The growth of authoritarianism and violent neoliberalism across Southeast Asia (Case Reference Case and Gomez2019; Morgenbesser Reference Morgenbesser2020; Springer Reference Springer2015) within the governance of environments, cities, and labor markets has limited the margin of maneuver for research (Morgenbesser and Weiss Reference Morgenbesser and Weiss2018) and especially for engaged research, that is “critical social science that challenges existing power relations” (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Kramer, Tungohan, Chaya Ocampo, Morris-Jung and Caouette2017: 428). However, it has neither prevented people from raising their voices in dissent nor prevented scholars from involving themselves in local struggles.

Tensions related to the intersection of research and action alongside people in the field have been the object of broad discussions (e.g., Hale Reference Hale2008; Low and Merry Reference Low and Merry2010; Ortner Reference Ortner2019; Speed Reference Speed2006), and have been approached from a regional, notably Southeast Asian perspective that highlighted locally specific ways of defining and articulating research and action (Kelly et al. Reference Kelly, Kramer, Tungohan, Chaya Ocampo, Morris-Jung and Caouette2017; Salemink Reference Salemink2016). Ongoing mobilisations of academics who defend their rights within networks and organisations (Wijayanto et al. Reference Wijayanto, Putri and Wiratraman2021) are rediscussing the boundaries between scholarship and citizen struggle. Further, Southeast Asian anthropologists have developed thorough reflections on research in contexts of violent political conflict (Castillo Reference Castillo2015) and vulnerability (Thajib Reference Thajib2022).

Convinced of the enduring importance of dealing with the questions and dilemmas that scholar-activists face as well as of the relevance of a regional approach, this special issue aims to reiterate a reflection on these matters in Southeast Asia. It grew out of “Engaging research: Exploring Collaborations between Researchers, Activists and Citizens”, a multi-sited hybrid conference organised in 2022 by the Observatory of Political Alternatives in Southeast Asia (AlterSEA) that connected scholars and practitioners in Bangkok, Semarang, and Paris, as well as online.

The five contributions are based on research conducted over the last decade in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia. Although almost all the authors identify as academics, they write from different perspectives. Some are based at universities within the country they study and come from, others work at institutions outside of the country they study and come from, and still others conduct research on Southeast Asia while being from and based in Europe.

From their complementary points of view, the authors reflect upon the role played by institutional settings, socio-political contexts, and mobilisation cultures in influencing the very qualification of what constitutes engagement. They explore how engagement in research can be legitimised or disqualified, and how inter-sectoral porosities and relations are framed between researchers, research participants, practitioners, and public action.

Serina Rahman reflects on her seventeen-year-long involvement with the people of a rural fishing village in southwest Johor, Malaysia, first as an environmental education facilitator, then as an “accidental scholar-activist.” Accidental, because she initially identified as a scholar-practitioner, the term activist appearing too strong in the context of a conservative Malay-Muslim village. In hindsight, she realised that her engagement, which was aimed at adjusting to the needs of her interlocutors over the long run, largely corresponds to Ramasubramanian and Sousa’s (Reference Ramasubramanian and Sousa2021) definition of scholar-activism. S. Rahman compares the citizen-science project that she launched with local youth through the community-organisation Kelab Alami, which she had co-founded with a local fisherman, and the seafood market project that her co-founder brought into life as coastal inhabitants’ living got threatened by external development projects. With an auto-ethnographic reflexivity, she ponders the impact of her identity as an educated “city-girl” who did not conform to dominant gender roles, and the influence of her co-founder, who later became her husband. The relative failure of the youth-program led S. Rahman to question the suitability of providing youth with a near-impossible vision of environmental protection and encouraging the contravention of conservative cultural and gender norms. By supporting her partner’s project to improve fishing peoples’ livelihoods through her research (and status), S. Rahman was able to contribute to overcome restrictive power structures, improve social justice, and support an unplanned local initiative that took on a life of its own.

Chester Arcilla takes stock of the role that Filipino scholar-activists have been playing within urban poor organisations’ quest for alter-politics, that is open and democratic movements, focusing on community empowerment. He relies on his own long-term engagement as well as on conversations with 20 fellow scholar-activists, who have all been involved for decades in community fights for adequate housing, some from within university positions. After having drawn an edifying history of urban politics in the Philippines, C. Arcilla mobilises a rich toolbox of concepts to delve into the complexities of working with a variety of organisations, which share progressive agendas, but situate themselves differently on the political spectrum. A red thread running through the paper concerns the ways in which scholar-activists often draw connections within a diverse field of actors and organisations and their alter-works, from reformist to radical, which—as he importantly recalls—can be mutually reinforcing. To do so, scholar-activists invest roles ranging from political advisor to capacity-builder and translator, which might involve silencing and foreclosures, as well as strategic essentialism. This “strategic facilitation” that is at the basis of “situated solidarities” (Routledge and Derickson Reference Routledge and Derickson2015) requires personal openness and “patient deliberation” from scholar-activists. It doubtlessly also needs a decent amount of courage, considering the risk of internal and external critique, a dimension that C. Arcilla evokes in passing, and that only adds to the impressiveness of these Filipino scholar-activists’ contribution to urban rights struggles.

