In 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic that had plagued Southeast Asia and the world at large for the previous two years finally receded. But hopes for a strong rebound from the pandemic were soon overshadowed by new uncertainties and upheavals in domestic and international politics as well as structural economic shifts that have been accelerated by the pandemic. There were also significant economic and geopolitical disruptions brought on by Russia's war against Ukraine, while the rising tensions between the United States and China across multiple domains have contributed to a more fraught security environment—testing the region's resilience to avoid being drawn into a conflict between the major powers.

Elections in Malaysia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste brought back familiar names and faces into power. Anwar Ibrahim finally laid claim to the Malaysian premiership that had for so long eluded his grasp. In Manila, another Marcos once again occupies the Malacañang Palace—this time it is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the scion of the eponymous dictator who was deposed by the People Power Revolution almost four decades ago. In Timor-Leste, the one-time president José Ramos-Horta was elected back into the same office with the support of the country's founding father and revolutionary hero José Xanana Gusmão.

Meanwhile, the prospects of impending elections in Thailand and Indonesia have prompted considerable political jostling and tussling. The electoral systems in both countries feature byzantine rules for qualification and complex balloting processes so politicians and parties have to manoeuvre early to ensure they remain ahead of their rivals. Cambodia will also hold legislative polls in 2023, but the political situation appears relatively secure for the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP). The CPP intends to use the election as an opportunity for leadership succession, with prime minister Hun Sen grooming his son to eventually take over. There was some flux in Laos and Vietnam, especially towards the end of 2022.

On the last day of the year, Lao prime minister Phankham Viphavanh tendered his surprise resignation—ostensibly for health reasons—though the general view was that his failure to effectively steward the pandemic-battered economy meant that he had to go.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary, Xi Jinping, announced the Global Security Initiative (GSI) on 21 April 2022 at the annual Boao Forum. The timing was noteworthy. It came only weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and China joined Russia in blaming the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the cause for Russia's aggression.

In the arc of Boao Forums throughout the Xi era, development has been the dominant theme. Xi's 2015 Boao speech was entitled “Towards a Community of Common Destiny and A New Future for Asia”. It was still a time of high hopes and few doubts within China about its rise, but then each subsequent year saw mounting problems that needed answers. In 2016, Donald Trump, who vowed to rectify trade and market access imbalances with China, won the US presidential election. In 2017, the Trump administration launched the US Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) initiative. The year 2018 saw the start of the Sino-US trade war and the consolidation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) between the United States, Australia, Japan and India. Xi was confident that he could win a trade war, and he invoked Mao's call for “self-reliance” to brush off worries about Beijing's continuing technological dependence on the United States. China's then foreign minister Wang Yi dismissed the Quad as something that would “dissipate like sea foam”. But by 2020, he would accuse the Quad of being a new “Asian NATO”.

In 2019, Xi skipped the Boao Forum. He began the year warning Taiwan that unification “must be and will be achieved”. Then the Sino-US trade war deepened; a million Hong Kong citizens marched to protest a criminal extradition law that would violate Hong Kong's Basic Law and China's one country–two systems commitment in the Sino-British Joint Declaration; and the Second Belt and Road Forum saw Chinese officials pledge to reform the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was ridden with concerns over debt sustainability, corruption, environmental impacts and local benefits. As growth slowed, Xi called for a “new Long March” to overcome “major challenges at home and abroad”.

Rodrigo Duterte was the first president to have hailed from Mindanao. Along with federalism, making peace with Moro Muslim separatists in the conflict-ridden south was among his priorities. He pledged to uphold the 2014 peace deal and to grant greater autonomy to the Bangsamoro.

While the goal of federalism slowly faded and was eventually abandoned, he has delivered on his promise of bringing peace and prosperity to Mindanao despite some setbacks and persistent challenges. The Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL), signed and passed in 2018, is regarded as Duterte's greatest legacy. This chapter examines the achievements of and challenges to Duterte's peace-building efforts in Mindanao and the prospects for sustainable peace after his presidency. The chapter is organized as follows: the first part provides a brief background of the Mindanao conflict and the events that led to the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM); the second and third sections examine the achievements of the BARMM during Duterte's tenure and the challenges to the established peace, respectively; and the final section discusses the developments under the new Marcos Jr. administration.

