In the introduction, we adopted the notion of the Anthropocene as a symbol of the planetary scale of the environmental crisis, and a time marker for the last two decades (see Chapter 1). Given Southeast Asia's rich biodiversity and its pivotal role in global capitalism—with hubs like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—the countries we chose to focus on in this book bear an important responsibility in the Anthropocene in general, and its Asian version in particular. But they are interesting for other reasons, which lie in the dialectics between civil society and political regimes, and the contribution of their environmental movements in a geopolitical context marked by China's growing hegemony.

In the previous chapters, we have seen a great variety in the repertoire of collective action, with different levels of engagement and risk. For example, in the case of the Philippines (Chapter 5), while online petitions on climate change policy may present no risk for those who click to sign, court litigation and protest marches against coal plants require greater commitment and do not exclude perils such as police brutality, and disruptive actions against illegal logging and agribusiness thugs entail considerable danger such as “extra-judicial killings”. Cambodian environmental activists are likewise exposed to the risk of murder. Such dramatic endings are thus far unheard of in Taiwan, Singapore, or Vietnam, although in Vietnam activists might be condemned to long prison sentences on false pretexts. These examples suggest that opportunity structures for environmental activism vary greatly depending on patterns of political regime. One goal of our book has been to examine the evolution of this interaction between environmental movements and political regimes in our selection of East and Southeast Asian countries over the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

In the collective opus published twenty years ago—and which inspired the present book—Lee et al. (1999, chapter 9) evaluated the impact of democratization on environmental movements in East Asia. In the cases of South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, the authors found that environmental movements played a significant role in the process of political liberalization, democratization, and democratic consolidation. They called these environmental movements partners or guardians of the democracy movement (i.e., partners in the democratization process while it was still in the making, and guardians once significant steps towards democratization had been achieved).

Environmentalism can be seen as resulting from differences in material conditions and perspectives on how to live and develop sustainably. This chapter describes these differences and set them in the context of Malaysia's recent history. Following on from Guha and Martinez Alier (1997) and Martinez Alier (2002), we depart from the view that environmentalism is a luxury that emerges only when basic needs are fulfilled.1 We rather consider that the positioning of environmental problems depends on the space available for doing so in the public sphere (Justus et al. 2009). Borrowing from the environmental justice approach, this chapter considers how environmental issues have become entangled with problems of land rights of Indigenous Peoples, particularly in East Malaysia.

Environmental justice is critical of the selective or complete exclusion of local communities for the sake of logging or mining interests, as well as deforestation for vast cash crops like rubber or palm oil (Sicotte and Brulle 2018). In early industrialized countries like the United States, environmental justice mobilizations started with conflicts over the unequal distribution of ecological burdens like waste disposal and air pollution. Although these sorts of conflicts have spread to developing countries, in the latter, social conflicts are still generally provoked by unfair access to natural resources or their destruction by mining, unsustainable logging, and the like (Aiken and Leigh 2015; Majid Cooke et al. 2018; Martinez Alier 2018). By extension, environmental justice is also critical of the cult of wilderness that, in the past, has equated conservation with preservation, for example, through the formation of national parks or the preservation of commons (Schlosberg 2013). Environmental justice has broadened conservation to consider landscapes and biospheres as places where people live, not museums to be preserved.

The discourse of “authentic native identity” aims at regaining the access of Indigenous Peoples to their customary lands. This narrative has won some support through the judicial system. The Orang Asli groups of West Malaysia and the myriad groups officially categorized as “natives” of East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) have won a number of court cases through conservation claims as their livelihoods depend on the ecosystem of these places (Aiken and Leigh 2011). Although this strategy for recovering customary land rights has met with some success, in cases of conflicts over natural resources, the rhetoric of “authentic native identity” might exclude other “native” claims from individuals with equal rights (Murray Li 2001).

