Insurgent Southeast Asia: Protest, Rebellion, and Resistance

This book brings together contributions from academics thinking through, and activists involved in, contemporary social and revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia and their connections. Insurgency here is understood broadly, gesturing to actions in the larger field of social relations across which unequal power relations travel and intersect. What animates this book is the multifarious ways in which resistance is waged along asymmetries of power and the lessons that can be gained from analyzing the various contexts alongside each other. As an edited volume, the book makes a timely intervention into the study of contemporary Southeast Asian movements through transnational and critical perspectives.

The contributions address a broad range of political struggles, including resistance to authoritarianism in the Philippines, the insurgency in Southern Thailand, separatist movements in West Papua, anarchist mobilizations in Indonesia and the ongoing revolution in Myanmar. Together, the book identifies points of rupture and blending at work: violence and non-violence; sociopolitical inclusion and exclusion; society and the state. It also offers an articulation between new and old mobilization spaces (e.g. malls forecourts as free spaces and city halls) and tools (e.g. online and onsite places for political expression).