Rights mobilization: A view from Southeast Asia

This chapter offers a view on authoritarianism and rights mobilization from Southeast Asia. I demonstrate plural orders of power and identify a rights repertoire far more diverse than the commonly studied protests, lobbying and litigation. Southeast Asia reflects the empirical realities of other places, where authoritarianism radiates from the state and from family, religion and other non-state sites of power. Paying close attention to multiple sites of authoritarianism illuminates how rights are central (or not) to how individuals handle their troubles. By using Southeast Asian experiences to show that mobilizers deploy rights quietly, off stage, as well as on the streets and in the courtroom, I illustrate a broad range of rights practices that sit on three intersecting axes-uncoordinated to coordinated, covert to overt and formal to non-formal. The experiences of Southeast Asians enhance law and society’s study of rights and demonstrates how rights mobilization from below-from a Global South region and from the ground-produces more astute assessments of the potential of rights and the consequences of putting them into action.