, access was limited to certain elite groups. Censorship was common. To marginalize the established elites and to prevent unreliable ethnic groups from gaining access to positions of authority and power in the colonial administration, Western powers often recruited minorities who were viewed by Europeans as reliable and loyal. These included Chinese and Indians for the administration of British Malaya and Burma, Vietnamese in the French protectorates, Ambonese in the Dutch colonial army, and Karen, Chin, and Kachin in the British military in Burma (Hack & Rettig, 2006).

Colonial rule appeared in different forms (Trocki, 1999, pp. 90–97). In places such as Portuguese Timor and the Sultanates of British Malaya, Western powers attempted to control local populations via “indirect rule”, contracting or farming out functions such as taxation and jurisdiction over local people to traditional elites. In others, for example Ministerial Burma, the Strait Settlements, and Cochinchina (the southern region of Vietnam), colonial authorities opted for “direct rule” by deploying their own bureaucrats and soldiers and enlisting the services of a minority group whose loyalty to the regime could be ensured by their numerical weakness vis-a-vis the majority of the population (Hack & Rettig, 2006).

First proposed by Furnival (1960), the differentiation between “direct” and “indirect rule” is analytically useful, but also misrepresents the reality in the individual colonies, where different institutional models often coexisted. All colonies underwent incremental change, caused more by ad hoc adjustments to local conditions than a sophisticated preexisting strategy of institutional design. Direct rule, under which the administrative structure of the colonial power supplanted existing political structures, was the exception (Houben, 2003, p. 149). Indirect rule was a tactical compromise between the fact of uneven power relations and the ceremonial fiction of equal alliances between indigenous rulers and the colonial authority. It was characterized by the retention of local governing bodies and leaders while foreign colonial officials directed the top-level administration and economic affairs. It was not only useful for the colonial government but also for the old political elite of the new colony as far as it justified their position. A typical example is the Dutch rule of Java. In theory, the four princely houses of Java ruled their own territories, and Dutch rule was indirect. In fact, the Dutch Residents exercised real control, although there were differences between the principalities and directly ruled areas because of the different legal standing of Dutch authority (cultuurstelsel policy) (Kuitenbrouwer, 1991; van Klaveren, 1983). The French protectorates in Indochina provide another example for the reality of indirect rule. The protectorate was an official euphemism since power over all Vietnam was in the hands of a French Governor-General in Hanoi. While Cochinchina was governed according to French law administered by Frenchmen and loyal Vietnamese, the “protectorates” were under dual jurisdiction. The old Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian bureaucracy were still in place, their officials surviving as “traumatized moldering tokens of the classical past” (Woodside, 1976).

In reaction to the changes brought about by colonialism, reform movements emerged all over the region following World War I (Kratoska & Batson, 1999). Unlike previous rebellions or insurgencies, these movements were neither a reaction to acute social or economic crises nor attempts to return to precolonial conditions (Berger, 2009). Ironically, at that the very time that European colonialism seemed to be consolidating, Southeast Asian peoples were developing a national consciousness, which would create new forms of anti-colonial resistance. While there was resistance against colonialism in the past, it was mostly based on local traditions and had religious motifs, therefore being pre-modern in form and substance, and other organized political movements that strived for the formation of a sovereign nation state soon advanced. In fact, the period after about 1918 saw an extraordinary proliferation of nationalist political movements. The awakening of nationalism in the region during these “years of illusion” (Osborne, 1990) had many reasons. First, improved educational opportunities, the adoption of Western administrative models, and the expansion of travel opportunities and communication channels had created an indigenous middle class and intelligentsia. Second, tensions between the local population and Asiatic and European migrants had increased. Third, the collapse of European and world markets in the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression had strained European economies. Finally, many Southeast Asian reformers were motivated by the spread of anti-colonial ideologies, Communism foremost among these, and wanted to emulate the model of the Japanese Meiji reforms, or the Chinese (1911) and Russian (1917) revolutions (Owen, 2005; Trocki, 1999). In countries like Burma or Indonesia, the struggle for independence pitted representatives of the main ethnic group, striving for territorial nationalism based on recognition of the political and territorial unity created by colonizers, against members of ethnic minorities, who favored ethnic nationalism that would give them their own state (Kratoska & Batson, 1999, pp. 253–255, 286–288). Other groups were neither interested in nationalism nor independence but demanded limited social and religious reforms (ibid.). Moreover, nationalism had to compete with two other major ideological forces—Communism and Islam—for dominance over the respective anti-colonial movements (Berger, 2009). The extent of coercion used to control local populations and contain the rise of nationalist movements varied between spaces and over times. For example, the French in Vietnam confronted determined resistance from local peasants, traditional elites, bourgeois, and leftist nationalist movements, including a nationalistic uprising of “native” troops in 1930, and, hence, ruled with a heavy hand. In the Dutch Indies and British Burma, periods of repression and relative tranquility alternated. In contrast, in British Malaya and the Philippines after 1902, colonial powers favored an accommodating approach toward local and indigenous elites.

