Protest Waves and Mass Violence in Southeast Asia in Long Durée

Chungse Jung, Davidson College

This study explores the trajectory of protest waves and mass violence in Southeast Asia in the long twentieth century. Political and social mobilization for democracy has swept the region of Southeast Asia since 2019. Myanmar and Thailand have particularly experienced one of the most revolutionary moments in their history of democracy. As of now, we have almost enough hindsight to compare this regional protest wave to revolutionary moments from the 1980s, the 1960s, and even earlier decades. To this end, this study uses the dataset of protest events spanning five countries (Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) in Southeast Asia from The New York Times between 1870 and 2016. As mapping out about 1,800 popular protests across the countries in Southeast Asia, the most striking feature of the protest waves in Southeast Asia for the long twentieth century is the revealing of four greater temporal clusters of popular protests: the 1930s, the long 1950/60s, the 1980s, and the late 1990s. The empirical finding shows the profound impact of world-historical decolonization, national liberation movements, and democratization has led to temporal and spatial diffusion of struggles against exclusion across a large set of countries in Southeast Asia. In sum, examining the protest events, protest cycles, and protest waves in Southeast Asia over the long twentieth century from a world-historical perspective offers a path to understanding the continuation of current political and social mobilization in the region and how periods of struggles may be just the one wave in a larger sea of long-term resistance.

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 Presented in Session 160. The Politics of Protest and Resistance