The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia

This Element examines the state of rights and their contestations in Southeast Asia through the theoretical lenses of politics of rights.

This Element is for practitioners, policy-makers and researchers interested in the rights-culture-politics nexus in Southeast Asia. It investigates the contested nature of rights, and explores the debates over who are entitled to rights, what sorts of rights they should have, and even who get to decide on such issues.In this Element, I introduce the socio-legal study of politics of rights as the theoretical framework to understand rights in the culturally and politically diverse region of Southeast Asia. The politics of rights framework is empirically grounded and treats rights as social practices whereby rights' meanings and implications emerge from being put into action or mobilised. I elaborate on the concepts underlying politics of rights and develop an analysis of rights in Southeast Asia using this framework. The analysis focusses on: what are the structural conditions that influence the emergence of rights mobilisation? How do people mobilise rights and what forms does rights mobilisation take? What are the consequences of rights mobilisation and how do we assess them? I hope that this view of politics of rights - from a Global South region and from the ground - can encourage more astute evaluations of the power of rights.