Civil society's inconsistent liberalism in Southeast Asia: exercising accountability along differing diagonals

Abstract

Predating but intensifying with the public health and economic crises COVID-19 sparked has been a political one, of democratic decline or autocratic consolidation, across much of Southeast Asia. Concerned actors and organisations from civil society have acted as firewalls against democratic decline or autocratisation, even as fellow civil society organisations (CSOs) have exerted countervailing, anti-democratic pressure. Indeed, CSOs may be no more progressive than the state, nor fully autonomous from it, and may be debilitatingly fragmented or polarised. And yet across the region, CSOs still disrupt regimes' would-be panoptic scrutiny and authority, by presenting alternative spaces and premises for mobilisation and voice, through a range of modalities. Regardless of their ideological stance, CSOs' political engagement represents the promise or exercise of diagonal accountability. This check interacts with vertical and horizontal dimensions and retains the potential for meaningful intervention - but need not pull in a liberal direction.