Political violence has defined Philippine politics for decades. It has been used by different agents in order to achieve their political goals. In local politics, bosses and warlords have included it as part of their repertoire to remain in power. Non-state actors like the communist New People's Army and the different Moro (Muslim Filipino) groups have used violence as leverage in peace negotiations. Terrorists and criminal groups also use violence to achieve material and non-material goals. The national government struggles to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in some areas, including Mindanao. The lack of resources also undermines the ability of national security forces to keep local warlords and non-state armed actors in check. As a result, groups that use political violence thrive in some areas of the Philippines.

It is important for the Philippine state to assert its monopoly of the use of legitimate violence to suppress armed non-state actors. This is well understood by the new Philippine president. In the first State of the Nation Address of Rodrigo Duterte, he promised to strengthen the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police. He also called for lifestyle checks among members of the security forces to ensure that they do not have corrupt members. These are prerequisites in Duterte's declaration of war against terrorism, criminality and illegal drugs. While the promise of this war on criminality, drugs and terrorism was a reason for Duterte's successful election campaign, human rights groups and the international community have been critical of the government's implementation of the programme after more than seven thousand people have died in the process. An ensuing war against the communist party, which Duterte declared a terrorist group, will most likely increase the number of casualties.

Moreover, in the first year of the Duterte presidency, the use of political violence by terrorist groups in occupying the city of Marawi in the southern island of Mindanao has been touted by International Alert as a new form of vertical conflict (i.e., a conflict between the national government and a non-state armed actor). Marawi City was declared liberated from terrorist groups by Duterte in October 2017, after four months of fighting. According to the Philippine military, the conflict dragged on because they have yet to develop urban warfare capabilities and because the terrorist groups were well prepared.

The year 2017 was a significant one for Southeast Asia in many ways. It was a milestone year, marking the fiftieth anniversary of ASEAN. Formed in the cauldron of the Cold War in August 1967, ASEAN has been credited with playing an instrumental role in fostering stability and security in the Southeast Asian region over the last five decades. Expressing this celebratory mood, the ASEAN calendar for the year was predictably inundated with events to commemorate the formation of the regional organization. In terms of economics, the countries of the region continued to grow at commendable rates, buoyed in no small part by increased domestic consumption and Chinese and Japanese investments.

Yet, the celebratory atmosphere could barely conceal the uncertainties and host of challenges that confront the region, and which manifested themselves in 2017. Foremost, at the geostrategic and geoeconomic level, was the election into office in the United States of Donald Trump, who, based on his campaign rhetoric, seemed to desire a fundamental overhaul of America's role in global affairs. On the other hand, China appeared to be relentlessly expanding its economic clout and influence in the region, with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) leading the way. Meanwhile, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan appears to have awakened from its slumber and has both deepened and accelerated its own engagement of the region. Together with several other major challenges, such as humanitarian crises in Myanmar and Marawi, these developments not only made for an exacting year but also reflect the increasing complexity that has come to characterize the regional strategic and economic landscape and suggest potential challenges that need to be overcome in the years ahead.

Navigating Major Power Politics

The inauguration of the mercurial Donald Trump into the White House on 20 January ushered in something of a new era in regional affairs. A product of popular dissatisfaction among the American electorate, the Trump administration cast doubt over America's continued leadership of global affairs with its “America First” approach to international diplomacy. For the region, the early portents of change were not encouraging. One of Donald Trump's first acts as president was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was painstakingly negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

The year 2017 marked the fourteenth year of a renewed insurgency that has roots in the post–Second World War wave of national-liberation movements, a legacy of Siam's annexation of the Patani region at the start of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, and waged at a low level through the 1970s to the 1990s, the insurgency re-emerged with unprecedented intensity at the start of the new millennium. Malay nationalist groups cast their fight as one for liberation from Thai rule and for national self-determination. The main militant group, Barisan Revolusi Nasional Melayu–Patani (Patani–Malay National Liberation Front; BRN), founded in 1960, built a clandestine network of cells in the southernmost provinces during the 1990s. Since the beginning of 2004, militants have continually staged ambushes, bombings and assassinations, but at a slowing pace over the past several years. Deep South Watch, an NGO that monitors violence in the region, estimates that almost seven thousand people have been killed. Violence has declined over the past several years, and in 2017 reached its lowest point since 2004; the insurgency claimed 235 lives, compared to 309 in 2016 and a peak of 892 in 2007.

