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This Element seeks to make sense of Southeast Asia's numerous armed conflicts, analysing typology, ethnicity, trends and conflict management. Just as ethnicity shapes conflicts, ethnic leaders and traditions can also promote peace. Cultural mechanisms are especially important for managing conflicts, the lone type not declining in Southeast Asia.

Sexuality and gender diversity rights in Southeast Asia are deeply controversial and vigorously contested. Debate and protest have been accompanied by both legislative reform and discriminatory violence. These contradictory dynamics are occurring at a time when the international human rights regime has explicitly incorporated a focus on the prevention of violence and discrimination in relation to sexuality and gender diversity. This Element focusses on the need for such rights. This Element explores the burgeoning of civil society organisations engaged in an emancipatory politics inclusive of sexuality and gender diversity, utilising rights politics as a platform for visibility, contestation and mobilisation. This Element focusses on the articulation of political struggle through a shared set of rights claims, which in turn relates to shared experiences of violence and discrimination, and a visceral demand and hope for change.

Islamism in Indonesia and Malaysia has undergone a fascinating transformation from social movement roots to mainstream politics. How did this take place, and to what ends? Drawing on social movement theories, this Element explains this transformation by focusing on key Islamic social movements in these two countries. It argues: first, that the popularity and appeal of Islamism in Indonesia and Malaysia cannot be understood without appreciating how these social movements have enabled and facilitated mobilization; and second, that it is precisely these roots in civil societal mobilization that account for the enduring influence of Islamist politics evident in how Islamic social movements have shaped and transformed the political landscape. These arguments will be developed by unpacking how Islamist ideas took root in social movement settings, the kinds of institutional and organizational structures through which these ideas were advanced, and the changing political landscape that facilitated these processes.

Urbanization as a process is rife with inequality, in Southeast Asia as anywhere else, but resistance and contestation persist on the ground. In this element, the author sets out to achieve three goals: 1) to examine the political nature of urban development; 2) to scrutinize the implications of power inequality in urban development discussions; and 3) to highlight topical and methodological contributions to urban studies from Southeast Asia. The key to a robust understanding is groundedness: knowledge about the everyday realities of urban life that are hard to see on the surface but dominate how the city functions, with particular attention to human agency and the political life of marginalized groups. Ignoring politics in research on urbanization essentially perpetuates the power inequities in urban development; this element thus focuses not just on Southeast Asian cities and urbanization per se, but also on critical perspectives on patterns and processes in their development.

Contrary to popular claims, civil society is not generally shrinking in Southeast Asia. It is transforming, resulting in important shifts in the influences that can be exerted through it. Political and ideological differences in Southeast Asia have sharpened as anti-democratic and anti-liberal social forces compete with democratic and liberal elements in civil society. These are neither contests between civil and uncivil society nor a tussle between civil society and state power. They are power struggles over relationships between civil society and the state. Explaining these struggles, the approach in this Element emphasises the historical and political economy foundations shaping conflicts, interests and coalitions that mobilise through civil society. Different ways that capitalism is organised, controlled, and developed are shown to matter for when, how and in what direction conflicts in civil society emerge and coalitions form. This argument is demonstrated through comparisons of Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

This Element analyzes the economic and political forces behind the political marginalization of working-class organizations in the region. It traces the roots of labor exclusion to the geopolitics of the early postwar period when many governments rolled back the left and established labor control regimes that prevented the reemergence of working-class movements. This Element also examines the economic and political dynamics that perpetuated labor's containment in some countries and that produced a resurgence of labor mobilization in others in the 21st century. It also explains why democratization has had mixed effects on organized labor in the region and analyzes three distinctive ¿anatomies of contention¿ of Southeast Asia's feistiest labor movements in Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

This Element contributes to existing research with an analysis of public understandings of democracy based on original surveys fielded in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. It conceptualises democracy as consisting of liberal, egalitarian and participatory ideals, and investigates the structure of public understandings of democracy in the five countries. It then proceeds to identify important relationships between conceptions of democracy and other attitudes, such as satisfaction with democracy, support for democracy, trust in institutions, policy preferences and political behaviour. The findings suggest that a comprehensive analysis of understandings of democracy is essential to understand political attitudes and behaviours.

In 2016, Freedom House recorded the eleventh consecutive year of declining democratic freedoms, adding material to the growing political science literature on a global democratic recession. Southeast Asia is no exception in this regard. During the last decade, one previously democratic country experienced a full democratic reversal (Thailand), another has seen the rise of a populist with openly neo-authoritarian tendencies (the Philippines) and yet another has begun a slow but perceptible process of democratic deconsolidation (Indonesia). At the same time, semi-authoritarian regimes such as Singapore and Malaysia have defied predictions of a possible democratic trajectory and the fully authoritarian regimes of Vietnam, Laos and Brunei have firmly held on to power. Initially hopeful democratic transitions, finally, have ended either in autocracy (Cambodia) or in uncertainty (Myanmar). What explains this failure of democratization efforts in Southeast Asia? Why have autocracies proved so resistant to democratic opening? And what can the Southeast Asian experience tell us about the drivers of the global democratic recession.

Conceiving of populism as the charismatic mobilization of a mass movement in pursuit of political power, this Element theorizes that populists thrive where ties between voters and either bureaucratic or clientelistic parties do not exist or have decayed. This is because populists' ability to mobilize electoral support directly is made much more likely by voters not being deeply embedded in existing party networks. This model is used to explain the prevalence of populism across the major states in post-authoritarian Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. It extracts lessons from these Southeast Asian cases for the study of populism.

Explores why ASEAN has endured and why members, many of whom remain comparatively weak and poor, continue to invest in the regional project. Argues that ASEAN has and continues to serve state interest through the creation of a shared ritual and symbolic framework.

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century.

Explores issues of global relevance around journalism's relationship with political power using Southeast Asian states. Argues that development of free, independent, and plural media has been complicated by commercialisation, the Internet, and identity-based politics. These open up political space and pluralise discourse, but do not necessarily produce change.

Argues that following the 1993 United Nations intervention to promote democracy, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) perpetuated a patronage state. They maintained electoral authoritarianism, but saw increased political awareness among the public. This Element explores Cambodia's return to authoritarianism, made possible in part by China's pivot to Cambodia.

Focuses on the transformation of the Vietnamese state as it transitioned away from a centrally planned socialist regime. It examines the drivers of socialist-regime change, the nature of the emergent state, and the basis of regime legitimacy in Vietnam.

Explores nation building and international relations in the small multicultural nation state and cosmopolitan global city of contemporary Singapore. Examines the exercise of smart power, or the ability to strategically combine soft and hard power resources.

Reviews the historical origins, contemporary patterns, and emerging changes in civil-military relations in Southeast Asia. It analyzes military roles in state- and nation-building, political domination, revolutions and regime transitions, and military entrepreneurship.

Argues that after twenty years of democratization, Indonesia has performed admirably. Focuses on Indonesia's political regime, political economy, and identity-based mobilizations since democratization in 1998.

Explores the modes by which rulers have exercised power in Timor-Leste. Contrasts coercion under colonial rule and consent expressed through the 1999 referendum on independence. Since the restoration of independence, politics in Timor-Leste are understood in terms of economic constraints, and latterly a ruling strategy based on inducements.

This Element offers a way to understand the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. The empirical results presented reveal vast differences within and across authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, but also a discernible shift towards sophisticated authoritarianism over time.