Political Violence in Southeast Asia: Origins and Consequences in Daily Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

An important and contested lineage of scholarship credits violence for making states and buttressing capacity in Southeast Asia and beyond. But how violence is perceived, internalized and perpetuated in Southeast Asians’ daily politics remains understudied. This panel attempts to fill this void. Spanning a range of countries and methods, this panel’s papers interrogate the origins and consequences of violence in the region’s day-to-day politics. Its scholars apply regional expertise and unique insights from Southeast Asia to uncover the lived underpinnings of how politics shapes violence, and violence shapes politics.

The panel’s first two papers examine the consequences of past violence on current political attitudes. In “The Concentration of Silence: Historical Memory of War in Rural Cambodia”, Erin Lin exhibits how historical memory is transmitted in post-genocide Cambodia in communities where perpetrators and victims of genocidal violence live next to each other. Lin blends immersive ethnographic reporting with in-depth interviews to expose survivors’ opaque, mercurial and morally expansive perception of the conflict and its foreign participants.

In “The Commander’s Daughter: Military Ties and Support for Female Leadership in Mindanao”, Steve Monroe and Risa Toha investigate whether and how familial ties to past conflict shape current attitudes towards female candidates. Family ties to male incumbents have been a powerful lever for female politicians’ electoral success in the Philippines and beyond. A theorized driver of this success is that female candidates can tap into their relative incumbent’s party apparatus to deliver patronage. It’s unclear whether familial ties to political leaders who are divorced from party structures, like military commanders, can brighten female candidates’ appeal to voters. Monroe and Toha answer this question through a priming experiment of over 1,200 Mindanaoan survey respondents.

Greg Amusu also studies the impact of conflict on support towards historically under-represented identity groups. In “Accommodation or Incorporation? Why the Khmu and Tai are State Allies in Laos and State Adversaries in Vietnam", Greg Amusu illustrates how the fight for independence catalyzed diverging patterns of ethnic minority integration on the border between Laos and Vietnam. In Laos, the ruling party coopted ethnic minorities during the conflict via party integration. Party inclusion subsequently facilitated public goods provision to minority strongholds after the conflict. In Vietnam, however, accommodation took the form of territorial autonomy, to the detriment of minority groups’ access to public goods post-conflict. Amusu pairs rich historical analysis with a natural experiment that compares minority groups’ public goods provision across the Loas-Vietnam border to demonstrate these outcomes.

The panel’s last two papers unpack the factors that drive citizens’ support for political violence. In “The Attitudinal Foundations of Extremism”, Matthew Nanes uncovers the determinants of support for violent extremism. Employing a survey of 1,600 in Mindanao, Nanes adjudicates between competing theories on the causes of support for violent extremism. He finds a strong association between economic deprivation and support for exclusionary and violent statements. Migration may also impact support for violent extremism. While prospective emigrants express attitudes that are significantly more exclusionary and patriarchal, returned migrants are significantly less supportive of these views. Migration may therefore moderate extremist and anti-democratic.

Lastly, Aries Aruguay, Dimitar Gueorguieve and Aim Sinpeng unearth the roots of electoral support for candidates with violent campaign agendas. In “Tic-Tok-Ticket: Philippine Electoral Alliances in the Digital Era” they exploit pre-election surveys alongside social-media data to understand the vote base and campaign strategies behind one of the most successful tickets in Filipino electoral history: the Marcos-Duterte ticket. Their analysis indicates the alliance was a marriage of political convenience and power asymmetry brokered by a positive-messaging campaign of national unity. Looking forward, however, the auspicious alliance also indicates potential fissures in a digital voter base that is highly connected, poorly informed, and easily polarized along both domestic and international dimensions. In addition to probing electoral support for law-and-order candidates, their research contributes to the study of comparative electoral coalitions and democracy in the digital age.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• The Attitudinal Foundations of Extremism: Evidence from Mindanao, Philippines - Matthew Nanes, Saint Louis University

• The Commander’s Daughter: Support for Female Leadership in Mindanao - Steve Monroe, Yale-NUS College; Risa Toha, Wake Forest University

• The Concentration of Silence: Historical Memory of War in Rural Cambodia - Erin Lin, Ohio State University

• Tic-Tok-Ticket: Philippine Electoral Alliances in the Digital Era - Aries Arugay, University of the Philippines-Diliman; Dimitar D Gueorguiev, Syracuse University; Aim Sinpeng, University of Sydney

Chair

• Risa Toha Wake Forest University

Discussants

• Lucille E Right Duke University

• Sol Iglesias University of the Philippines