Violence has been largely confined to the provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala and four southeastern districts of Songkhla: Chana, Nathawi, Saba Yoi and Thepa. This region of approximately 13,500 square kilometres is home to two million Thai citizens. Roughly eighty-four per cent of the population are Muslims who speak Malay as their first language, the remainder almost entirely Thai or Sino-Thai Buddhists. In contrast to the previous year, there were no insurgent attacks outside of the southernmost provinces in 2017.

Peace Dialogue

Thailand's military junta, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), took power in a May 2014 coup. The military had been hostile to a peace dialogue process with BRN initiated by the Yingluck Shinawatra government in February 2013. Known as the Kuala Lumpur Process and facilitated by Malaysia, it collapsed after just three plenary meetings, but it marked the first time that a Thai government had publicly committed to negotiating a settlement with those who had taken up arms against the state. In spite of the army's scepticism of the earlier dialogue, the NCPO turned to reviving a dialogue with militants in late 2014, six months after seizing power.

It seems like a distant memory now, but the first year of the Obama administration was an anxious one for many American Asia watchers. Those closest to the president, people who worked on his campaign, and people heartened by his boyhood connections to the region may have been confident about his professional interest in Asia. Those not in-the-know or disinclined to take too seriously the policy implications of his personal story were uncertain. The substance of President Obama's interest was also unclear. Asia policy was not a major theme of the campaign and he seemed ambivalent about its most important element — international trade.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Asia on her first overseas trip as secretary. It was a very positive statement about American interests. During the course of the visit, however, what made the most news was a remark in reference to China that the United States had to be careful not to let human rights interfere with its broader interests. Later in the year, President Obama compounded doubts about his administration's priorities by refusing a customary meeting with the Dalai Lama. The best reading of his reluctance was that he would soon be visiting China for the first time and did not want to spoil the prospects for a productive visit; the worst was that, as his first National Security Strategy would later indicate, he saw China as a partner more than a challenge. And when President Obama made his own visit that November, it was plagued by doubt. Given his interaction with the Chinese, many critics were concerned that he had been manipulated.

It was not until the Tokyo stop of this November swing through the region that President Obama committed the United States to joining negotiations on what would ultimately become central to his Asia policy — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Until then, it was anything but certain whether he would endorse his predecessor's initiative. Similarly, until it was finalized in 2010, suspense surrounded the future of the U.S.–Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), portions of which President Obama demanded be renegotiated as the price for his support.

The point of this recounting is not to evaluate the history of the previous administration but to contextualize the Trump administration's policy. The first year of a presidency is often an uncertain one.

Timor-Leste enters 2018 facing an uncertain future on a number of political and economic fronts. This review focuses on three issues: first, the progress of the Timor Sea negotiations with Australia in 2017; second, Timor-Leste's bid for ASEAN membership; and finally, the processes and outcomes of the presidential and parliamentary elections. By the year's end, the events of 2017 relating to these key issues have left Timor-Leste's political situation in an indeterminate state.

An agreement between Australia and Timor-Leste on resolving the longrunning dispute over hydrocarbon resources and maritime boundaries in the Timor Sea will be integral to the short- and medium-term economic viability of the Timorese state. While the apparent resolution of the maritime boundaries dispute has been viewed as a moral victory, we currently know little about where the boundaries will be located or the specifics of the special regime that will govern the lucrative but contested Greater Sunrise gas field. How these negotiations will alter Timor-Leste's plans to develop oil industrialization capabilities also remain unknown. On the second major international relations issue — ASEAN membership — Timor-Leste finishes the year once again unsuccessful in its pursuit of joining the organization, as the current member states remain doubtful about the country's economic and diplomatic capacities. This again leaves Timor-Leste's membership prospects in suspension, and, consequently, its identity status as a Southeast Asian state remains ambiguous.

In terms of domestic politics, Timor-Leste held the third set of presidential and parliamentary elections since its independence in 2002. As such, the elections provided some important insights into democratic consolidation, and were widely regarded as well run. The national parliament elections in particular produced surprise outcomes and led to a peaceful change of government, replacing the sixth government of “National Unity” that comprised a cosy coalition between the two major parties, CNRT and FRETILIN. Subsequent to the election, the formation of new coalitions between political parties rendered obsolete those observations that oppositional politics had ended. The description by Dennis Shoesmith in Southeast Asian Affairs 2017 of Timor-Leste as a “consociational” and “controlled” democracy that had ostensibly replaced conflict with consensus has now been supplanted, as a parliamentary majority opposition has emerged that threatens the authority of the new FRETILIN-led minority government. Now, instead of no opposition, there may to be too much, highlighting the fluidity of the domestic political context.

