Contesting state and civil society: Southeast Asian trajectories

The spectre of civil society is haunting South East Asia. Witness Manila's ‘People Power’ in 1986, Bangkok's ’No-More-Dictatorship‘ demonstrations in 1992, and, most recently, the Reformasi movements centered on Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in 1998. Indeed, these recent waves of popular mobilization have underscored the significance of civil society—as political discourse and social terrain—for the successful launching of challenges against the non-democratic state in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of the political discourse of ‘civil society’, a common claim to spontaneous voluntarism and cross-class universalism was articulated and celebrated in some form by each of the four mobilizational campaigns identified above.