Amalia Rossi offers a fine-grained ethnography of the co-optation of grassroots environmental activism in the Nan River basin, Northern Thailand, positioning her involvement with local militants as one of “partisan ethnography” (Greco Reference Greco2017). The paper provides a detailed account of how Eco-Buddhism and progressive networks of actors became institutionalised and stripped of their critical and independent approach. It does so, in part, by relying on experiences that A. Rossi collected since the beginning of her field research, in 2007, when she started following politically engaged persons, earning their trust, without directly engaging herself in their activism. Over the years, she got an intimate understanding of the dynamics that led a man whom she had come to know as one of the more radical defenders of marginalised highland farmers to involve with conservative government-led top-down development. When this man stepped out of his newly earned comfortable career and went back to supporting people on the ground, she rendered her partisanship more explicit, both in academia and on the ground, notably through translation. By following activists over eight years, A. Rossi has been able to document the “patient resistance” of non-aligned Thai environmental activists, who are navigating a political landscape in which open critique is dangerous and financial support depoliticizing. She thereby sheds light on “hidden transcripts” of alter-political (Hage Reference Hage2015) imaginations.

In post-coup Myanmar, Dustin Barter and Bawk La analyze struggles for water governance as an inroad to understand broader fights for self-determination and inclusive political practices, in opposition to the state’s extractive and top-down approach to development. Their article advances the concept of “solidarity scholarship,” which challenges detached positivist methodologies by advocating for collaborative, activist research that explicitly confronts power asymmetries inherent in knowledge production. The detail of the descriptions contributes to a body of fine ethnographic work in the region, coming, for example, from neighboring Thailand, where researchers from Chiang Mai University have developed the “Thai Baan research” (Heis and Vaddhanaphuti Reference Heis and Vaddhanaphuti2020). This original approach transforms villagers into local researchers, producing “expert” knowledge on water, and it enables the co-construction of alternative narratives and the conduct of counter-assessments of environmental impacts. This type of approach is extremely limited in post-coup Myanmar, where disasters caused by mining have consequences beyond national boundaries, polluting Thai rivers and the Mekong. In this context, rivers such as the Salween and Myitsone—on which D. Barter and Bawk La focus their article—have become powerful symbols of unity and resistance, catalyzing civil society solidarity and challenging militarised, uneven development while opening space to reimagine “development” through ideological and territorial contestation.

In the final contribution to this issue, Iqra Anugrah interrogates the prevailing assumption that critical academics and intellectuals within the academy inherently serve as the vanguard of intellectual rigor, moral integrity, and solidarity with working-class social movements. He contends that such assumptions obscure the often-unequal socio-economic positions and cultural disjuncture between these intellectuals and the movements they claim to support. He identifies several structural dynamics—most notably the ongoing neoliberalisation of the research sector—that contribute to the formation of a “professional-managerial class” within critical academia. This process exacerbates class stratification among intellectuals, as many benefit from economic, cultural, and political privileges that are inaccessible to both precariously employed academic activists and the marginalised communities with whom they engage. The author offers a self-reflexive critique of his own academic trajectory, which he views as implicated in the neoliberal research-industrial complex, and concludes by considering possible pathways out of this political and intellectual impasse. The preparation of this text prompted us to reflect more deeply on questions that require careful consideration, and the paths traced by I. Anugrah contributed to our aim of creating a dialogue between different perspectives on engaged research.

We thoroughly enjoyed learning from the conference conversations, and later the articles that make up this special issue. We consider that each author’s shared experience strongly enriches reflections on how to meaningfully involve with research partners active in alter-political projects. Taken together, these contributions show how political contexts, academic situatedness, and unexpected interactions that arise in the course of fieldwork influence ways of conducting engaged research. The authors question its relevance and limitations, and shed light on the processes not only of co-constructing knowledge, but also of reciprocal transformation, which can take a very personal shape. Throughout, the value of long-term engagements becomes apparent, as it is not only necessary to establish relationships that enable researchers to get a better understanding of those with whom we study, but also to find ways to meaningfully support them in their often-long-term struggles.