The late 1930s and the early 1940s were also a time of shifting diplomatic alignments in the region. Because Europeans and American were preoccupied with domestic economic problems and with defending against the German advance in Europe, they were less interested in their Asian colonies, thereby opening opportunities for Japan to extend its economic influence and military power, moving southwards through China into Southeast Asia. As Western control and interest declined, Japan saw an opportunity to move into Southeast Asia, to use its economic resources. In autumn of 1940, Japan established a military foothold in Indochina (Christie, 2000, p. 11). In December 1941, the Imperial Army and Navy began a series of assaults on the remainder of Southeast Asia. In less than six months, Japan controlled Southeast Asia. There can be no doubt that three years of Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia (1942–1945) were the key to the decolonization process in the region. The defeat of Western armies and Japanese support for the anti-Western forces in the occupied territories opened opportunities for charismatic leaders to rise to national leadership, for instance in Burma (Aung San) and Indonesia (Sukarno) (Christie, 2000, pp. 11–13). As the war progressed, the Japanese military’s increasingly frenetic efforts to mobilize Southeast Asians laid the groundwork for the national revolutions that were to follow. In Indonesia and Burma, pro-Japanese forces were especially large, and these forces eventually took part in the subsequent struggle for independence after 1945. In Indonesia, the main military force the Japanese raised was the Tentera Pembela Tanah Air (Peta), or Army of the Defenders of the Homeland. Another feature of the Japanese military imprint was the organization and training of numerous paramilitary groups, for example in Java. While the military training was minimal, the numbers of young men involved were considerable (Lebra, 1977, p. 9). These forces and especially Peta had a powerful influence on political leadership and on the Indonesian Army in post-war Indonesia and eventually took part in the subsequent struggle for independence. Nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed independence in August 1945, mere days after the Japanese surrender. While the Netherlands tried to restore its control over Indonesia militarily, the Dutch government ultimately recognized Indonesia’s independence in 1949.

Japan had already provided military training to a group of ethnic Burmans prior to the invasion of Burma in December 1941. Later renowned as “The Thirty Comrades”, this group of nationalists led by Aung San formed the core of the Bamar Lutlatye Tatmadaw or Burma Independence Army (BIA), which entered Burma in early 1942. In the rapidly expanding BIA, the Japanese recruited mostly Burmans but avoided ethnic minorities who had served in the colonial forces (Lebra, 1977, p. 167). In mid-1942, the Japanese military command replaced the BIA with the considerably smaller, still ethnically Burman Burma Defence Army (BDA). However, Aung San and his fellow nationalists remained in the BDA. When the Japanese proclaimed “independence” for Burma in late 1943, Aung San became Minister of Defense in the new Burmese government. In March 1945, he led the Burma National Army (the renamed BDA) out of Rangoon to join the allied forces.

The nationalist movement in the Philippines emerged in the 1880s. When its demand for equal treatment of the Philippines as a Spanish province within the kingdom was ignored, a secret society, the so-called Kapitunan, started a military insurgency in 1896, but failed to overcome the Spanish forces (Abinales & Amoroso, 2005, pp. 102–105). After the Spanish–American War of 1898, sovereignty over the Philippines passed to the United States. After breaking military resistance, the American administration managed to co-opt the Filipino elites by granting them new political and economic privileges (Abinales & Amoroso, 2005, p. 134). With the creation of the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935, the United States promised to grant full independence after a ten year interim period. Even though the Japanese occupation delayed the plan for an orderly transition of power, the Philippines finally became an independent republic in 1946.