The National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) junta led by General Prayuth Chan-ocha came to power on 22 May 2014 after it toppled the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of former prime minister Thaksin. This coup returned Thailand to military authoritarian rule similar to that of strongman Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat's in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Prayuth's premiership brought back the old model of “Thai-style democracy” in which the royal–military alliance dominates politics with an ultra-conservative discourse. Since the coup, the military has established itself as the new ruling elite by enhancing its scope of power, budget and size. It has also sought to maintain its dominance by weakening majoritarian democracy and undermining the influence of political parties and civil society through constitutional design. This chapter explains an attempt of the Prayuth administration at restructuring Thai political order through various institutional mechanisms in order to prolong military power.

During the Cold War period, military rule was the most common form of non-democratic regime. Between the end of the Second World War and the beginnings of the third wave of democratization, militaries have intervened in approximately two-thirds of the more than one hundred non-Western states. And in the late 1970s militaries controlled the governments in about a third of these countries. However, since the end of the Cold War, the phenomenon of military coup and military government has gradually disappeared and become anachronistic. Only a handful of poverty-stricken countries still encounter political intervention from the army and military coups. Thailand is currently the only country in Southeast Asia being governed under military rule. This striking fact points to the necessity of closely examining the roles and politics of the military in Thailand's transition.

Consolidating Military Power

Instead of pursuing a power-sharing mode like the previous coup governments in 1991 and 2006, the current ruling junta led by General Prayuth and General Pravit Wongsuwan aims to consolidate and entrench military power in the political system for the long term. They aim to re-centralize the state structure by increasing the duties and power of the military at the expense of civil society and elected forces. The new political structure is designed to control majoritarian democracy by blunting the power of political parties.

The people of Myanmar overwhelmingly voted in the 2015 general elections to usher in a historic change for the country. As a majority of the citizens hoped, the major opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a majority of the vote. As a result, for the very first time, the people of Myanmar were able to witness a civilian government. The date of the election, 8 November 2015, marked a historic moment for Myanmar, and engendered great expectations among the public that reform would accelerate under the new administration.

Winning over 80 per cent of the vote, the NLD was able to form the government. The new administration, led by president U Htin Kyaw, commenced on 1 April 2016. The beginning of the journey for the new administration was quite rocky, as it had to boost an economy that had contracted in the difficult fiscal year (FY) 2015/16, affected as it was by natural disaster and lower commodity prices. As a first step in its economic reforms, in July 2017 the new government released a twelve-point economic policy agenda, covering all the important sectors. The twelve-point agenda, though generally positively received, was criticized for a lack of clarity, priorities or specifics.

The most significant economic reform of the year was the Myanmar Investment Law 2016. This was enacted in October 2016 and its implementation rules were published in March 2017. It replaces Foreign Investment Law 2012 and the Myanmar Citizens Investment Law 2013 with a consolidated law that provides a level playing field for both foreign and domestic investors. In addition, it will streamline internal procedures. However, there has been a delay in enacting another important piece of legislation for the country — the new Myanmar Companies Act, the most anticipated legislation for 2017. The act was approved by President U Htin Kyaw in the first week of December 2017. Hence, the NLD government failed to enact this important legislation during its first year as part of its economic reform agenda. This may have led to lower investments for the government's first year.

The first year of the NLD administration, FY 2016/17, witnessed a slower than expected growth rate of 5.9 per cent — lower than the average 7.3 per cent growth rate of the previous administration.

As election season looms, President Joko Widodo's (Jokowi) political opponents have begun to craft their campaign message. From mid-2017, Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi's closest rival, made an increasing number of public appearances. Campaignstyle videos started to appear with greater frequency on his party's (Gerindra) social media pages. Gerindra's twitter profile, for example, was filled with content about economic inequality, emphasizing to followers that the richest 1 per cent of Indonesians own 49 per cent of the country's wealth. In one video, posted in November 2017, Prabowo blames Indonesia's worsening economic inequality on a political elite who have abandoned the egalitarian spirit of Indonesia's 1945 Constitution. Meanwhile, senior members of Gerindra, along with Jokowi's other detractors from Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS), and conservative Islamic groups, accuse the Jokowi government of providing economic privileges to foreign business interests and Indonesian Chinese tycoons. Indonesia's Muslim masses, they intimate, have been excluded and left behind.