Environmental problems do not occur solely as a result of natural phenomena, but are also a product of multi-faceted socio-political interactions. This is especially true in the Anthropocene era, in which the impact of human activities on the environment has been elevated to a geological scale. Such interactions likewise effect the mobilization that arises in response to environmental problems. This chapter highlights how, in Thailand, the political changes of the last twenty years— including mass mobilizations, military coups, constitutional reforms, and erratic government—have reoriented the country's environmental movement(s) away from the activism of earlier years, toward a more reactionary stance. In Thailand, as in other countries of the region, environmental politics largely focuses on the over-exploitation of natural resources, such as rainforests for logging and agribusiness, and rivers for the construction of hydroelectric dams. Resource politics is especially important if we consider the new forms of governance and institution required to cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Environmental politics in Thailand goes far beyond formal political institutions with the government at the centre. In fact, it involves the dynamism of power relations and the wider processes of democratization, the politics of mass mobilization, knowledge production, emerging economic and social aspirations, as well as the rise and decline of relations between incumbent governments and civil organizations. These relations may be embodied in different ways— contestation, negotiation, cooperation, even impasse. The changing interactions among actors also create a new terrain in which various kinds of political manoeuvres can be achieved in the area of resource politics and in environmentalism more broadly.

In this chapter, I look at Thailand's environmental movement during the past two decades through the interaction between the state, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the populations who are directly or indirectly affected by environmental issues. During the country's rapid economic growth in the 1990s, governments’ development policies often caused all sorts of ecological problems, resulting in the dissatisfaction and mobilization of people demanding better management. During the 2000s, the political instability of the country added to the obstruction of sustainable development, especially the lack of meaningful participation of average citizens in the decisionmaking process.

Twenty years ago, sociologist Daniel Goh commented that Singapore is a strange place for environmentalism (Goh 2000). The reasons for this are two-fold. First, ruled by a single, dominant political party since its independence in 1965, the room for civil society in general has been circumscribed in the best of times, and suppressed in the worst of times. Second, as a small island-state, which reached near complete urbanization as early as the 1980s, Singapore is seen as a place where environmentalism is dissonant with reality. This dissonance becomes more acute as far as nature conservation—an enduring environmental issue—is concerned. Put another way, nature conservation is seen as increasingly irrelevant given the hyper-development of the city-state because there is little space left to conserve in urbanized Singapore. Suffice to say, the perennially weakened state of the environmental movement explains in part why, when it comes to the tug-of-war between conservation and development, the conservationists have more often than not ceded ground to the state. In addition, as this chapter will illustrate, the developmentalist posturing of the Singapore state makes it ideologically challenging for the environmental movement to defend nature conservation. Yet, the latter is but one of the many concerns of the environmental movement.

Indeed, mirroring global trends, the local environmental movement, especially in recent years, has incorporated a plethora of interests beyond nature conservation. How have issues such as animal rights and sustainable living (broadly defined), relatively new forms of environmental concerns here, play out within the environmental politics of Singapore, as compared to the concerns of more “traditional” environmental groups? Further to that, how have the general ebb and flow of the Singaporean political climate affected the development of the environmental movement? These questions, the focus of this chapter, are related in a symbiotic manner. To put it simply, commentators have argued that the introduction of newer, non-traditional environmental concerns spearheaded by younger environmental organizations nudge open the political space in Singapore (Kong 1991), and the latter once opened—even if gingerly—can encourage the further emergence and consolidation of environmental groups.

Two decades ago, several authors of the present book contributed to a collective publication on Asia's environmental movements in comparative perspective (Lee and So 1999). As the editors pointed out (p. 15), while Western environmental movements developed in the context of advanced industrial economies and decades-old liberal democracies, their Asian counterparts emerged in either economically backward or newly industrializing countries, new democracies or authoritarian states. Distinct cultural and religious backgrounds have further shaped the specificities of environmentalism in Asia. The book therefore aimed to outline and compare the characteristics of Asia's environmental movements, and to examine their impact on the state, economy, and society—as well, of course, on environmental outcomes.

Around the same time, two other edited volumes attested to the effervescence of the academic attention to this range of topics in the context of East and Southeast Asia (Kalland and Persoon 1998; Hirsch and Warren 1998). The flourishing of bottom-up environmental activism reflected the quick pace of industrialization and an ascending position in the world economy. While social movements against industrial pollution in Japan started commenced in the late nineteenth century (Walker 2010; Stolz 2014), in the rest of Asia, similar movements did not appear until some hundred years later, starting with the “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) in the 1970s; Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia in the 1980s; in China since the end of the 1990s; and still more recently in other countries, like Indonesia and Vietnam.