The Long Road to Peace

The Mindanao conflict was complex and multifaceted, involving ethno-religious, cultural, historical, political and ideological aspects. The often-cited cause of the conflict was the incompatible divide between the Muslims and the Christians, but the long-standing and unresolved socio-economic grievances of ethnic minority Moro Muslims, political repression and enduring patterns of inequality and injustice also contributed to its continuance. The origins of the Mindanao conflict date to as far back as the sixteenth century (when the native Muslims resisted Spanish colonialism), but most of the literature identifies the 1968 Jabidah Massacre as the spark that ignited the contemporary armed resistance. It triggered the reinvention of Moro identity and spurred the creation of the revolutionary Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in 1971, whose chief objective was to gain the independence of the Bangsamoro.

The conflict between the Philippine government and the Muslim insurgents intensified following the imposition of martial law by President Ferdinand Marcos in September 1972. The attempts by the government to disarm Muslim groups led to a full-fledged war between the Philippine military and the MNLF, resulting in an estimated 60,000 deaths and about 200,000 to 300,000 people displaced.

While there is no official poverty line in Singapore, the expansion of government support programmes for low-income individuals reflects an increasing poverty problem that has required government intervention. In 2007, Singapore introduced Workfare, with the Workfare Income Supplement (WIS) and the Work Support Programme (WSP) as anchor income-support programmes. WIS gives older lowwage workers an automatic earnings supplement, whereas WSP was a means-tested programme for low-income households. Both programmes have since greatly expanded. For WIS, the income ceiling and payout amounts have been periodically revised, and the age eligibility will be lowered from thirty-five to thirty in 2023. WSP has evolved into ComCare Short-to-Medium-Term Assistance, and in the last three years it had an average annual disbursement of S$25.8 million. This represented a twofold increase from when it was first introduced in 2007. These two workfare programmes are in addition to the existing welfare support through public assistance (now referred to as ComCare Long-term Assistance), and they operate alongside the Progressive Wage Model (PWM), which sets minimum wages by sectors corresponding with skill ladders. Evidently, from initially catering only to the most needy who cannot work, Singapore's welfare system now includes a range of support programmes for low-earning individuals and households.

The persistence of poverty is unsurprising given global economic trends of technological-biased development and globalization that have combined to compress the wages of lower-skilled workers. As a small, globalized economy with a lean welfare system, the issue of low wages is especially challenging. In earlier papers, I have estimated that Singapore's incidence of poverty and low wages are relatively high compared with OECD economies. Given the trends, made worse by COVID-19, support for low-income households will need to expand on account of income poverty alone.

However, the support will be inadequate to lift Singaporean households out of poverty if we do not also take into account three forms of non-income poverty, which this chapter will discuss. First, digital resources have become necessities in today's world of technology; thus, tackling digital poverty needs to become a priority. I will argue the case for universal digital access. Second, I will discuss attention poverty, which my colleagues and I have found is more adversely experienced by people in financial need and parents of young children.

The year 2022, dominated by intensifying fears of a global recession and armed conflict between major powers, was difficult enough for a healthy government to navigate, but the governing Thai coalition was nowhere near healthy. Generalturned– prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, who was initially greeted with a wave of enthusiasm after staging a bloodless coup in 2014 and was re-elected after the 2019 general election, had become immensely unpopular for a combination of reasons: his snappish public persona, his failures to implement meaningful reforms and bridge the political divide, his weak economic performance, and his favouritism of powerful family conglomerates. With the end of the four-year parliamentary term drawing near, infighting within the crowded eighteen-party coalition that Prayut led and inside the military grew more palpable. These developments, coupled with the controversy around Prayut's tenure, fuelled never-ending talk about a House dissolution, a snap election, and even a counter-coup.