These claims of economic injustice, whether real or imagined, are typical of a populist political style. Prabowo ran on a similar platform during the 2014 presidential race, and lost. So, how vulnerable is Jokowi to this kind of narrative? To what extent might such nationalist and populist appeals have more traction with the electorate in 2019 than they did in 2014? Are exclusivist electoral campaigns and nationalist economic agendas becoming a permanent fixture of post-Suharto politics?

This chapter attempts to address these questions. It begins with a brief overview of populist politics and economic nationalism in the Indonesian context. It then progresses in three sections, each of which explores a major line of critique put forward by Jokowi's political rivals: (1) growth, foreign investment and the China problem; (2) resource nationalism and food sovereignty; and (3) socio-economic inequality. It argues that Jokowi's economic record has been mixed over the past three years, which exposes him to technocratic critiques about missed economic targets and poor policy execution. But he is also vulnerable to populist-nationalist attacks, which exaggerate the president's closeness to China and Indonesian Chinese tycoons and question his commitment to the prosperity of the ummah. In a fourth section, I look at Jokowi's attempt to adjust his economic message and undercut these critiques. The chapter closes by reflecting on scholarly debate about the conditions which have produced an upswing in populist politics and economic nationalism in Indonesia.

At the end of 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte and his administration finished in a stronger position than at the beginning of the year, as did the Philippine economy. This was the case despite 2017 being a turbulent year, even by Philippine standards.

Marawi City, the largest city in Muslim Mindanao, was taken over for months by a coalition of ISIS-inspired local and regional terrorists. A fifth of the country ended the year under martial law, while the rest of the country remained under an indefinite state of emergency declared in September 2016. The Philippine National Police were twice removed from the crusade-like war on drugs, due to gruesome deaths of apparently innocent foreigners and children, and then reinstated. The Philippine government suspended peace talks with the communist insurgents, started them again, then suspended them again and reclassified the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People's Army, as terrorist groups. Congress’ Commission on Appointments knocked back the largest number of cabinet appointments made by any president (five). According to President Duterte, China threatened war if the Philippines exercised its maritime rights in the West Philippine Sea.

In Southeast Asian Affairs 2017, Aries A. Arugay from the University of the Philippines analysed the socio-political reasons for President Duterte's surprise “outsider” victory in the May 2016 presidential elections. His victory was truly a populist watershed moment in the country's post-Marcos democratic development. Joseph Franco from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and a former Philippine soldier deployed to Mindanao dissected President Duterte's new and often contradictory approach to the insurgency in Muslim Mindanao and the terrorist groups it continues to spawn.

Building on these two chapters, this year's Philippine country overview contends that 2017 was a year of political consolidation for President Duterte and his administration. The year saw much of the potential for change and a new style of government promised by President Duterte's May 2016 victory, for good and bad, be turned into political reality. The chapter begins by looking at developments in national politics and how the president's political position strengthened and his prerogative was wielded over the year.

After successfully consolidating his power in his second year in office (2016), 2017 saw President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) gradually and consistently expand his power base to strengthen his political authority in Indonesia to the point that he was able to weaken opposition forces both in and outside parliament. Against predictions, he successfully reduced political tensions arising from the two highprofile events that occurred in early 2017: first, the defeat of the ethnic Chinese, Christian Governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) in the Jakarta election and, second, the two-year prison sentence handed to Ahok for blasphemy. Jokowi responded to these events decisively, with constitutional initiatives and political manoeuvres aimed at outlawing social and religious organizations deemed to be anti-Pancasila1 and moving to limit the impact of outspoken critics in Jakarta and the countryside. At the grass-roots level, Jokowi visited and consulted with religious and community leaders across Indonesia to gain support for his efforts to reduce what threatened to become an increasing level of religious intolerance and hatred in Indonesian communities.