British Malaya also gained independence through negotiations rather than national revolution. The British practice of integrating the traditional elite into the colonial administration meant that a Malayan national movement only emerged relatively late (Stockwell, 1977). Moreover, the Chinese, Indians, and Malays of its segmented population were not easily unified into an anti-British position. Ultimately, the struggle against the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), supported mainly by the Chinese population, brought the British colonizers and the Malay elite together when the Party began a guerrilla war in 1946 (Loh, 2005, p. 22). In order to overcome segmentation and prepare the country for independence in 1957, the British mediated “the Bargain” in 1955, a social contract among the country’s three main ethnic groups that granted Chinese and Indians citizenship in exchange for accepting the constitutionally guaranteed political predominance of the Malay population.

In French Indochina, Japan had allowed the collaborationist Vichy administration to remain in place. However, in March 1945, Japanese forces disarmed and interned the complete French community and declared Vietnam independent, with Nguyen Emperor Bao Dai as sovereign ruler over Annam and Tonkin. The intervention of an already weakened Japan enabled the Vietnam Independence League, known as Viet Minh, and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (renamed Vietnam People’s Army in 1950), to fill the power vacuum. The Viet Minh under the leadership of Nguyen Ta Thanh, also known as Ho Chi Minh, started a revolutionary insurgency and quickly gained full control over all of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi on September 2, 1945. Unwilling to give up on its colonial empire, French troops took control over the south, but had to recognize the DRV as a sovereign state within the French Union. In December 1946, fighting broke out between colonial and communist troops. The First Indochina War lasted until French troops were decisively defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Negotiations between Paris and Hanoi without participants from South Vietnam resulted in the Geneva Accords. Under the Accords, Vietnam was to remain separated at the 17th parallel, the troops of both sides were to be withdrawn, and a supervisory commission would be put in place to oversee countrywide election. Yet, the elections never took place because the government of South Vietnam (officially the Republic of Vietnam) under President Ngo Dinh Diem refused to participate. North and South Vietnam remained separated, and while the north aligned with the Soviet Union and China, the south relied on American support.

1.3 From Armed Conflict to Economic Progress: Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 1990s

Most Southeast Asian states achieved independence between 1946 and 1963. Brunei, however, became independent in 1984, while Indonesian troops occupied Timor-Leste after the Portuguese left the island in 1975. While few states recognized the occupation, Timor-Leste only attained independence in 2002. Irrespective of the differing methods of achieving independence—through revolutionary struggle as in Vietnam and Indonesia, or by peaceful elite bargaining in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia—governments faced hard challenges of nation-building in often ethnically segmented societies (Table 1.2) with no shared conception of nation and citizenship, but plenty ethnic and social class conflicts.

Table 1.2 Population, territory, and social heterogeneity in Southeast Asia, around 2019
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In most Southeast Asian societies, nation-building was the project of political and cultural elites in the almost complete vacuum of a universally accepted notion of nation and national identity. Although it might be argued that Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand have been developing into nations over several centuries and contemporary beliefs about what makes one’s state unique in the past, present, and future are conditioned by preexisting identities, it was essentially Western colonialism that created modern nations in Southeast Asia by, first, “imposing centralized and unified territorial states”, and, then, “reactively generating the anti-colonial nationalist movements which imbued the populations of these states with stronger national loyalties” (Brown, 2005, p. 2). The resulting “invention of traditions” (Hobsbawm, 2005) was often based on the historical experiences, political mythology, and cultural symbols of particular groups within the segmented societies (Berger, 2009, pp. 32–41). Political elites in Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand engaged in ethnic majority nation-building, using colonial constructs of identity and defining nationhood by language, religion, customs, and traditions of an “ethnic core group” (Brown, 2004). Even when the name of the new country did not refer to an ethnic core, state policies nevertheless were biased in favor of “ethnic core groups”, for example Javanese in Indonesia, Khmer in Cambodia, and Kinh in Vietnam, or Tagalog-speakers in the Philippines (ibid.). Still, some governments also adopted elements of a “civic” national vision, defining the nation as an association of people with equal and shared political rights, irrespective of ethnic attributes. One example of this is Indonesia, where the ideology of Pancasila translated Javanese ethnic values into a universalistic civic language. Another example is Malaysia, where the government began in the 1980s to modify its Malay-centric, ethno-cultural vision of Malaysia (Bangsa Melayu) that had connoted the potent symbol of mono-ethnic Bumiputera, by articulating the new national identity of Bangsa Malaysia, or multi-ethnic “united Malaysia”, in which Malays and non-Malays were developing a sense of “we-feeling” (Hwang, 2003, p. 246). In socialist Laos and Vietnam, the communist cum nationalist parties propagandized an authoritarian nationalism in which communist elites claimed that they themselves were the objects of patriotic loyalty and that it was them who articulated the true will of the nation. Even more than in most other Southeast Asian countries, national identity is defined through the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle against France, the United States, and (in the case of Vietnam) China. In the case of Thailand, which was never colonized, “national identity was constructed and reconstructed differently from other Southeast Asian countries” (Thananithichot, 2011, p. 260). Nationalism had been a powerful instrument for traditional rulers to consolidate their rule since at least the 1900s. King Vajiravudh (1910–1925) in particular created the slogan “Nation, Religion, King”, which centered on ethnic Thai structures, to define national unity (Brown, 2005, p. 10; Chachavalpongpun, 2016).

