EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • Various motivations underlying terrorism uncovered by recent scholarship include the radicals’ desire for Muslim unity, political interest, yearning to correct social and economic deprivation in the Muslim world, and simply anti-Westernism.

• • This article focuses on the radicals’ call for Muslim solidarity and how this tends towards becoming their primary motivation for perpetrating terrorism. It discusses how radical groups and individuals exaggerate the perceived oppression of Muslims worldwide and how this encourages their sympathizers in planning, fundraising and/or executing terrorist attacks.

• • The so-called ummah solidarity discourse is coupled with the prevalence of the dogma that Muslims are targets of Western or foreign oppression. This has legitimized jihadist terrorists’ use of violence and facilitated the recruitment of new terrorists.

• • Besides regular crackdowns on terrorists and putting limitations on access to radical websites and other Internet sources, this article contends that the Indonesian security apparatuses and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must work with the embassies from India, China and Myanmar based in Jakarta to nullify any likelihood of terror attacks on their embassy compounds or their citizens.

INTRODUCTION

Existing scholarship on terrorism has pointed out various motives underlying violent acts. Notably, Kruglanski, Bélanger, and Gunaratna (2019) argue that such intent could stem from perpetrators’ unfulfilled basic needs, their exposure to violent and extremist narratives since they were young, and the outreach by terrorist networks to them. Additionally, an insightful study by Putra and Sukabdi (2013, p. 84) provides a more region-specific example. Through conducting in-depth interviews with forty religious terror activists in Indonesia, they identified three prevalent motivations for violence: (1) the perception of Indonesia being in a state of war, thus legitimizing defensive actions; (2) the belief in the nobility of suicide bombing; and (3) the view of the West (as a whole) as an invader of Muslim countries and a representative of evil, with the Indonesian government being seen as its corrupt ally.

Mufid et al. contest the notion that poverty and social inequality are the sole drivers of terrorism, positing instead that the confluence of structural factors at the global, national, and subnational levels is what leads to such acts. Based on their study involving 110 terror perpetrators, Mufid et al. suggest that perceived structural factors, such as the West's domination of the global economy and politics, along with its military intervention in Arab countries, provoked the terrorists to act (Mufid et al. in Sukabdi 2021, p. 4). Mufid et al. further classify the terrorists’ motivations into five distinct categories: (1) religious-ideological; (2) solidarity-driven [individuals participate in the acts of terrorism to express sympathy for fellow believers whom they perceive as victims of conflict]; (3) separatist [the terrorist's desire to establish an Islamic state]; (4) “mob mentality” [spontaneous acts of terrorism]; and (5) situational [referring to, for example, individuals convicted of terrorism charges due to associations with others].

This article focuses on the role of ummah solidarity [or Muslim community solidarity], as a motivation for terrorism. According to Mufid et al., 20 per cent of their 110 respondents admitted to engaging in acts of terrorism driven by this sense of community solidarity (Mufid et al. in Sukabdi 2021, p. 4). This motivation is only surpassed by ideological and religious motives, which were cited by 45.5 per cent of respondents. Other motives were: mob mentality (12.7 per cent), revenge-seeking (10.9 per cent), situational (9.1 per cent), and separatism (1.8 per cent).

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Malaysia is a signatory of the Global Methane Pledge, but the implications for national action on methane emissions remain unclear. We reviewed publicly available literature and data, arriving at the following key findings:

• 1. There is no clear national plan for methane action yet. Since signing the Pledge in 2021, there has been no demonstrable government initiative focusing on joined-up methane action at the national level. Malaysia does not have a methane strategy or policy, and sector-specific regulations focusing on methane emissions are either not present, vague, or publicly inaccessible.

• 2. There are indications emissions are falling due to positive corporate action. Effective methane reduction initiatives exist in Malaysia’s top two methane-emitting sectors, oil and gas and palm oil, and key players have committed to net zero pathways with methane reductions central to progress to 2030. Emissions should be expected to rapidly fall further if action can be scaled across all industry players.

• 3. Quantifying reductions with confidence remains challenging. Different reporting approaches and incomplete information on assumptions and uncertainties in quantification approaches, make independent analyses of reported emissions challenging. Wider

• deployment of measurement-based emission quantification is a key option to improve confidence in progress.

