Following the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, more than 3.4 million people had been internally displaced by late 2024, while many others crossed into neighboring states; ethnic minorities and low-income communities have borne disproportionate costs. Some are fleeing systemic oppression, economic collapse, and militarised exploitation of resources. Although much of the international community has condemned the military regime, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) remains committed to its longstanding principle of non-interference, responding with largely symbolic measures such as the Five-Point Consensus. This research argues that ASEAN's limited response exemplifies a regional order shaped by authoritarian capitalism rather than a failure of normative principles. Drawing on a Marxist perspective in international relations, this research positions ASEAN's response within a broader system of capitalist containment, in which displaced populations are treated as surplus labor. These individuals contribute to regional economic systems yet continue to face political marginalization and lack protection. Based on secondary sources and a critical political economy approach, the research shows how the region's silence facilitates the exploitation of migrants through collaboration between state actors and capitalist interests. This dynamic sustains the dominance of elite groups. The crisis in Myanmar, therefore, exposes underlying contradictions at the core of ASEAN regionalism, an approach that endorses economic integration and labor mobility while simultaneously upholding exclusionary legal structures, deep-seated social divisions, and the persistence of authoritarian regimes. Ultimately, this research advocates a fundamental re-evaluation of regional cooperation, emphasizing migrants’ lived experiences rather than prioritizing the security interests of dominant political entities.
While Southeast Asia’s post-pandemic recovery has led to a resurgence of overtourism, existing scholarship often prioritizes technical carrying capacity over the security of host community identity. This research investigates how Russian tourists’ behavior in Bali generates ontological insecurity and prompts collective resistance that transcends economic concerns. Employing a narrative analysis of public discourse from 2019 to 2025, the research identifies a paradox. Although Russian tourists accounted for only 2.56 percent of Bali’s 2024 arrivals, their presence provoked disproportionate political mobilization. State responses included establishing specialized task forces, increasing deportations, and proposing to revoke visa privileges. The findings suggest that visitor volume alone does not explain this phenomenon. Instead, behavioral transgressions, such as desecration of sacred sites and illegal business operations, positioned Russian tourists as existential threats to Balinese Hindu identity. The research carries ontological security theory from the state, where it usually sits, to the host community, showing how scapegoating and abjection turned diffuse anxiety about a changing island into fear of one group. The research proposes ontological carrying capacity to name a threshold that technical, volume-based models overlook, the point at which a host community begins to read tourism as a threat to who it is.
This research examined the revision of the Undang-Undang Sistem Pendidikan Nasional (UU Sisdiknas) or Indonesia’s National Education System Law not as a technical consolidation of legislation but as a contested process of institutional redesign in a plural education system. Indonesia has long relied on large faith-based and community-based providers—Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Persatuan Islam or Islamis Union (PERSIS), and Majelis Pendidikan Kristen or Christian Education Council (MPK)—whose networks have expanded educational access across regions and social classes. Whereas prior scholarship treats such reform mainly as regulatory harmonization or political contestation, this study reframes it as a problem of institutional and fiscal design and analyzes the four organizations’ submissions as legislative-design evidence rather than advocacy. Drawing on qualitative analysis of policy documents, organizational submissions, media reporting, and comparative literature, it asks how the reform problem is framed, what participatory architecture is visible, what governance and financing the organizations propose, and what policy-design implications follow. The research argues that the dominant state framing is administratively coherent but distributively thin, and that the four submissions converge on one diagnosis: legal recognition without a binding fiscal architecture cannot produce institutional equity. Because plural education systems and community-based providers are widespread across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), these findings offer a transferable design lesson for equitable education reform across the region. Lasting reform requires embedding participation in ongoing governance and making distributive implications central to reform design.
Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, this research argued that India’s policies toward Southeast Asia have been shaped by the interplay of three primary drivers: security maximization, economic maximization, and power maximization. The dominance of one driver or a combination of drivers varies across temporal phases, producing shifting alignments in India’s policy orientation and its regional engagement with Southeast Asia. This research applied neo-classical realism to examine the evolution of India’s foreign policy towards Southeast Asia from the Cold War through the post-Cold War period. This research used qualitative methods and process tracing to trace historical progression and debates that show a non-linear pattern in India’s policy path towards Southeast Asia. While India’s policy during the Cold War period demonstrated an interplay among the three drivers, this shifted in the later Cold War period, when security maximization became more prominent. After the Cold War, economic maximization became more dominant as India sought deeper institutional and economic engagement with Southeast Asia, reflected in the Look East Policy. The Act East Policy, which was subsequently launched under India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, further broadened this engagement to encompass stronger security and power considerations. The research further finds that India’s shifting alignments are influenced not only by structural international pressures but also by domestic political considerations, including elite legitimation shaped by material and ideational factors.
This research examined the key factors shaping China’s shifting approach to multilateralism in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), with a particular focus on the establishment of the Lancang Mekong Cooperation (LMC). The LMC represents a significant shift from China’s previous strategy of acting unilaterally as a hydro-hegemon, which granted it the power to build hydropower dams on the Mekong River without meaningful consultation with downstream neighbors. Utilyzing Jeffrey Taliaferro’s balance-of-risk theory, the analysis investigates how great powers adjust foreign policy in response to anticipated changes in the relative distribution of power within the international system and a state’s prospects. According to Taliaferro, states are more motivated by the fear of anticipated losses in their relative power than to anticipated gains. From this perspective, China’s move to establish the LMC was a calculated response to the increasing involvement of external actors in the GMS, which threatened its influence. China’s multilateral turn is best understood as a pragmatic, risk averse adjustment aimed at anticipating a relative decline in power in the near future if it maintained a unilateral approach. This research contributes to our understanding of how great power engage with regional institutions and demonstrates the importance of risk management in China’s water dipmomacy in mainland Southeast Asia.