The lack of integration within the emerging social order and the latent tensions between political units and national identities created the tinder for domestic armed conflicts that flared up after independence. Some of these internal wars, as in Burma, the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and West Papua, persist until today. Whether social conflict could quickly be contained within institutional channels or resulted in military violence had profound effects on the process of state-building (Slater, 2010; Vu, 2010). The first decades following World War II have been characterized as an era of elite-driven and often violent nation-building in Southeast Asia: During this period, the region was plagued by ethnic conflicts and class-based insurgencies (Brown, 1994, 2008). Ethnic and class cleavages often overlapped, as in Malaysia, Thailand, and Laos. The region only grew more peaceful after the Cold War era proxy conflicts in Laos (1960–73), Vietnam (1958–75), and Cambodia (1970–1991) had ended (Fig. 1.1). Even though the turn of the century engendered an upsurge of ethno-nationalist violence—partly caused by the political upheavals of the Indonesian transition in 1998/99—this appears to have been a passing phenomenon and has not affected the underlying trend (Trinn & Croissant, 2012).

Fig. 1.1
A bar graph plots number of violent conflicts versus years from 1946 to 2005. Values are estimated. (1946, 2), (1948, 1), (1950, 8), (1954, 5), (1956, 4), (1960, 7), (1971, 6), (1972, 8), (1974, 7), (1975, 10), (1979, 11), (1981, 10), (1985, 9), (1988, 8), (1993, 4), (1996, 3), (1999, 5), (2000, 5), (2001, 5), (2005, 4).

Source: Data compiled from Conflict Information System (CONIS) based at Heidelberg University. The graphic includes all intra- and interstate violent conflicts and wars involving any of the 11 countries covered in this book, see also Croissant et al. (2009)

Number of violent conflicts in Southeast Asia, 1945–2005.

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Several factors account for the ebb in violent conflict since the 1980s. A first one is the end of the second Indochina war in 1975 and, in the 1980s, of the Cold War. As a result, Indochina lost its relevance as a theater of great power rivalry, and the appeal of leftist insurgencies faded with the global decline of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A second factor is the often-underappreciated success of the ASEAN in building a regional identity, which helped to ease tensions between neighboring states in the region’s over-contested and often undemarcated borders (Connors et al., 2018). Third, parts of Southeast Asia became centers of economic growth, which helped to reduce internal socioeconomic tensions and strengthened intraregional ties. In Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, real per capita GDP rose twice as fast as in any other regional group (Northeast Asia) between 1965 and 1990 (Croissant & Pelke, 2021). More recently, Vietnam has also sustained high growth rates (ibid.). Even the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and 1998 would not reverse this trend. Economic growth fueled dramatic reduction in poverty in many Southeast Asian countries, and the simultaneous increase urbanization, public health, human development, and the size of the new middle classes, but also income inequality (Asian Development Bank, 2010; see Table 1.3).

Table 1.3 Indicators of modernization and human development in Southeast Asia
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1.4 Democratization and Autocratization

The political consequences of socioeconomic modernization were manifold. While authoritarian regimes ruled the region in the mid-1980s, democracy or, at least, semi-democracy replaced dictatorship in the Philippines (1986), Thailand (1992), and Cambodia (1993). In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Indonesia (1999) and then Timor-Leste (2002) also joined the regional wave of democratization (Croissant, 2004; Tusalem & Shin, 2009). Some of the remaining autocracies in the region have also undergone important changes. In 2010, the military in Myanmar initiated a process of gradual disengagement from day-to-day politics that led to the election of a democratic government in 2015. In Malaysia, opposition parties won a historic election victory in May 2018 and toppled the Barisan Nasional coalition, which had been in power since 1957.

