ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical reflection on globalization and international development agendas that affect children and youth in Southeast Asia. Although most Southeast Asian nations have had sustained economic growth and some success in reducing relative and absolute poverty, accelerated globalization has exacerbated income inequality, and the ranks of the urban poor have been swelling rapidly (Murray and Overton 2014; OECD 2015; Asia Foundation 2016; Indonesia Investment 2014). A clear manifestation of growing inequality in the region is the increased marginalization of less powerful members of society – including children and youth. Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of poverty, especially if they are: a member of a minority ethnic group, living in rural or remote areas, or among the urban poor. This chapter highlights key development indicators of child well-being in Southeast Asia, and then focuses on how poor children in the region are typically socially constructed as victims within development discourse, and how programs that have been designed to protect and ‘save’ them are often based on preconceived, patronizing Western ideas that reinscribe their victimhood. The chapter then explores the lives and aspirations of marginalized children, including street children in Indonesia and Cambodia, children in post-tsunami Aceh, and forced migrant children from Myanmar who are growing up on the borders in Thailand, China and Malaysia. Many of the children in these populations are also stateless (Ball et al. 2014).