Our present collective volume examines how these popular protests engage with the environmental challenges in nine country-specific chapters, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong for East Asia, then moving to Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia in maritime Southeast Asia, followed by Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia for the mainland area. The principal goal of the book is to present a qualitative assessment of how environmental movements have influenced the socio-politics of these countries and their environmental policies, and vice versa: how politics has influenced environmental movements.

The period covered focuses on the last two decades. Compared with the situation observed by Lee and So some twenty years ago, the state of the environment in the region—and indeed around the world—has not improved.

Since it toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 with the help of Vietnam, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has been Cambodia's ruling party, under the strong leadership of Hun Sen who, since 1985, has doubled as the Prime Minister. Hun Sen and the CPP have thus ruled the country for over three decades. The CPP's legitimacy as a hegemonic party is based internally on its capacity to maintain political order and develop the economy, and externally on its ability to work with international aid donors, with different geopolitical agendas (China and the United States, in particular). Since the early 1990s, and thanks to the regional stability provided by the country's adhesion to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997,1 Cambodia has experienced a rapid economic transformation built with the support of considerable financial aid from international donors, as well as the ruthless exploitation of the country's natural resources. The institutional basis for this political economy is a patronage network controlled by the CPP and its local allies, who reap financial windfalls from lucrative land deals (MacInnes 2015). This commercialization of the land encourages illegal logging and land grabs, which have already caused massive biodiversity loss and declining fish stocks (Connell and Grimsditch 2017). The forced dislocation of local populations has provoked indignation from international donors and reduced the CPP's popular approval. Nevertheless, state patronage based on land concessions and a brutal exploitation of natural resources remains the regime's strongest political asset.

Max Weber (1978, pp. 231–32) defined patrimonialism as a form of traditional domination: as long as the ruler abided the tradition, he could treat the administration and the military as his personal instruments. As in feudalism, under traditional patrimonialism, the subordinates accept submission to the ruler's personal power in return for various advantages (Weber 1978, p. 1026). In his study of sub- Saharan Africa, Eisenstadt (1973) drew on Weber to underline that the lack of political modernization excerbates practices of patronage and clientelism, a mechanism which he described as a modern form of patrimonialism or “neopatrimonialism”. Some recent studies have applied the notion of neopatrimonialism to the Cambodian context, to spotlight how the state apparatus has been captured by particular patronage interests (Cock 2011), and the consequences of that functional threat for nature-society relations (Milne et al. 2015).

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 EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • On 1 February 2021, under the command of General Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar's military initiated a coup, apparently drawing to a close Myanmar's ten-year experiment with democratic rule. State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were arrested along with other elected officials.

• • Mass protests against the coup ensued, led by Gen Z youths who shaped a values-based democratic revolutionary movement that in character is anti-military regime, anti-China influence, anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, and anti-sexist. Women and minorities have been at the forefront, organizing protests, shaping campaigns, and engaging sectors of society that in the past had been relegated to the periphery of national politics. The protests were broadcast to local and international audiences through social media.

• • Simultaneously, a civil disobedience movement (CDM) arose in the shape of a massive strike mostly led by civil servants. CDM is non-violent and acephalous, a broad “society against the state” movement too large and diffuse for the military to target and dismantle. Semi-autonomous administrative zones in the name of Pa-a-pha or civil administrative organizations emerged out of spontaneously organized neighbourhood watches at the ward and village levels, effectively forming a parallel governance system to the military state.

• • Anti-coup protests moved decisively away from calls for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected political leaders, or for a return to democracy under the 2008 constitution. Instead, it evolved towards greater inclusivity of all Myanmar peoples in pursuit of a more robust federal democracy. A group of fifteen elected parliamentarians, representing the ideals of Gen Z youths, formed a shadow government called the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) on 5 February 2021. On 1 March the CRPH declared the military governing body, the State Administrative Council (SAC), a “terrorist group”, and on 31 March, it declared the military's 2008 constitution abolished.

