Part 1

• Kikue Hamayotsu NIU
• Nico Ravanilla University of California San Diego
• Momentum, Alliances, Incumbency: The Bhumjaithai Party’s Components for Electoral Victory in Thailand Punchada Sirivunnabood Mahidol University

  The Bhumjaithai Party’s (BJT) meteoric rise and its subsequent consolidation of power represent one of the most compelling narratives of Thailand’s February 8, 2026, general election. Founded in 2008 by former members of Newin Chidchob’s factions—originally aligned with Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai—the BJT has evolved into a formidable political force defined by strategic pragmatism. Following its 2019 breakthrough, where it secured 51 seats, the party’s trajectory has been one of consistent expansion: growing to 71 seats in 2023 and reaching a dominant 193 seats in the 2026 polls. This latest victory underscores a robust grassroots infrastructure; the party captured 174 of the 400 constituency seats while maintaining a steady presence in the party-list tier with 19 seats in the 2026 election. This paper examines the drivers behind the BJT’s landslide, arguing that this triumph not only reshaped the immediate political landscape but established a foundation for its long-term dominance in Thai politics.

• Support for Electoral Violence in Election Time: Evidence from High-Frequency Surveys in Indonesia Nathanael Gratias Sumaktoyo National University of Singapore

  Peaceful resolution of political disagreements through elections and other means is a cornerstone of democratic political systems. A democracy could not survive if its citizens forgo political processes and take matters into their own hands. Yet studies increasingly document growing acceptance of various forms of political violence in many countries. What factors predict voters’ support for political violence? How does this support vary in the weeks before and after an election? I answer these questions by analyzing responses from over 33,000 respondents in a high-frequency survey project fielded eleven weeks before and nine weeks after Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election, in which Prabowo Subianto defeated Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo. I find that support for political violence declined in the run-up to the election but increased afterward. Contrary to the “sore losers” hypothesis, which predicts that support for violence would be confined to electoral losers, I find that supporters of all three candidates exhibited increased support for violence. However, the increase was most pronounced among supporters of Ganjar Pranowo. Given that Ganjar’s camp was more vocal than Anies’s in criticizing the integrity of the election, this finding highlights how a candidate’s positioning in relation to election results can shape their supporters’ attitudes toward violence. I also examine the roles of victory expectations, media consumption, attitudes toward democracy, institutional trust, and affective polarization. Preliminary findings suggest that these factors matter, but not as strongly as the candidates’ own response to the election results.

Part 2

• Reclaiming Epistemic Agency: How Participatory Policy Hackathons Shape Empathy-Based Futures in Thailand Cholnapa Anukul JuSRI-Just Society Research Institute Sayamol Charoenratana HuSE, SRI, Chulalongkorn University

  As democratic regression deepens across Southeast Asia, the crisis is increasingly felt not just in institutions, but in the epistemic realm—where elite-driven agendas routinely silence popular voices. While much of the current literature focuses on the decay of formal structures, this paper explores an alternative path: the use of Participatory Policy Hackathons as a practical tool for future-making from the ground up.The study follows a multi-stage process that moved from provincial forums across Thailand to a central policy arena in Bangkok. By tracking this trajectory, we examine how citizens—particularly those usually locked out of the political center—can do more than just voice grievances; they can actively frame and co-design complex policy solutions. The findings suggest a fundamental shift in how people engage with the state. Participants moved beyond narrow, interest-based demands toward what we term Policy Empathy. This deliberative process allowed diverse groups to see their own struggles within broader structural vulnerabilities, creating a shared vision for the future. Ultimately, this research argues that these hackathons are a form of democratic resistance. By decentralizing the power to define what comes next, these participatory practices offer a tangible way to reclaim democracy from autocratic revival.

• Democratic Regression and External Conditionality: Indonesia and the Limits of EU Normative Trade Policy Joan Ricart Angulo Universitat Pompeu Fabra

  The conclusion of the EU–Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement offers a timely opportunity to examine how democratic regression in Southeast Asia affects the European Union’s external governance strategies. Indonesia remains the region’s largest democracy, yet recent years have raised concerns over institutional accountability, shrinking civic space, and declining liberal safeguards. At the same time, Indonesia has become strategically important for the EU because of its role in critical raw materials, supply-chain diversification, and broader European de-risking strategies vis-à-vis China.

  This paper asks how democratic regression in strategically salient partner countries reshapes the EU’s commitment to democratic conditionality in external economic relations. It argues that Indonesia appears to illustrate a broader pattern in which the EU preserves the formal architecture of normative trade governance while adapting its practical application to geopolitical priorities.