In late August, Thailand's Constitutional Court suspended Prayut from office after opposition lawmakers filed a petition asking whether Prayut, who ascended to the premiership in 2014, had violated the eight-year constitutional term limit. The suspension only lasted five weeks. Prayut returned to take the helm in early October on the grounds that the eight-year term limit dictated by the current constitution came into force only in 2017, meaning that the countdown clock must start ticking from that point onwards. The final green light from the Constitutional Court, ruling in favour of the regime and granting Prayut roughly two more years of eligibility for the premiership, was more or less predictable. What was uncertain, however, was the extent of public opposition. Polls indicated that much of the Thai public wanted Prayut out right away, and this popular frustration threatened to spill over because of the court's seemingly biased ruling and the waves of anti-government protest in other countries.

The rocky governing coalition eventually managed to survive and host this year's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leader's Meeting in Bangkok on 18 and 19 November without popular domestic resistance.

The year 2022 marked the second year of Indonesia's economic recovery after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from the economic, health and social scourges of the pandemic, Indonesia also felt the effects of the war in Ukraine. As has been the case for many other countries, rising fuel and food prices brought into sharp focus the need to prioritize food security through both domestic measures and international diplomacy. Indeed, 2022 was the year for Indonesia, and President Joko Widodo (also known as Jokowi), to make its mark on the international stage with the hosting of the Group of Twenty (G20), where it could raise the issues of food security, environmental protection and economic growth. With the controversial passing of the new criminal code, however, Indonesia's successes will be tempered by questions about the quality of its democratic institutions as it moves into a heated campaigning season ahead of the 2024 elections.

Election Ferment and Jokowi's Legacy

Election ferment for the 2024 polls was on the rise in 2022. Several prominent figures indicated their interest in running in the presidential race, with some already securing major party endorsements. These include Jokowi's former rival and current defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the recent governor of Jakarta Anies Baswedan, and Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo. Popular vicepresidential candidates include minister of tourism and creative economy Sandiaga Uno, minister of state-owned enterprises (SOE) Erick Thohir, West Java governor Ridwan Kamil, Democrat Party chairman Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono (the eldest son of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono), and Speaker of the House of Representatives Puan Maharani (the daughter of Megawati Sukarnoputri, another former president and the current chair of the Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle [PDI-P]).

For the most part, Indonesian politics in 2022 was marked by expediency and flexibility over strict loyalties. With the popularity of Jokowi and of other political figures who have made their mark as capable technocratic managers, solid track records are likely to appeal to Indonesian voters. Jokowi's party, the PDI-P, was the only party in the 2019 elections that won the required twenty per cent of legislative seats to be allowed to unilaterally nominate a presidential ticket in 2024.

Any discussion on political Islam in Malaysia will necessarily centre around the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS). This is largely because of its Islamist and revivalist goals, which aim to incorporate Islam into every aspect of life, including politics, law and governance. In the 1980s and 1990s, PAS and its arch-rival, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), engaged in a fierce battle to out-Islamize one another. This also resulted in the party leaders labelling each other deviant (kafir-mengkafir). Today, the competition to out-Islamize one another seems to have waned, with both parties having recently entered into an alliance called Muafakat Nasional (MN). In the 1970s, both UMNO and PAS were part of the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition when the parties were united by the aim of national reconciliation. However, their partnership in MN was based on Malay- Muslim unity. Founded in September 2019, the MN lasted less than three years as the two parties contested against one another in the 15th General Election (GE15) held in November 2022. In this most recent election, PAS contested under the Perikatan Nasional (PN) banner and won the highest number of seats in its history, outnumbering even UMNO.

PAS has historically championed political Islam and the promotion of an Islamic state. In 1993, the party wanted to introduce the Syariah Criminal Code Bill II in Kelantan, and in 2002 the Syariah Criminal Offences (Hudud and Qisas) in Terengganu. In 2003, they published the Islamic State Document, which detailed the party's idea of an Islamic state governed by hudud laws. The president of the party, Abdul Hadi Awang, continues to advocate for an Islamic state in Malaysia, although the form may not be the same as what PAS proposed two decades ago.

