The co-creation of new knowledge by combining traditional ecological knowledge and citizen science can empower communities to cope with impending and irreversible changes. However, scholar-activists walk a fine line between driving communities into fields that they are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with, and sharing their wealth of knowledge. This paper uses an autoethnographic approach to reflect on my experience as a researcher deeply involved in community organising in a rural fishing village in southwest Johor, Malaysia, and the tightrope I walked to provide locals with access to resources, networks, and materials, and to amplify their work through myriad media. My accidental scholar-activism is the outcome of 17 years immersed in this community, initially as an environmental education facilitator, then as the community found its voice, as a supporter of efforts to participate in and benefit from the development encroaching onto its neighbourhood and natural habitats. While the villagers simply wanted to safeguard nature-based livelihoods despite increasing habitat destruction and climate change impacts, my work in the background effectively empowered them to overcome restrictive power structures and improve social justice. This was an unplanned social movement that took on a life of its own, analysed through engaged and participative ethnography. While the community made headway in effective and impactful change, the journey demonstrated some failures in youth engagement, but unexpected success with the fishermen. Throughout it all, I questioned the wisdom of my providing people with a near-impossible vision of surmounting entrenched power structures, and the contravention of conservative cultural and gender norms.

In this paper, I marked the critical alter-political works of urban scholar-activists in the Philippines. Slums are at the heart of capitalist dispossessions. Slumdwellers live, survive, negotiate, and resist on an everyday basis. In the Philippines, the struggles of slum community organisations are strongly influenced, formed, and pulled in divergent ideological trajectories by contending larger political formations.

I draw on my own experience and that of 20 Filipino urban scholar-activists with varied political commitments, reflecting on decades of community work, to highlight the alter-works and challenges of navigating the web of political heterogeneity within urban poor organisations and movements. By scholar-activists, I do not refer solely to those who are based in universities, but to the many who struggle every day to unearth subaltern political knowledges and collectively fight for the right to adequate housing, as well as, for some, the right to the city. I enumerate the multiple functions and necessary labours of being 'embedded' in these complex politics. We engage in political advising, framing, networking, organizing, translating, and capacity-building. Caught in a complex web that may necessitate strategic essentialisation, silencing, and foreclosures, scholar-activists play a crucial role of strategic facilitation that connects collective forms of living among urban surplus lives and corrodes neoliberal urban dispossessions. These alter-works are continuous efforts towards situated solidarities, where urban scholar activists critically draw from and reshape ‘inherited’ social movement frames and strategies grounded on actually existing subaltern realities, capacities, and political opportunities.

The article highlights the role of partisan ethnography in studying the chains of co-optation of grassroots environmental activism in ecologically and politically sensitive contexts. In Thailand, such chains are often undergoing the process of institutionalization of eco-Buddhist approaches to nature conservation, also concurring with the detachment of grassroots socio-environmental activism from the recent, urban based pro-democracy uprisings. The discussion will focus on the recent history of the eco-politics related to natural resources conservation in the Nan River Basin (Northern Thailand). It will describe how, since the 1980s, eco-Buddhist NGOs, Royal think tanks, international cooperation organizations, and corporate C.S.E.R. programs, which comply with the latter agencies, have systematically tended to manipulate pioneer, grassroots eco-political imagination and the organisational know-how of local environmental activists. These powerful institutional actors demonstrated interest in the Buddhist moralization of local ecological beliefs and praxis as a strategy to afford privileges of access to land, water, and forest resources through forms of internal “green grabbing”. At stake here is the fact that, beyond the grabbing of Thai river basins’ contested landscapes, activists’ radical imaginations and alter-political practices – an intangible component of such landscapes - are subject to a form of intellectual and political grabbing. The anthropological enterprise and the ethnographic encounter, conceived as partisan collaboration, nevertheless show that forms of patient resistance to such structural dynamics of co-optation might also express an unexpected source for the creative rearticulation of dissent and alter-political imaginations.