Despite the optimism caused by these developments in the 1990s, democracy could not uphold its triumphant entry into the region (Croissant, 2004, 2015). The collapse of power-sharing in Cambodia in 1997, the rise of authoritarian populism in the Philippines, the collapse of parliamentary democracy in Thailand in 2006 and, again, in 2014, indicate that democracy in Southeast Asia had entered a new phase of erosion and retreat. At the beginning of the 2020s, the situation looks even bleaker. Malaysia’s democratic liberalization came to an abrupt end with the political turmoil caused by the resignation of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and the subsequent breakup of the Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope, PH) shortly before the pandemic hit the country in February 2020. In August 2021, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which had been in power from 1958 until 2018, eventually reclaimed the premiership it lost in the 2018 election. In what is the latest incident of autocratization in the region (as of early 2022), the Burmese military (known as Tadmadaw) seized control of the government on February 1, 2021. Just hours before the newly elected parliament would have convened, the military arrested President Win Min, State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, and several other senior officials of the governing National League for Democracy (NLD) party. The military-appointed Vice President, General Myint Swe, declared a year-long state of emergency and transferred full executive, legislative, and judicial powers to the State Administration Council, a military junta chaired by the commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw, Min Aung Hlaing. The coup sparked a nationwide civil disobedience movement, demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other arrested political leaders as well as a return to a parliamentary government. The military responded with lethal force, which included targeted killings of demonstrators by security forces. As many doctors, teachers, civil servants, public employees, and workers in formal sectors of the economy joined an indefinite political strike, the public administration and economy came to a virtual standstill. In mid-April 2021, the opposition announced the formation of a so-called National Unity Government. However, the junta's crackdown on demonstrators and uninvolved civilians has also sparked violent resistance, which has also led to the formation of militias in parts of the country. The emergence of new armed groups and the radicalization of parts of the opposition in response to the military junta's brutal repression marks a new phase in the decade-long civil war (International Crisis Group, 2022).

Building on the Regimes of the World (RoW)-Dataset (Edgell et al., 2020), political regimes in the region can be grouped into three different categories. As of early 2021, the first group included “electoral authoritarianism” (Schedler, 2006). In electoral authoritarian regimes, such as Singapore and Cambodia, parliament is elected in de jure multiparty elections and the chief of executive de jure depends on the elected legislature. However, such institutional trappings of representative democracy coexist with authoritarian political practices (Howard & Roessler, 2006; Levitsky & Way, 2010; Lührmann et al., 2018; Schedler, 2006). Governments systematically abuse their powers and evade accountability by institutionalizing an unlevelled political playing field, constraining the ability of opposition parties to challenge the government on the ballot box or in parliament, restraining the development of civil society and a free media, and suppressing political dissent.

The second group of “closed autocracies” that avoid de-facto (and, perhaps, de jure) competition in elections includes, Brunei, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand. These regimes do not tolerate even limited political competition. Laos and Vietnam are among only five self-proclaimed communist single party states that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.Footnote 4 The authoritarian sultanate in Brunei is one of only five countries worldwide that hold no national parliamentary elections.Footnote 5

The third category comprises “electoral democracies”, that is political regimes with institutional arrangements for arriving at political decisions that include not only free and fair elections but also the freedoms that make elections meaningful and that make rulers de-facto accountable to citizen, such as freedoms of expression, information, association, and assembly (Lührmann et al., 2018). As of 2021, this group includes the Philippines, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste, though it is important to note that the stability and quality of these democracies differ widely (Croissant & Haynes, 2021). In the Philippines, political violence is widespread, civilian control over the military is limited, civil liberties are not guaranteed, and the rule of law is weak (Abinales & Amoroso, 2005). The erosion of democratic qualities of political institutions and processes reached such an alarming level under President Rodrigo Duterte (since 2016) that some democracy barometers downgraded the Philippines to the status of an electoral autocracy. In Timor-Leste, the democratic process and the effectiveness of democratic institutions are fragile, but democratic elections and political rights have remained relatively robust and functional (Croissant & Abu Sharkh, 2020). Even though clientelism, neo-patrimonialism, and untamed politicking are rampant in Timorese politics, democracy as an abstract ideal and democratic turnover of power are accepted among both the political elite and the wider population. In the region, Indonesia remains the only country that has somewhat stabilized its democratic system, even though it has not yet become a consolidated liberal democracy and some country experts see a worrisome trend in democratic regression in recent years (Mietzner, 2021; Warburton & Aspinell, 2019).

