ABSTRACT

From Bersih rallies in Kuala Lumpur to oppositional protests in Phnom Penh, in the 2010s we have witnessed numerous protests and mass movements take place in Southeast Asia. While their causes and motivations varied, all incorporated the uses of mobile social media. Prior to the era of social media, the internet was already incorporated in various major political events in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as in the “People Power” protests in the Philippines, Reformasi in Indonesia and Malaysia, and Burma’s “Saffron Revolution”. Urbanized parts of Southeast Asia have been places with the most vibrant digital activism for the past two decades. However, “despite this impressive record, Southeast Asia has been marginalized from ‘global’ accounts” of the role of digital media and protest movements (Postill 2014: 78) that have predominantly emerged in the European and American context, with the exception of the Middle East which gained a temporal prominence immediately after the “Arab Spring”. Kluver and Banerjee (2005) pointed out that there has been very little internet research on the widely varying political systems and philosophical foundations of societies outside Europe and North America. This statement still rings true today.