Southeast Asia Archive

Since an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in July that China’s claims to the South China Sea had no legal basis and thus violated the Philippines’ maritime rights, claimants to the waters have focused on lowering the temperature on the ongoing disputes. Though this is a welcome respite from years of tensions and has yielded some progress, formidable challenges remain in translating these gains into sustainable solutions for the complex disagreements between China and five other claimant countries—Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Before the tribunal’s verdict, many observers had worried that a lopsided legal outcome for either […]

Over the past month, the situation in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, which has been extremely volatile since an eruption of violence in the early 2010s, has deteriorated once again. Following an attack on police outposts near the border with Bangladesh in early October, which killed at least nine policemen, Rakhine has been on edge. Some human rights groups have reported that the security forces and police, as well as individuals, are striking back at the state’s ethnic Rohingya, since militant Rohingya Muslims were believed to be behind the killings of the police. Although the security forces, which are dominated by […]

Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election victory was a result, in part, of his success tapping into growing populist sentiment across much of the United States. That follows a global trend that has seen populist leaders come to power in Latin America, Europe and Asia. For all the attention on populism, though, what is it? Jan-Werner Müller explained it this way in a December 2014 article for WPR on the threat populism poses to liberal democracy: Contrary to conventional wisdom, populism is not simply a matter of irresponsible policies or appeals to the downtrodden. Populism is an anti-elitist but, crucially, also […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on a range of countries’ space priorities and programs. Last week, two bills were introduced in the Philippine Senate and House of Representatives that would establish a space development program and a Philippine Space Agency. The legislation has been well received, but it is unknown when lawmakers will vote on the bills. In an email interview, Rogel Mari Sese, a program leader at the National SPACE Development Program, the government agency working to establish a space agency, discusses the Philippines’ space program. WPR: What are the Philippines’ space capabilities, […]

Last week, Rodrigo Duterte, the combative and mercurial new president of the Philippines, made high-profile visits to China and Japan, which have the two largest economies in Asia. In Beijing, Duterte offered alarming comments about his desire to “separate” from the United States, the Philippines’ sole military ally and security guarantor. In his typical off-the-cuff manner, he publicly mused that it would be preferable to join in some trilateral relationship with China and Russia, rather than focus on Manila’s relationship with Washington. China, looking to seize on Duterte’s vitriol against the U.S., offered him a massive suite of soft loans, […]