“I Don’t Want to Limit Myself to Binary Thinking”: an Interview With the Indonesian Artist Arahmaiani

Arahmaiani is one of the best known contemporary Indonesian women artists. Her works, performances, and installations have been exhibited at 7 biennials and in a total of 29 countries. She has taught at universities in Australia, China, Indonesia, Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands. Arahmaiani is a politically committed artist. In her works, she addresses the reduction of human beings to consumers, which is on the rise all over the globe, as well as the discrimination against people on the grounds of gender, religion, and ethnicity. While the phenomena addressed in her art are always of a global nature, the majority of her works deal with cultural, social, and political realities of Indonesia. She views these as being threatened by an increasing politicization and essentialization of Islam, whose protagonists supplant the country’s diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage with a purely Islamic interpretation of the Indonesian past. In this interview, conducted by Gunnar Stange in December 2016, Arahmaiani elaborates on the main themes she addresses in her art works as well as on current political, social, and environmental challenges in Indonesia

Durable Violence in Southeast Asia: Machinery and Scale

Rampant forms of violence increasingly take place not only in troubled areas but also in centers and metropoles. Such violence is no longer simply confined to local concerns or historical ruptures, but emerges instead in relation to modalities of power. The movement of people and expanding networks of actors and capital enables the notion of violence to transgress boundaries set by institutions, geography, state, and power. In some conditions, rather than sealing off the emergence of violence, the transition to democracy has opened the door for engineered violent confrontations to manifest out of cleavages that have been tempered by previous authoritarian rule. ASEAS 12(2) addresses violence in selected cases and on different scales. The contributions discuss how violence is practiced, how it (re)produces structures, and how it may eventually transform into non-violence. Violence is not simply an outcome of tensions but is a mechanism that actors and organizations deploy to stabilize their struggles, which eventually makes peacebuilding or democratic projects volatile. The articles in this issue feature police violence in the Philippines; intimate partner violence against women in Vietnam; Islamist online/offline mobilization strategies in Indonesia; the role of traditional actors in reconciliation processes in Timor-Leste; and gender security in the context of conflict management in Thailand’s Deep South

Durable Violence in Southeast Asia: Machinery and Scale

Rampant forms of violence increasingly take place not only in troubled areas but also in centers and metropoles. Such violence is no longer simply confined to local concerns or historical ruptures, but emerges instead in relation to modalities of power. The movement of people and expanding networks of actors and capital enables the notion of violence to transgress boundaries set by institutions, geography, state, and power. In some conditions, rather than sealing off the emergence of violence, the transition to democracy has opened the door for engineered violent confrontations to manifest out of cleavages that have been tempered by previous authoritarian rule. ASEAS 12(2) addresses violence in selected cases and on different scales. The contributions discuss how violence is practiced, how it (re)produces structures, and how it may eventually transform into non-violence. Violence is not simply an outcome of tensions but is a mechanism that actors and organizations deploy to stabilize their struggles, which eventually makes peacebuilding or democratic projects volatile. The articles in this issue feature police violence in the Philippines; intimate partner violence against women in Vietnam; Islamist online/offline mobilization strategies in Indonesia; the role of traditional actors in reconciliation processes in Timor-Leste; and gender security in the context of conflict management in Thailand’s Deep South

Forced Migration in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian countries host significant numbers of forcibly displaced populations, both within countries and across borders. This brief review paper provides a basic overview on recent forced migration research in Southeast Asia for the period 2013 to 2018. To this end, a keyword search with two predefined sets of search terms was carried out in the Web of Science database in September 2018. The identified research literature corpus was then analyzed regarding persons of concern, study site(s) (country/ies) as well as main drivers of migration. The results show that the major part of studies focuses on refugees and asylum seekers in the region’s main host countries, namely Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This correspondence between current research trends and the distribution of refugees and asylum seekers in Southeast Asia could, however, not be identified for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Although Southeast Asian countries account for a substantial share of worldwide IDPs, only a very limited number of identified studies focus on this group of persons of concern

Impeded Migration as Adaptation: COVID-19 and Its Implications for Translocal Strategies of Environmental Risk Management

In the debates over environmental impacts on migration, migration as adaptation has been acknowledged as a potential risk management strategy based on risk spreading and mutual insurance of people living spatially apart: migrants and family members that are left behind stay connected through a combination of financial and social remittances, joint decision-making and mutual commitment. Conceptualizing migration as adaptation through the lens of translocal livelihood systems enables us to identify the differentiated vulnerabilities of households and communities. COVID-19 and the restrictions on public life and mobility imposed by governments worldwide constituted a complex set of challenges for translocal systems and strategies, especially in the Global South. Focusing on examples, we highlight two points: first, the COVID-19 crisis shows the limits of migration and translocal livelihoods for coping with, and adapting to, climate and environmental risks. Second, as these restrictions hit on a systemic level and affect places of destination as well as origin, the crisis reveals specific vulnerabilities of the translocal livelihood systems themselves. Based on the translocal livelihoods approach, we formulate insights and recommendations for policies that move beyond the narrow, short-term focus on the support of migrant populations alone and address the longer-term root causes of the vulnerabilities in translocal livelihoods systems

“I Don’t Want to Limit Myself to Binary Thinking”: An Interview With the Indonesian Artist Arahmaiani

Arahmaiani is one of the best known contemporary Indonesian women artists. Her works, performances, and installations have been exhibited at 7 biennials and in a total of 29 countries. She has taught at universities in Australia, China, Indonesia, Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands. Arahmaiani is a politically committed artist. In her works, she addresses the reduction of human beings to consumers, which is on the rise all over the globe, as well as the discrimination against people on the grounds of gender, religion, and ethnicity. While the phenomena addressed in her art are always of a global nature, the majority of her works deal with cultural, social, and political realities of Indonesia. She views these as being threatened by an increasing politicization and essentialization of Islam, whose protagonists supplant the country’s diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious heritage with a purely Islamic interpretation of the Indonesian past. In this interview, conducted by Gunnar Stange in December 2016, Arahmaiani elaborates on the main themes she addresses in her art works as well as on current political, social, and environmental challenges in Indonesia

“From Frustration to Escalation in Marawi”: An Interview on Conflict Transformation in Southeast Asia With the Indonesian Peace and Conflict Advisor Shadia Marhaban

Shadia Marhaban has been actively involved in international peace mediation, capacity building, and human rights activism for more than 20 years. She is from Aceh, Indonesia, where she joined the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in the early 2000s. She was an advisory member of GAM’s peace negotiating team during the 2005 Helsinki talks that brought an end to nearly 30 years of armed conflict. After her return to Aceh, she became a founding member of the Aceh Women’s League (LINA). The NGO was involved in reintegration programs for female ex-combatants and provided democracy education trainings. In recent years, her work has focused on facilitating dialog between conflicting parties in many regions of Southeast Asia affected by armed conflict. In her work, she is mainly engaged with resistance and liberation movements and their political transition. She believes that considering the dimensions of identity, religion, and culture is key to successful war-to-peace transitions and the achievement of sustainable modes of conflict resolution. With a background in political science and international relations, she is a fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, of Harvard University and has been teaching classes on mediation and conflict transformation at universities in Austria, Indonesia, and the US. In this interview, conducted by Gunnar Stange in Vienna in June2018, Shadia Marhaban speaks about her peace-building work all over Southeast Asia and her experiences in violence prevention in the city of Marawi, Mindanao, Philippines