• 4. Improvements in corporate Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) in the coming years are expected. While some corporate standards remain confidential, key companies have joined international frameworks featuring transparency and MRV measures like the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 and, in a broader climate context, the evolving Science Based Targets initiative. Improved corporate MRV should enable improved national emissions reporting.

• 5. Methane reduction is a “low-hanging fruit”. Methane is a major initial lever to reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 2030 in the climate plans of leading Malaysian industry players. Action to improve methane-related processes in the key oil and gas and palm oil sectors thus presents a valuable opportunity for Malaysia to contribute to global climate mitigation within its long-term national interests. Therefore, decisive methane action is needed even while plans for further crucial greenhouse gas emission reductions are developed and articulated in more detail.

1. METHANE AND CLIMATE CHANGE

The concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) is steadily increasing, with the 2021 levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) 49 per cent, 162 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively, above pre-industrial levels. Due to continually rising GHG concentrations, the past eight-year period (2015–22) is likely the warmest on record at around 1.1°C above the pre-industrial temperature. Associated climatic extremes such as heatwaves and flooding are already causing “widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people”. Despite ongoing global efforts to address climate change, such as the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global warming well below 2°C, cross-cutting challenges mean GHG emissions are not falling and leave climate change unresolved. Additional strategies are needed to slow the warming induced by GHG emissions.

Among the GHGs, methane is gaining increasing attention as a significant shorter-term driver of warming. Although there is around 200 times less methane than CO2 in the atmosphere, the global warming potential (GWP) metric indicates each unit of methane causes around 80 times more warming than a unit of CO2 over twenty years. The increasing methane concentration has made the second-largest contribution to observed global warming, after CO2. Due to its warming potency and its shorter atmospheric lifetime (about twelve years) than CO2 (usually assessed as hundreds to thousands of years), rapid reductions in methane emissions have great potential to slow climate change in the coming decades. Unfortunately, methane concentrations are rising at an increasing rate, with a record increment of 18 parts per billion (ppb) in 2021. While the precise reasons for recent records are the subject of ongoing research, methane is known to be emitted from several anthropogenic sectors, including waste (e.g., from wastewater), energy (e.g., from oil and gas (O&G) production) and agriculture. Importantly, owing to methane’s role in producing global surface ozone pollution, reductions in methane emissions should also yield air quality improvements and associated health and crop productivity benefits.

Launched by the United States and the European Union in 2021 during the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Global Methane Pledge (GMP) aims to catalyse global anthropogenic methane emission reductions of at least 30 per cent by 2030, relative to 2020 levels. By November 2022, more than 150 countries have joined the pledge.

This first section provides an overview and analysis of the full Quantitative Report which follows.

Southeast Asia’s growing economic linkages with and dependence on China for investment have generated political opportunities and strategic concerns in equal measure. However, recent discussions have tended to focus on infrastructure projects, especially those associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This narrow focus can be misleading, and an understanding of the fuller picture of Chinese investments in Southeast Asia is necessary for those seeking to understand its significance and impacts. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not a new player in this game, having had a longer history of providing investment and aid in this region, particularly in support of independence struggles and civil and regional conflicts during the Cold War. After 1990 and reflecting Beijing’s economic reform and internationalization strategy, Chinese investment in Southeast Asia picked up gradually across varied sectors. Prior to President Xi Jinping’s unveiling in 2013 of what has come to be called BRI, Southeast Asia had already seen a turning point in the growing significance of Chinese investments during the global financial crisis in 2008/9.

This report is part of a research project that examines China’s investment in Southeast Asia, aiming to provide a regionwide, multi-sectoral analysis that allows comparisons and facilitates policy calibration and focus. In this quantitative report, we present the baseline quantitative survey and analysis of key changes in Chinese investments in Southeast Asian economies over the most recent fifteen years, from 2005 to 2019, for which comparable data is available.

By “investment”, we refer to Chinese investment, project financing, and service provision in the region. The CGIT dataset that our report relies on captures the two key forms of Foreign Direct Investment (mergers and acquisitions, and greenfield investment), as well as other forms of cross-border investment flows associated with Chinese investments in Southeast Asia. Construction contracts, in particular, often accompany Chinese overseas investment and are a form of trade in services that can be even more significant than FDI.

