Southeast Asia Archive

A civilian population comes under brutal attack by a heavily armed military force. What is the world to do? Amid Russia’s ongoing onslaught against Ukraine, this question has dominated the agendas of policymakers, monopolized headlines and taken over discussions on social media. But when Myanmar’s military, a perennial human rights violator, unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against the country’s Rohingya minority in 2016, the crisis was a secondary matter for most of the world. Now, six years later—and one year after Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, overthrew the country’s incipient democracy—the United States has finally formally designated that 2016-2017 campaign […]

Although widely overlooked outside the country, Malaysia recently experienced what is arguably the biggest shake-up to its electoral politics since the country’s independence from Britain in 1957, thanks to a law passed in 2019 that took effect on Dec. 15. The legislation, which lowers the voting age from 21 to 18, will see 5.8 million new voters added to the electorate ahead of the next general election in 2023. Perhaps even more importantly, it represents a rare and encouraging victory on the part of Malaysian progressives, who have had very few wins to celebrate in recent years. The campaign to lower […]

When United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed the Security Council in October, he urged it to act against the “epidemic of coup d’etats” plaguing the international community. Guterres’ warning came in the aftermath of a successful coup in Sudan—the fifth in the world that year. Though it’s just started, 2022 has brought even more coup attempts, including a successful one in Burkina Faso on Jan. 23 and a failed one in Guinea-Bissau in early February. In total, there have been nine military coup attempts since January 2021, of which six—in Myanmar, Sudan, Chad, Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso—were successful. This recent spree has led some to suggest that, despite waning in the post-Cold War era, […]