However, recent developments in the Malay(sian) political scene suggest that PAS is no longer the only party championing political Islam; UMNO appears to be just as big a player as PAS. As long-standing historical rivals, UMNO has traditionally been viewed as the party that champions the protection of Malay supremacy and nationalism, while PAS has almost consistently advocated Islamism and conservative Islam.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • In Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, democratic regression and the reconsolidation of authoritarian regimes have triggered the rise of social media-driven protest movements. These are pioneered by a new generation of activist youth, distinguishing themselves from previous student and youth movements by the digitally mediated, decentralized and diverse nature of their protest.

• • While experimenting with digitally mediated repertoires of action adopted and adapted from similar struggles elsewhere, these protesters forge transnational links that give rise to new protest assemblages across and beyond the region. This is exemplified by the social media-based #MilkTeaAlliance, in which the distinct protests in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and other countries are conjoined through extended solidarity and affinity ties in a common “generational” struggle against entrenched authoritarianism. The youth resistance in Hong Kong was instrumental in driving this trend.

• • Like a “rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), these movements are characterized by connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity and “unbreakable” expansion. This allows for a fluid participation of various activist and non-activist groups (such as K-poppers) and the inclusion of various issues and demands in the protest, which merge into the cause of fighting systemic injustice. It also heightens the movements’ viability and resilience to repression.

• • However, besides physical repression, protesters in all three countries face the added challenge of new modes of cyber-repression. The combined effect of repressive cyber laws, intrusive

• cyber surveillance and aggressive cyber troops took its toll on the protest movements’ capacities for online agitation and mobilization, thus contributing to the movements’ silencing and suppression. Yet, the resistance did not die out, as activists dodge cyber-repression and make creative uses of digital media and technologies to cultivate their resistance online, at the grassroots level, or in the cultural sphere.

• • Meanwhile, as long as authorities remain repressive and tone-deaf to this generation's criticism and concerns, the gulf between them looks set to widen. The longer-term implication is that this generation will remain alienated and continue to express their struggle in novel and unpredictable ways.

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.

INTRODUCTION

In various Southeast Asian countries, already weak democracies are being eroded by processes of democratic regression and reconsolidation of dynastic, autocratic and authoritarian regimes.2\ At the same time, these countries have seen the rise of new protest movements, pioneered by a new generation of activist youth. Youth fuelled spectacular mass protests in Indonesia (2019–20), Thailand (2020–21) and Myanmar (2021–22), mounting a daring resistance to the erosion of democracy. In doing so, they experimented with new instruments and repertoires of action, characterized by creative uses of digital media and technologies. The digitally mediated nature of their protest allowed them to forge new links across national and sectoral borders. This has given rise to new assemblages of protest that extend across and beyond the region, bound together by shared imaginations of generational struggle.

Organizationally, ideologically, and in strategy and style, these protest movements and their participants differ from the student and youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were driven by centralized, hierarchical organizations and mono-directional targets oriented towards

the nation-state. Southeast Asia has a long history of student movements that pioneered key political events—from anti-colonial struggles in the early twentieth century, to regime overthrows in Indonesia in 1966 and 1998, in Thailand in 1973, and the People Power Uprising in Burma (Myanmar) in 1988. In the 1960s and 1970s, students also played a leading role in democracy and social justice movements in the region. Despite this legacy, the role of student movements has since declined, mainly due to their suppression, pacification and de-legitimation in the context of state consolidation. The decline was also due to their burden of “rootedness” in national histories and political cultures, which limited them to fixed repertoires of student protest. Those fixed roles and repertoires no longer appeal to younger generations known vernacularly as the “Millennial Generation” (roughly, born in the 1980s and 1990s) and “Gen Z” (born in the 2000s), whose political identifications have greatly diversified. So have their own modes of protest.