There are obviously many differences between political regimes within the same category. A first one concerns the character of an autocracy’s “ruling coalition”, that is those (elite) groups in a country without which a dictator cannot rule and whose support is essential for gaining and preserving power. In Brunei, it is the monarchy, whereas in Myanmar (since the 2021 coup), it is the military, and in Thailand, it is a mix of both, with significant participation by non-military elites (Chambers, 2021). In contrast, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are all “party-based regimes” in the sense that a political party—with a strong personalist leader at the top, as in Cambodia (Morgenbesser, 2018), or with collective leadership as in the other countries (see also Geddes et al., 2018). The second crucial difference concerns the direction of regime trajectories in the different countries. As Table 1.4 shows, regime types are not static, and several countries experienced one or more regime changes in the past three decades or so. While Brunei, Laos, Singapore, and Vietnam exhibit a high level of institutional stability and regime resilience, Thailand has been suffering from frequent political instability and regime-type oscillation. Other countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia also experienced democratization and (more recently) autocratization, though this is not reflected in the regime classifications in Table 1.4.

Table 1.4 Categories of political regimes in Southeast Asia
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The COVID-19 pandemic raised concerns that it would accelerate the regional dynamics of democratic regression and autocratic hardening. Yet, preliminary analyses of the democratic trends in the region since early 2020, when the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) appeared in Southeast Asia, suggest that there is no uniform trend of democratic decline during the pandemic. Rather, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been a stress-test that magnified countries’ preexisting democratic strengths and weaknesses. There is case-based evidence that the pandemic has played into domestic political processes that were already in motion before its outbreak, which have contributed in different ways to backsliding and autocratic hardening. As noted elsewhere, much “like the actual virus affecting people with underlying health conditions, the threat of reversal in democratic governance posed by the pandemic is more severe for democracies with an already compromised immune system” (Croissant, 2020). Such “preexisting conditions” seem to be primarily internal, and they have more to do with structural and political weaknesses, the strategic behavior of political elites, and the local consequences of global developments, than with the coronavirus. However, the pandemic amplifies existing trends by causing seismic shocks to almost all areas of social life.

1.5 The Structure of this Book

The variety of regime types and the large variation of theoretically relevant explanatory factors makes Southeast Asia a “natural laboratory” (Abrami & Doner, 2008, p. 229) to test competing theories of political change. Levels of socioeconomic modernization, paths to state and nation-building, ethnic heterogeneity, colonial heritage, the structure of governing coalitions and elite formations, the shape and extent of interest, and civil society organizations as well as institutional factors like type of government or electoral system all differ widely. The region encompasses federal as well as unitary states, numerous different types of parties and party systems, vastly different levels of cohesion and professionalism in the national armed forces, and different levels of coercion employed by the governments to uphold their rule (Slater, 2010). Finally, regimes vary in their claims to legitimacy, religious traditions span a wide spectrum, and national ideologies as well as individual value patterns are highly diverse (Case, 2009; Slater, 2010). Carving out these details and analyzing their causes and effects is among the goals of this textbook.

The developments addressed previously have raised interest in the region and the need for concise information about its political structures, processes, and actors in the past decades. Until now, however, the political economy of Southeast Asian developmental states has dominated the research agenda. In stark contrast to that, there is a lack of concise current monographs that focus on the national political and social systems in the region from a comparative perspective. In order to fill this lacuna, this textbook provides a systematic introduction to the political systems of Brunei Darussalam (Brunei), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. It combines country studies with comparative analyses. It focuses on the structures, processes, and actors of the political system as well as the current political situation. Compiled by comparative political scientists, its intended audience includes students of political science without regional expertise and students of area studies. In addition, it is meant as a resource for other political and social scientists in research and teaching, as well as journalists and other professionals. We hope it will provide its readership with a well-founded introduction to Southeast Asia as an area of study.

The chapters in this textbook have been updated throughout to reflect developments in the political regime and governmental system of the respective countries that have taken place since the publication of the first edition (2018). Two considerations have influenced the structure of this textbook. On the one hand, each political system is discussed individually and in great depth in the form of country chapters to foster a deeper understanding of the whole system and the interaction of its components. On the other hand, this country-based approach is complemented by an explicitly and systematic comparative perspective. All country chapters follow a similar structure, and while all chapters focus on current politics, they also discuss the historical origins and context of national politics and current challenges. The textbook concludes with a comparative summary (Chap. 13) and a discussion of regional dynamics in democratization, autocratization, and autocratic consolidation (Chap. 14).