Across the world, hydropower dams that seek to tame and commodify water are sites of intense contestation, as global capital and development agendas often face staunch localised resistance. This is acutely evident in Myanmar, where water politics is a microcosm of competing visions for the country’s governance and development. Locally-led alliances pursuing self-determination and inclusive politics are pitted against the central state’s rapacious approach to development, backed by violence and foreign capital. These dynamics exist amidst an influx of international aid, providing an illuminating site for examining the intersection of aid politics, development ideology, and subaltern resistance.

This paper contributes to these thematic areas by examining the contestation of hydropower hegemony in Myanmar and centring civil society actors’ agency. It utilises what the authors call ‘solidarity scholarship’ that rejects detached positivism to deploy an epistemological belief in embedding solidarity throughout the research process for making sense of resistance and power. The paper examines how domestic opposition has gone beyond anti-dam to being uniquely propositional; rivers have become symbols of unity and resistance against uneven development and military violence. Focused on Myitsone and the Salween River, the paper elucidates how the respective campaigns galvanised not only civil society solidarity, but also the potential for re-imagining governance and development in Myanmar. This has implications for understanding subaltern resistance across many contexts globally, particularly where exploitation disguised as development is prevalent.

Critical scholars and intellectuals are often viewed as vanguards of intellectual rigor, moral integrity, and left-leaning/left-liberal politics. In particular, their trajectories tend to be examined from a sympathetic lens: as supporters of lower-class social movements. Unfortunately, this approach overlooks the varied agency of these critical scholars and their complex relationship with the very movements that they often claim to represent. It obscures their potentially unequal socioeconomic status and cultural gap with the movements they engage with. This is not to dismiss their contribution or deny the reality of state repression against some of them, but a more grounded, sober approach to studying these cognitive workers is needed.

This study investigates the value-appropriating, politically-moderating, status-seeking tendency in some parts of critical knowledge production and activism. It advances several claims. First, the increasing neoliberalisation of the research sector exacerbates the process of class differentiation among critical scholars and intellectuals. The majority join the swelling rank of precarious cognitariat, whereas a selected stratum becomes part of the professional managerial class. Second, the latter stratum contains new intellectual actors who enjoy economic, cultural, and, political benefits from their advantaged position at the expense of precarious scholar-activists and marginalised communities, as exemplified in their public celebrity status or appointment into policymaking decisions. Lastly, as an illustration, and a form of self-criticism, I interrogate my position as an early-career researcher of Indonesian politics, show my own role and complicity in the neoliberal research industrial complex, and reflect on possible ways out of this politico-intellectual impasse.

Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Islamic organisation, is renowned for fostering tolerance in Indonesia. However, recent studies have revealed that the degrees of tolerance NU displays are inconsistent, throwing the organisation’s reputation for acceptance into question. By adopting critical juncture and case study analyses, this article finds that tolerance within NU is dynamic for three reasons. First, it evolves depending on the social-political context of the time. Second, NU upholds tolerance within specific limits, extending it to those who do not contradict the Islamic values it upholds and who do not pose a threat to the unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI). Third, the commitment to tolerance by NU’s membership, the nahdliyin, varies and does not always align with NU’s principles.

The nature of Indonesia’s foreign policy has long been understood as non-aligned. It has been associated with the basic tenet of bebas aktif (being independent and active) and the evolving international relations of the state, which demonstrated continuity in its non-side-taking position in the Cold War. However, recently, new trends in Indonesia’s regional and global conduct have emerged, including the diversification of multilateral engagements beyond ASEAN, the strengthening of various forms of strategic partnerships with major Indo-Pacific powers, and the adoption of normative hedging policies in response to sensitive international issues. What explains these developments? The conception of Indonesian foreign policy as being defined by non-alignment is no longer appropriate. This article argues that Indonesia now employs a partial multi-alignment strategy. Nevertheless, limited national power and persistent threat perceptions prevent the state from pursuing a fully multi-aligned strategy.