Rather than sprouting from the single “root” of national histories of student activism, today's youth movements form a heterogeneous assemblage with multiple origins and nodes that expand in multiple directions, much like the digital communication flows that shape their protest.

Malaysia and Indonesia have a rather skewed agricultural sector, as the national agriculture policy is shaped by export competitiveness with a specialized product: palm oil. This is especially applicable to Borneo as a major producing region; it produces more oils and fats than carbohydrates based on the current levels of consumption. In the past few decades, the model (export CPO and import cereals and other foods) worked reasonably well for both countries until the sharp decline in 2008–9 (see Figure 7.1). Another period of decline in 2015–18 clearly shows that such a model was no guarantee of food security in economic terms. The situation is severe in Indonesian Borneo, where per capita cereal supply has declined significantly throughout the major oil palm-producing sites in remote districts (MoA Indonesia 2018). This is reflected in the high prevalence of stunting (30–40 per cent) in many districts. While there are no comparable statistics in Malaysian Borneo, a similar trend of stunting (43 per cent) was found among the Penan groups in Belaga, Sarawak (Bong, Norimah A. Karim, and Noor 2018).

In this context, the concept of self-sufficiency has been frequently mentioned in land-use-related discussions with conservation also considered a core element. It is an alternative to the productivity-oriented mentality that essentializes development into economic outputs, especially in rural areas in the context of transforming land-based economies into eco-economies. It prioritizes food-fibre-fuel security and other provisioning services by creating a diversified agroecological and socio-economic landscape, which can sometimes be termed “neo-productivism” (Almstedt et al. 2014). Furthermore, it also advocates for the appreciation of the “traditional” way of living, in the hope of maintaining or regaining health and spiritual benefits through forging a healthy human-environmental relationship as in the past (Dounias and Froment 2011; Abram, Meijaard, et al. 2014; How and Othman 2017). This is not unusual in the developing world, where farming, hunting, and gathering are treated as integral parts of social life and not only for economic productivity (Hisano, Akitsu, and McGreevy 2018). Additionally, some have suggested that the preservation of indigenous agro-ecological and socio-cultural settings can enhance conservation efforts (Altieri 2004; Yuliani, Adnan, et al. 2018).

This book has so far described various ways or lines of inquiry to improve productivity and support conservation in Chapters 3 to 12, attempting to answer the three subquestions set in “Scope and Structure” in Chapter 1. Importantly, the chapters also invoked concerns about the immense challenges that come with these strategies, with monitoring and communication as the most prominent ones. This chapter suggests that the digital revolution, also called Industrial Revolution 4.0, may provide new solutions to overcome these challenges, and at the same time bring new options to the table for development planning. While there are studies that touched on the different aspects of the application of digital technologies in Borneo, an overview of the opportunities and impacts brought by the digital transformation of land-based economies of the island remains largely missing. How will the developing, land-relying populations in Borneo fare in their experiences with the digital revolution will be an important question for researchers in the coming years.

This chapter first illustrates the recent trends of digitalization in Borneo. This is followed by an overview of technological vectors in the context of land-based economies. With this basis, the chapter continues to explore how the digital revolution can be practically operationalized in Borneo, using the framework of ten strategies described in previous chapters, populating with cases found across the island or elsewhere but applicable to Borneo collected from literature, through personal communications, and from field observations.

RECENT TRENDS IN BORNEO

The digital revolution has become a major policy focus in Malaysia and Indonesia to ensure the nations survive and evolve in the face of disruptive changes in the global economy. Digital and smart technologies are perceived as key modular building blocks for sustainable development in the next few decades (Sachs et al. 2019). Transformative efforts and initiatives have been made primarily for urban areas, especially on integrating infrastructure and various services via digital platforms, with labels like “smart cities” or “digital cities”; see, e.g., Yau et al. (2016), Jurriëns and Tapsell (2017), and Beschorner et al. (2019).