Announcements
Posted: Monday, March 10, 2025What Should We Expect of Civil Society in Southeast Asia?
Monday, March 17, 2025
Program: 5:30 - 6:45 PM EST
Location: Technology Building 160
Speaker: Dr. Meredith Weiss, Professor and Director, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, SUNY, and SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium
Alongside environmental, public-health, and economic crises in recent years has been a political one, of democratic decline or autocratic consolidation across much of Southeast Asia. Increasingly, concerned actors and organizations from civil society have acted as firewalls against democratic decline or autocratization, even as fellow civil society organizations (CSOs) have exerted countervailing, anti-democratic pressure. Indeed, CSOs may be no more progressive than the state, nor fully autonomous from it, and may be debilitatingly fragmented or polarized. And yet across the region, CSOs still disrupt regimes’ would-be panoptic scrutiny and authority, by presenting alternative spaces and premises for mobilization and voice, through a range of modalities. Regardless of their ideological stance, CSOs’ political engagement represents the promise or exercise of diagonal accountability. This check interacts with vertical and horizontal dimensions and retains the potential for meaningful intervention—but need not pull in a liberal direction.
*Sponsors and Partners: Small Business Development Center, SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium, Global Studies Institute, Department of Geosciences, Department of Government, Planning and Philosophy; Department of Economics and Finance, School of Arts and Sciences, Institutional Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