• • Gen Z's protests have accomplished what has been elusive to prior generations of anti-regime movements and uprisings. They have severed the Bamar Buddhist nationalist narrative that has gripped state society relations and the military's ideological control over the political landscape, substituting for it an inclusive democratic ideology.

INTRODUCTION

On 1 February 2021, the opening day of the new Parliament elected in November 2020, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces, or Tatmadaw, launched a coup overthrowing the country's democratic government. The military declared a newly formed “State Administration Council” as the interim governing body, reserving to the Tatmadaw Commander-in-Chief the “exercise of legislative power by himself or by a body including him”. The arrest of President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, alongside other National League for Democracy (NLD) party members, writers, student leaders, activists, and monks, prompted a committee of fifteen ousted elected lawmakers to form a government-in-waiting under the name of the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) and calling for Myanmar citizens and the international community to help restore democracy.

A leaderless youth movement identified in Myanmar as “Gen Z” has since been shaping the anti-coup movement by amplifying a wide array of civil society and minority voices. Their youthful exuberance and refusal to accept military rule has encouraged resistance from all sectors of society and has united the Bamar majority and ethnic minorities in a common anti-regime movement. Gen Z's protests have accomplished what has been elusive to prior generations of anti-regime movements and uprisings. They have severed the Bamar Buddhist nationalist narrative that has gripped state-society relations and facilitated the military's ideological control over the political landscape. Gen Z has challenged attitudes and values that have restricted participation in national politics to a patriarchal, gerontocratic, and Bamar Buddhist majority. Emphasizing values that draw from global democratic ideals and imaginaries as well as universal Buddhist ethics, Gen Z has guided a movement of movements that is leaderless, emphasizes horizontal relations (rather than hierarchical ones), and accentuates a social justice orientation inclusive of all members of society.

This paper charts descriptively and analytically the first two months of Myanmar's 2021 anti-coup protests. Revolutionary movements are messy, processual, and dialectical; we aim to capture a moment in an evolving situation, infusing our inquiry with historical context and genealogical reasoning so as to draw out certain features of particular political and cultural salience.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • The Myanmar military has dominated that complex country for most of the period since independence in 1948. The fourth coup of 1 February 2021 was the latest by the military to control those aspects of society it deemed essential to its own interests, and its perception of state interests.

• • The military's institutional power was variously maintained by rule by decree, through political parties it founded and controlled, and through constitutional provisions it wrote that could not be amended without its approval.

• • This fourth coup seems a product of personal demands for power between Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and Aung San Suu Kyi, and the especially humiliating defeat of the military-backed party at the hands of the National League for Democracy in the November 2020 elections.

• • The violent and bloody suppression of widespread demonstrations continues, compromise seems unlikely, and the previous diarchic governance will not return.

• • Myanmar's political and economic future is endangered and suppression will only result in future outbreaks of political frustration.

OVERVIEW

Burma was “quite unlike any land you know about,” so Kipling wrote. He thought it unique even if appended to India as a province. But he could not have predicted the future singular role of the military in that country, for the Tatmadaw has been, and remains, the longest-ruling military elite in modern Asia, and perhaps in the contemporary world. For over half a century it commanded power, ran the state, and has been pivotal since independence in 1948. Its dominance lay not only in its complete control over the powers of state coercion, but also in its early prestige and heritage, and, later, its vice-like grip on all important elements of the society.

Its militarized Burman leadership was the only Asian group that fought early against the Allies for independence early in World War II, despite very limited military training those participating received from their Japanese allies and before the Burmese (mostly Burmans) turned against the Axis in March 1945. Unusual in Asia, the military formedpolitical parties; this became a pattern. Its leader, Aung San, orchestrated a conference at Panglong in 1947 that brought some minorities into what became the Union of Burma. He negotiated independence from Great Britain in 1948, and his assassination just before its fruition gave an almost mystic reverence to him, his family, and those military personnel associated with him. The Tatmadaw saved the state from multiple communist and ethnic rebellions in the 1950s, tried (unsuccessfully) to counter fleeing Nationalist Chinese anti-communist remnants that occupied some of Burma's northern reaches, and later, on multiple occasions, prevented actual and perceived threats of secession and what it continuously referred to as internal “chaos”. In 1958, it unfortunately acquired both false confidence in its capacity to govern and to manage an economy as well as in the widespread, inevitable corruption of its civilian elite.

