This book brings together extensive recent innovative research on the study of men and masculinities in Southeast Asia. Drawing on rich ethnographic fieldwork from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, the book examines both dominant and marginal constructions of heterosexual masculinity and the ways in which these are performed in different localized contexts in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. Through the presentation of detailed ethnographic studies on topics ranging from the professional practices of Filipino merchant seafarers to the sex l.
AbstractDigital information and communications technologies like social media are critical for trade union renewal. Yet, although many unions now use social media, there remain ongoing debates as to what effective digital activism looks like. This question is even more pressing for the Global Unions, as international labour movement organizations without grassroots members. Drawing on social movement and networked communication theories, this article interrogates Global Unions' social media practices through a mixed‐method analysis of 19,009 Facebook posts created between 2017 and 2022. Based on this analysis, we find that Global Unions that adopt crowd‐focused communication styles and post on broader social issues have more success in engaging with online crowds than those that emphasize workplace or organizational issues and adopt top‐down communication styles. At the same time, our findings challenge assumptions in the literature that crowd‐led, connective communication styles associated with engagement are necessarily the most effective in today's digital society.
Scholars of internet activism have comprehensively analyzed techniques for ensuring the success of online campaigns, but few have examined whether and how campaigns built around culturally specific tropes drawn from non-Western contexts can achieve traction with global audiences. This article addresses this question by tracking the use of a hyperlocal cultural trope relating to the impact of women's sarongs (htamein) on men's power in an awareness-raising campaign sparked by a violent crackdown against tens of thousands of protesters in Myanmar. We draw on in-depth interviews with the campaign's originators and a content analysis of its online component to document how this trope transformed through three iterations over several years. In doing so, we examine the impact of processes of appropriative mediation and digital reflexivity, and the extent to which available technology shapes online campaigns.
Purpose Debates over the definition, processes and outcomes of minimum and "living" wages are heated and often politically contentious in garment-producing countries. Internationally, there have been various initiatives to promote and support the implementation of a living wage for workers in labour-intensive manufacturing, ranging from corporate-driven social responsibility and multi-stakeholder initiatives to the long-standing living wage campaign of the global unions. One prominent regional initiative is the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA). The purpose of this paper is to assess its reach and effect in Southeast Asia.
Design/methodology/approach A living wage campaign is assessed with reference to Indonesia and Cambodia, two important garment manufacturing countries in Southeast Asia. The paper draws on data collected in interviews with garment manufacturers, brand representatives, trade unionists and labour NGO activists, including members of the AFWA Steering Committee in Indonesia and Cambodia, complemented by a systematic review of documents and reports produced by the AFWA.
Findings As the paper shows, despite a series of initiatives, the Asia Floor Wage has failed to gain traction in Cambodia or Indonesia. This is so, the paper argues, because national economic, political and institutional contexts are the primary drivers of the strategies and priorities of constituent organisations, governments and industry stakeholders. In the absence of robust local and regional coalitions of trade unions, efforts towards a common and coordinated regional approach to living wages are thus unlikely to gain traction.
Originality/value To a large extent, the literature on the concepts and practices associated with the living wage has focussed on developed rather than developing countries. This paper extends the literature by providing a systematic examination of a transnational wage campaign in developing Asian countries.
Since the signing of the United Nations Convention against Trans-national Organized Crime, the Straits of Malacca have been identified as a "hot spot" for whole range of maritime security threats, including human trafficking and people smuggling. As a consequence, Indonesia's national and local authorities have been under immense pressure from the international community to develop and implement programmes that address these concerns. Multilateral agencies and other donor organizations have also pumped millions of dollars into counter-trafficking and anti-smuggling programmes in the Riau Islands. Much of the groundwork for both government and international initiatives is done by NGOs, most of which work to identify and assist repatriated migrant workers or victims of trafficking. In one case, however, a Batam-based NGO has gone far beyond this well-trodden [End Page 215] path, developing a system to apprehend undocumented labour migrants who use the services of people smugglers to return to Indonesia without passing through immigration. This article examines the case of Gerakan Anti-Trafficking (Anti-Trafficking Movement, GAT) and its implications for our understanding of emerging modes of non-state involvement in border regulation. (GIGA/Contemp Southeast Asia)
Abstract In this article we examine the extent to which mediated diffusion through trade union development aid succeeded in helping to establish a labour movement in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami. The international labour movement organisations involved in the post-tsunami reconstruction effort in Aceh focused their efforts primarily on humanitarian aid, physical infrastructure and vocational education. However, they also supported trade union-building programs, which succeeded in strengthening individual trade unions and instilling a sense of shared identity amongst Acehnese labour activists but ultimately failed to ensure the sustainability of the movement. We argue that while the Aceh case highlights the importance of local context to the outcomes of such interventions, the constraints imposed on international labour donors and their local counterparts by their focus on reconstruction and the time pressures of the post-tsunami aid cycle raise questions about the efficacy of the aid model as a means of promoting the growth of a social movement.
This chapter calls into question ideas about the existence of a transnational Malay-Muslim identity by examining the ways in which Malay men understand and perform their masculinity vis-a-vis men in the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia. It starts from the premise that issues of ethnic (and religious) 'loyalty' are questions that rest on primordial notions of 'self and 'other' attributed to ethnicity and religion. We argue that, in the context of Singapore, concepts of ethnic and national identity are shaped by two significant forces: the presence of the Chinese majority population, and the PAP's stance on Singapore's location in a Malay/Muslim archipelago (Brown 1994; Hill and Lian 1995). The Chinese majority population and the Chinese dominated parliament and bureaucracy play a critical role in shaping Malay identity not through a process of hybridisation that arises through direct contact and interaction, but through a state-led policy of comparison that requires the Malay community to constantly position itself in relation to the majority (Li 1989: 136). At the same time, given the heterogeneity of the Malay community (a fact eluded to in public statements about 'Malay loyalty'), any investigation into the meaning of a shared Malay identity also needs to consider to what extent 'Malayness' is constituted as 'a Singaporean experience, and to what extent this experience has itself been conditioned by geographical proximity to Malaysia and cultural affinities with other related communities in Malaysia, the Riau archipelago, and Indonesia' (Lian and Rajah 2002: 232). By examining how Singaporean Malay men negotiate and construct their identities, this paper both problematises the notion of a homogenous Malay identity in Singapore and seeks to subvert commonly held understandings about the presence of a transnational Malay masculinity in the region.
