Bücher der Reihe Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series

This book studies the impact of public expenditure allocations in achieving income equality goals in Malaysia.The book examines the initial functional and institutional distribution of income across different institutional agents and sectors and evaluates the impact of the public expenditure policies in reducing the inter-ethnic and rural-urban disparity. Since Malaysia has made enormous progress in eliminating poverty, the authors suggest that a change of emphasis in the public expenditure policy may now be called for. They present evidence on the importance of public expenditure in improving income inequality and examine the initial functional and institutional distribution of income across different institutional agents and sectors. The development of the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) model that presents both economic and social statistics in an economy can be served as a useful tool of this work. The SAM model is used to evaluate the impact of the public expenditure policies in reducing inter-ethnic and rural-urban disparity.A comprehensive source of information on how to deal with inequality economic challenges, the book will be of interest to economists and researchers on Southeast Asian Studies.

This book demonstrates how preserving ideology and relationships with other activists affords social movements to persist over time amid limited resources and political opportunities in Southeast Asia.Examining two peace movements in Indonesia - the largest democratic country in Southeast Asia - to illuminate discontinuity, continuity, and change in social movements, the author uses a cultural approach to understanding why social movements persist. He argues that the activists' memory, relationship with others, collective identity, and emotion are reasons for social movements to ascend and peak. This is a direct response to the argument that the availability of resources and political opportunities is the main ingredient for any social movements to rise. While having different fates, the two movements studied arose in the midst of violence between Christian and Muslim communities in Ambon, Indonesia: The Kopi Badati movement and Filterinfo. The book extends the applicability of the cultural approach in explaining why social movements discontinue, continue, and change over time, without discounting the importance of available resources and political opportunities.Addressing a gap in the existing social movement studies, the book explains why a social movement disbands and why the other manages to continue and change after achieving its immediate goal. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian studies, (new)-media and communications, civil society, and international development.

This book offers a regional analysis of the impact of fake news - misinformation, malinformation and disinformation - on electoral democracy and freedom of expression in Southeast Asia, which has taken place in the middle of a global health pandemic.The book maps the impact of social media and the internet on democracy in the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that have already been in the throes of democratic regression for some time. Including an analysis of countries that do not have national elections, the chapters provide detailed information on the extent of internet and social media penetration in each country, the laws that are deployed to reel in its political potential for critics and demonstrate the impact on democracy or the prospects for democracy. Collectively, contributors note that disinformation is a serious problem in the region that negatively impacts elections and how governments' attempts to deal with the phenomenon inevitably lead to the targeting of dissenting voices and opposition as anti-state fake news. The deleterious impact on democracy and freedom of expression, facilitated by a citizenry that is prone to manipulation of facts, appears to be the standard modus operandi in the regional authoritarian complex.This book is the first to undertake a regional analysis of disinformation in Southeast Asia and is a significant contribution to the literature on democracy, elections and disinformation. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Political Science and Asian Politics, in particular Southeast Asian Politics.

This book gives an overview of the difficult and multilayered process of democratization in Indonesia since the fall of its long-term autocratic ruler Suharto.

Social Activism in Southeast Asia brings together cutting-edge accounts of social movements concerned with civil and political rights, globalization, peace, the environment, migrant and factory labour, the rights of middle- and working-class women, and sexual identity in an overarching framework of analysis that forefronts the importance of human rights and the state as a focus for social activism in a region characterized by a history of authoritarian developmentalism and weak civil society. Drawing on contemporary case study material from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Timor-Leste, contributors explore the ways in which social movement actors engage with their international allies, the community and the state in order to promote social change. In doing so, they not only provide detailed and nuanced analyses of particular movements in particular parts of Southeast Asia; they also address difficult questions concerning the nature of social movements and their politics, strategies and claims to authenticity.

This book examines the policies of successive governments in Jakarta to contain regional separatist forces, focusing in particular on the response towards the armed separatist movement in Aceh.

Using the high-profile 2017 blasphemy trial of the former governor of Jakarta, Basuki 'Ahok' Tjahaja Purnama as its sole case study, this book assesses whether Indonesia's liberal democratic human rights legal regime can withstand the rise of growing Islamist majoritarian sentiment.

Social change affects all quarters of life and human society whether in individual neighbourhoods, communities or nations, or in the world as a whole - encompassing many issues of gender, age, social class and ethnicity. This book examines both the conceptual as well as operational aspects of social transformation and social development. It examines societal transformation at the individual, group, community, national and international levels using a range of case studies from Singapore, Asia and around the world. The four parts of this book highlight the challenges of social development; issues concerning workforce and migration; welfare, women and social care; as well as, community development and capacity building. Social development and social transformation are presented as intertwined concepts that affect citizens in profound ways from social care to social well-being, construction of social relationship as well as community life, capacity building and nation building.

This book depicts the evolution of Singapore's family and population landscape in the last half a century, the related public policies, and future challenges.

This book focuses on education and power in Southeast Asia and analyses the ways in which education has been instrumentalized by state, non-state, and private actors across this diverse region. It fills a gap in the literature on education in Southeast Asia.

This book extends the framework of the climate-energy-land nexus to elucidate political, economic, social, and institutional factors and causal mechanisms that stringent climate targets bring about, rather than mitigate a disproportional heavy burden on the forest sector in Indonesia.