This leadership was early viewed, and viewed themselves, as patriots and defenders of the state, and the Tatmadaw was a most desirable career, the officer class graduating from the Defence Services Academy at Maymyo with University of Rangoon degrees, although they were too junior to become leaders of the 1962 coup.

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 EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

On 10 May 1940, Hitler reneged on his promise to respect Dutch neutrality and unleashed a devastating blitzkrieg against the Low Countries. After five days of fighting, the Dutch commander-in-chief surrendered, unable to hold out against the German onslaught and unwilling to accept further destruction of Dutch cities. On the same day, Queen Wilhelmina, who now headed a Dutch Government-in-exile in London, having vetoed a cabinet decision to move to Jakarta because she “could not stand the tropical climate”, announced that the Dutch people in the colonies would fight alongside the Allies, by which she meant they would continue in the struggle against Hitler. What was less clear, at least to the British, was whether the Dutch would be prepared to resist a Japanese invasion of the Netherlands East Indies. While it seemed increasingly likely that the Dutch would resist, they were still playing for time, hoping to forestall an attack with their pledge, which they would give Tokyo on 6 June, to go on selling the Japanese strategic raw materials, including tin, rubber, oil and bauxite, from the East Indies so long as these did not fall into German hands.

The Dutch felt that if the Japanese could not obtain these commodities through negotiation they would be increasingly tempted to take them by force. They knew they could not hope to defend the East Indies on their own. Nor did they have any guarantee that the British or the Americans would come to their aid if the NEI were attacked. Those concerns were not misplaced. “We cannot foresee the time,” the British Chiefs of Staff had concluded in 1937, “when our defence forces will be strong enough to safeguard our territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously.” Nothing had changed since those words were written. On the contrary, the scenario the defence chiefs had considered was now unfolding. On 10 June 1940, less than a week after the mass evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk, Italy declared war on Britain and France. With their backs to the wall in Europe and the Middle East, the British would be able to provide few additional resources in the Far East should Japan strike south. The United States was to remain at peace for another eighteen months, until the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor. Southeast Asia was living on borrowed time.

The Japanese entertained high hopes for the Peta, and General Harada travelled to Bogor to preside over the opening ceremony, which was held on Wednesday, 20 October 1943. This did not proceed quite as expected. The young men who were to be trained to lead an Indonesian volunteer force had been drawn up on the parade ground in the early hours of the morning, and as the general took his place on the reviewing stand they looked quite impressive. Their uniforms, which were modelled on those of the Japanese army but made from surplus KNIL cloth, consisted of a green tunic and jodhpurs and a brown leather belt. The prospective battalion commanders had high black boots. The others wore black shoes and black leather leggings. Some wore a Dutch ceremonial sword. All of this gave the Indonesians a superficial resemblance to Japanese officer cadets. It soon proved to be illusory. As Harada began his opening remarks, one of the Indonesian officer cadets fainted. He was followed by another and then another. Before long, cadets were falling like ninepins, even though it was barely 8:00 a.m. and the sun was still low in the sky. The Japanese looked on in dismay. “Everyone stood there in line,” Tsuchiya said, “and the commander-in-chief addressed them for about forty minutes. But he was only five minutes into his speech when officer cadets began to fall down, one after another. The commander-in-chief was so disappointed. Later he said to us, ‘Can this really be successful with such weak soldiers?’ Of course, we were all disappointed.” The recruits had succumbed to what the Japanese called nisshabyo (sunstroke). “It's more than fainting,” said Tsuchiya. “They were hardly alive. They were barely breathing.” Tsuchiya and his fellow officers wondered themselves if the Javanese and Sundanese cadets would be able to endure the severe training the Japanese had in store for them. “It was astonishing to us. We were surprised how weak they were. They weren't expected to do anything except stand.”

Despite the unpromising start, the Beppan officers were determined to make a success of the training programme. They knew they had too little time to give the cadets all the necessary technical skills.