The Indonesian economy did not improve much, with growth remaining at around 5.1 per cent per annum. This was not enough to fully support Jokowi's ambitious infrastructure programmes, leading him to deploy available resources and funding inside and outside the country to ensure those programmes stayed on track. In terms of foreign policy, Jokowi continued to attract prominent international state visitors to Indonesia, and participated actively on the world stage in forums such as the G20, ASEAN and APEC meetings, and a visit to China to participate in the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) gathering organized by President Xi Jinping. The highlight of Jokowi's regional engagement was his quick response to domestic pressure to address the plight of the Rohingya refugees who became stranded along the Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Towards the end of 2017, his third year in office, Jokowi harvested the fruits of his efforts, with independent public opinion polls showing him to have an unprecedented level of support, making him, at this time, the most powerful and popular political leader in Indonesia.

This chapter will highlight key trends in Indonesia in 2017 in the areas of domestic politics, the economy and foreign policy. It will discuss the ways in which Jokowi navigated the complex Indonesian political landscape and stayed on top of the game.

In early May 2014, Chinese deep-water oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 (HYSY-981), accompanied by around eighty ships, started oil exploration activities at an area off Vietnam's central coast. Vietnam sent naval vessels to the area to prevent the stationing of the rig. Vietnamese authorities also said they would do everything they could to protect the country's sovereign rights and jurisdiction since the HYSY-981 was positioned well within the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) measured from Vietnam's baseline. China responded by claiming that the rig was still inside China's waters measured from the Paracel Islands and within Beijing's maritime claims based on the nine-dash line.

The subsequent standoff, which lasted until July, witnessed a cat and mouse game between maritime law enforcement forces of the two countries, with naval vessels of both sides looming in the background. Chinese ships aggressively rammed and fired water cannons at Vietnamese vessels that were trying to obstruct the rig's operation. The crisis led to two deadly anti-China riots in Vietnam, and created a sense of brinksmanship in the country for weeks. Following the incident, strategic trust between the two countries fell to its lowest point since bilateral normalization in 1991.

The incident further reinforces Vietnam's perception of the China threat in the South China Sea where China has since the late 2000s become increasingly assertive. Over the years, Vietnam has taken various measures to counter China's pressures and to improve its strategic position vis-à-vis China in the South China Sea. In the wake of the crisis, Vietnam has even stronger motivations to step up these efforts and to adjust its domestic as well as foreign policies in anticipation of higher levels of coercion from China in the future.

This chapter analyses the impact of the 2014 oil rig crisis on Vietnam–China relations, focusing on Vietnam's responses to counter the growing threat from China after the crisis. The chapter first reviews the significance of territorial and maritime disputes as a sticking point in bilateral relations. It then details how the 2014 oil rig crisis evolved and discusses mechanisms and diplomatic efforts that Vietnam and China made to mend their relations during and after the crisis.

The definition of religious authority varies across different faith groups. In Christianity and Catholicism, there is a concept of ordained priesthoods. In Catholicism, the Pope is the highest religious authority, and a symbol of unity among the faithful. His centre of authority is in the Vatican, Rome. While priests and bishops serve as intermediaries between God and man, the same claim cannot be made about the ulama (Islamic religious scholars), though they also fulfil the role as providers of religious guidance on theological matters to the masses. In Islam, religious authority is decentralized; even the religious scholars in Islam's holiest city Mecca (Saudi Arabia) cannot claim to be the central authority of the Islamic world. When Muslims were living under the caliphate system, the Sultan was regarded as a political authority rather than a religious one.

Ulama refers to a learned group of men well versed in the Islamic religious sciences, and are moral guardians of faith and the gatekeepers of religion. The Quran, Islam's holiest scripture mentions the term ulama twice. A narration of the Prophet Muhammad referred to the group as waratsatul anbiya or the “heirs” of the Prophet. However, there are Muslims who prefer to treat the ulama as ideal social groups rather than referring to any specific individuals (Norshahril 2015). The ulama as a social group is a product of human construction, and not one that is divinely appointed. Ulama for one community may not be considered as one in another community. This begs the question as to who has legitimacy in the religious community to speak on theological matters. This contestation also exists within the same community, depending on which criteria the group holds. Some communities emphasize on knowledge as the most important marker that differentiates a religious scholar and a layperson, and hence, authority is measured based on the number of books the alim (singular for ulama) has written or the originality of his ideas. Yet, in other communities, a scholar must possess the ability to cure the sick, or in other words, magical powers. The alim must reflect some form of divine inspiration, even though of lesser degree compared to the Prophet Muhammad, who died in AD 632. According to the Islamic belief, the Prophet received divine orders (wahyu) directly from God.