1.1 Regionwide Trends

Foreign investments in Southeast Asia (SEA) originating from China grew twentyfold during this fifteen-year period. This trend is more marked when we define foreign investments as including both ownership acquisition of specific enterprises, and service provision (such as construction contracts).

A1. Selection of Datasets on Chinese Investments in Southeast Asia

This report surveys key changes in Chinese investments in SEA economies since the mid-2000s (following from the Chinese government’s 1999 “Going Global” strategy). To achieve this research objective, we examined various databases on Chinese overseas investments, including:

• • China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT) database;

• • ASEAN Statistical Yearbooks;

• • Foreign direct investment (FDI) data compiled by the World Bank;

• • FDI data compiled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF);

• • FDI data compiled by the Asian Development Bank;

• • Statistical Bulletin of China’s Outward FDI released by China’s Ministry of Commerce;

• • Data on China’s outward direct investment released by China’s Bureau of Statistics;

• • Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset, 2000–2014, Version 1.0; and

• • China Global Energy Finance database.

We eventually decided to use the CGIT database as the primary data source for this project for three reasons. First, unlike other datasets on Chinese investment which are either too aggregated or too segmented, CGIT provides up-to-date data on Chinese investments in each SEA country by industrial sector over a reasonably long period, from 2005 to 2019 (as at the time when data analysis first commenced in early 2020). This allowed us to examine the industry-specific trends and patterns of Chinese investments in every SEA country over the past fifteen years and to compare the features of Chinese investments across SEA countries. Section A of this Appendix explains how we selected and classified industrial sectors for this project. Second, the CGIT database includes two broad types of Chinese investments—transactions involving Chinese acquisition of asset ownership, and Chinese provision of services, in SEA countries. These two classifications enabled us to further disaggregate the relative spread of types of investments across SEA countries and industrial sectors. Third, the CGIT database provides additional information about investors and other transaction parties, facilitating our identification of specific Chinese investments that were of significance or particular interest. The CGIT database is a public dataset compiled and published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in the United States.

However, it is important to note that the CGIT database only tracks “large” investments worth at least US$100 million.

2.1 Overview of Chinese Investments in Southeast Asia, 2005–19

Absolute Scale

Overall, foreign investments in SEA originating from China exhibited a general upward trend between 2005 and 2019, rising approximately twentyfold during this fifteen-year period. This trend is evident across different datasets that use differing measures of foreign investments (see Figure 9). Foreign direct investment is a commonly used measure of cross-border investments that captures foreign acquisition—by both state-owned entities and private entities—of ownership of target enterprises in destination countries. Data from ASEAN’s Statistical Yearbooks show that Chinese FDI to SEA grew exponentially from just over US$500 million in 2005 to roughly US$10 billion in 2018, peaking at US$13.7 billion in 2017. A broader measure of foreign investments would take into account cross-border transactions that involve not only ownership acquisition but also service provision. The CGIT database adopts this broader measure of foreign investments to track “large” Chinese overseas investments (those that are worth at least US$100 million). According to the CGIT database, Chinese investments in SEA soared from US$1.3 billion in 2005 to nearly US$31 billion in 2019, peaking at US$33.5 billion in 2018. A closer look at the trend of Chinese investments in SEA reveals that Chinese investments in SEA experienced its first phase of rapid expansion between 2009 and 2011, right after the end of the global financial crisis, and a second phase of rapid increase between 2014 and 2017, following the official announcement of Beijing’s BRI. Indeed, the vast majority of very large (at least US$1 billion) Chinese investments came after the advent of the BRI in 2013 for all SEA countries except Vietnam and Myanmar (as indicated in red and pink on Figure 10). However, between 2018 and the time of writing (late 2021), this growth appears to be slowing down or even declining modestly.

Relative Importance

Despite the substantial surge in the absolute amounts of Chinese investments in SEA between 2005 and 2019, the relative importance of Chinese FDI—as compared to other sources of FDI in SEA—did not increase as significantly. While China’s share of total FDI in SEA more than doubled—from an average of 3 per cent in 2005–10 to an average of 7 per cent in 2011–18—China had yet to establish itself as a dominant foreign investor in SEA. Table 1 displays annual FDI flows into ASEAN from 2005 to 2018.