  The paper develops the concept of institutional decoupling to capture this dynamic. Under conditions of high strategic salience, democratic and human-rights clauses are formally maintained, but their substantive enforcement is softened through dialoguebased mechanisms, gradual implementation, post-ratification monitoring, and flexible
  cooperation roadmaps. Rather than abandoning normative commitments, the EU recalibrates them to reconcile values-based discourse with strategic interests.

  Empirically, the paper draws on comparative analysis of EU agreements with Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore, based on official EU documents, sustainability chapters, negotiating texts, and public statements. Indonesia is treated as the central case through which to explore how external actors respond to democratic deterioration in strategically relevant partner states.

  By linking democratic regression in Southeast Asia with changing forms of external conditionality, the paper contributes to debates on autocratization, democracy promotion, and the political consequences of de-risking strategies in the Indo-Pacific.

• Civil Society, Accumulation of Dislocations, and Democratic Regression In Indonesia Ignasius Jaques Juru Juru Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Universität Bonn

  The problems of democracy in Indonesia-whether understood as stagnation or, as increasingly argued by scholars, as regression-are often explained in terms of deeply rooted structural constraints or the conditioning effects of powerful anti-democratic elites. In short, the dominant perspectives assume that both political structures and elites are excessively powerful, thereby lead to the deficit and, more recently, democratic backsliding.

  This study seeks to approach the question of democratic regression from a different point of view. Rather than locating the problem in the dominance of structures or elites, it argues that the democratic regression in Indonesia constitutively result from the inability of civil society domain to manage accumulation of various, dispersed dislocatory experiences or the limits of political power itself. This fundamentally leads to the failure of establishing a hegemonic democratic struggle among civil society activists. Therefore, my study will examines specifically how the emergence of discourse of changing from within (engaging the state), as mostly articulated within civil society, operates as one of a political response to the limits of power in post-New Order, yet fails to generate a chain of commonality among different activists capable of pursuing transformative politics. In other words, the articulation of the discourse changing from within is governed more by logic of difference which has rather reinforced the particularistic character of pro-democracy activists than by logics of equivalence.

  Furthermore, this study interrogates why, despite its limitations and its failure to consolidate democratic hegemonic project, the practice of engaging the state persists. Overall, the argument in this paper rest on two key theses: first, that power is always contingent, vulnerable, and constitutively dislocated; second, that civil society is argued as terrain of the accumulation of various and dispersed dislocatory experiences and marked by its character of undecidable terrain in terms of its function as democratic sites.

• Challenging the Boundaries of Security: The Impact of (Anti-) Terror Act of 2020 to Human Rights Advocacy Workers in the Philippines Casey Anne Cruz Mahidol University

  In a context where human rights advocacy is increasingly subjected to terrorization and criminalization, the question arises: who stands up for victims of state-sanctioned violence? Human rights advocates, church and youth leaders, laborers, and farmers struggling for their rights are not law violators, but defenders of justice and dignity, often vilified for opposing repressive state policies. The Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) of 2020, framed as a mechanism to enhance national security, paradoxically perpetuates a climate of “white terror,” instilling fear among activists and marginalized communities. This study examines how the Philippines’ counterterrorism framework, particularly the ATA’s vague definitions and expansive police powers, raises serious concerns about potential abuse. By focusing on individuals charged under the law, it demonstrates how the government’s disillusioned pursuit of peace exacerbates risks for vulnerable groups. Through narrative inquiry, drawing on documented cases and interviews, the research illustrates how the ATA produces a chilling effect on dissent, undermining civil liberties, political participation, and the socio- economic and psychological well-being of human rights advocates. It argues that the ATA blurs the line between activism and terrorism, institutionalizing practices that constrict democratic space. Moreover, initial findings suggest that the true agents of terror may be those who wield the law as a tool to suppress dissent. There is therefore a pressing need to review the law’s implementation, ensuring stronger judicial oversight, greater accountability, and the integration of conflict transformation approaches vis-à-vis international human rights standards and counterterrorism frameworks. This is particularly significant as the Philippine case may serve as a precedent in Southeast Asia, a region where counterterrorism models are often shaped by imported Western securitization paradigms. Only through such measures can human rights defenders continue to safeguard rights and advocate for social justice in the Philippines without fear of persecution.

Abstract

Keywords

• EU external relations
• Indonesia
• Southeast Asia
• Thailand
• accumulation of dislocatory experiences
• changing from within
• civil society
• counter-terrorism
• democracy
• democratic conditionality
• democratic hegemonic project
• democratic regression
• election
• empathy
• factionalism
• future-making
• human rights
• logic of difference
• participatory policy-making
• patronage system
• policy hackathon
• political parties
• securitization
• surveys
• terror law
• violence