Authoritarianism and its Discontents in Asia

Resistance has emerged in Asia with distinct dynamics to counter rising autocratization across political contexts and social issues. This panel focuses on the interactive and connective nature of resistance, emphasizing how it clashes with the state in its many forms. What are the conditions that give rise to new modalities of resistance against authoritarian tides? When are political actors likely to mobilize and coordinate pushbacks against autocratization? How then do social movements in turn produce legacies that shape party organizations? Finally, what are the contours of authoritarian responses to social resistance? The panel addresses these crucial questions through comparative analytics across political actors and social issues. The institutional and political complexity represented in Southeast and Northeast Asia, especially in light of recent political developments and the elevated geopolitical importance of the region, also provide fertile grounds for the panel’s comparative studies. Methodologically, the panel leverages the rigor of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, while taking into account the rich contextual factors underpinning political processes in the region.
Truong’s paper presents a comparative framework of reactive-institutionalized authoritarian responsiveness to social resistance and applies it to the cases of Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. Trinh’s survey experiment in China and Vietnam argues that while citizens can infer factional motives behind anti-corruption investigations by observing elite informal ties, such inferences do not erode trust in the regime’s legitimacy and efficacy. Horatanakun explains, through a novel model of movement-party relations, how Taiwan’s constitutional reform efforts have achieved greater success in securing progressive, rights-based changes than those in Thailand. Tran investigates how marginalized youth activists in Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia build resilience to digital repression through community-oriented strategies. Lastly, Willis explores the dynamics of anti-US military activism in Japan and the Philippines, where local activists link foreign military presence to issues of local sovereignty and democratic responsiveness to extract concessions from their national governments and/or the US government. Together, these papers offer a rich, comparative analysis of resistance strategies and authoritarian responses across Southeast and Northeast Asia.