Rhizome vs Regime: Southeast Asia’s Digitally Mediated Youth Movements

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In various Southeast Asian countries, already weak democracies are being eroded by processes of democratic regression and reconsolidation of dynastic, autocratic and authoritarian regimes.2\ At the same time, these countries have seen the rise of new protest movements, pioneered by a new generation of activist youth. Youth fuelled spectacular mass protests in Indonesia (2019–20), Thailand (2020–21) and Myanmar (2021–22), mounting a daring resistance to the erosion of democracy. In doing so, they experimented with new instruments and repertoires of action, characterized by creative uses of digital media and technologies. The digitally mediated nature of their protest allowed them to forge new links across national and sectoral borders. This has given rise to new assemblages of protest that extend across and beyond the region, bound together by shared imaginations of generational struggle.

Organizationally, ideologically, and in strategy and style, these protest movements and their participants differ from the student and youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were driven by centralized, hierarchical organizations and mono-directional targets oriented towards

the nation-state. Southeast Asia has a long history of student movements that pioneered key political events—from anti-colonial struggles in the early twentieth century, to regime overthrows in Indonesia in 1966 and 1998, in Thailand in 1973, and the People Power Uprising in Burma (Myanmar) in 1988. In the 1960s and 1970s, students also played a leading role in democracy and social justice movements in the region. Despite this legacy, the role of student movements has since declined, mainly due to their suppression, pacification and de-legitimation in the context of state consolidation. The decline was also due to their burden of “rootedness” in national histories and political cultures, which limited them to fixed repertoires of student protest. Those fixed roles and repertoires no longer appeal to younger generations known vernacularly as the “Millennial Generation” (roughly, born in the 1980s and 1990s) and “Gen Z” (born in the 2000s), whose political identifications have greatly diversified. So have their own modes of protest.

Rather than sprouting from the single “root” of national histories of student activism, today's youth movements form a heterogeneous assemblage with multiple origins and nodes that expand in multiple directions, much like the digital communication flows that shape their protest.