Part 1

• Decolonizing Visibility: Rethinking LGBTQ Discourses Beyond Western Human Rights in Malaysia Afifi Nordin Middle East Technical University

  Mainstream LGBTQ discourses in global peace and human rights scholarship are predominantly shaped by Western epistemologies that equate visibility with emancipation and universal recognition with progress. This paper challenges that assumption by examining the politics of LGBTQ visibility in Malaysia through a decolonial and Global South lens. It argues that the uncritical application of Western liberal frameworks, rooted in secular individualism and universalist rights language, often obscures local cultural, religious, and epistemic specificities that define sexuality and identity in postcolonial societies. Drawing on decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Maria Lugones, as well as Global South scholarship on cultural relativism and peacebuilding, this paper explores how visibility itself can become a site of epistemic violence when imposed as a universal moral imperatives. In Malaysia, where Islamic values, communitarian ethics, and colonial legal residues intersect, queer identities are not simply suppressed but negotiated within complex social and moral boundaries. Rather than framing non-visibility as silence or repression, this study reinterprets it as a possible form of agency, protection, and cultural negotiation. By deconstructing the Western paradigm of LGBTQ visibility, this paper proposes an alternative understanding of peace, one grounded in plural epistemologies, cultural coexistence, and respect for contextual moral systems. In doing so, it contributes to decolonization of both peace studies and human rights discourse by situating Malaysia not as a deviant exception to universal norms but as a site of epistemic plurality that challenges the coloniality of global queer narratives.

• The Concept of Human Rights: The Contribution of the Philippines Alejandro Jr Ciencia University of the Philippines

  This paper examines the Philippines’ contribution to human rights thought and advocacy. The writings of Filipino thinkers, among them Jose Rizal, the Philippines’ national hero, and Jose Diokno, the “Father of Human Rights” in the country, will be highlighted in the presentation.

  The paper moves from the premise that the promotion of human rights is an evolving and continuing task. Human civilization is estimated to be 6,000 to 12,000 years old, but it was only in 1948, more than 75 years ago, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by members of the United Nations at the time. This suggests that the countries of the world needed time to recognize the compelling persuasiveness of the concept of human rights.

  Human rights is not a western concept. Many countries, including non-Western ones, contributed to the drafting of the UDHR. Moreover, some foundational principles of the human rights position - e.g., racial equality, religious freedom, the equal treatment of persons, etc. - can be attributed to non-Western sources or influences.

  My own work on indigenous notions of justice in the Philippines suggests that human rights as “entitlements of human beings by virtue of their being human” is not clearly established in many indigenous communities in the country. Still, one can argue that there are elements in indigenous notions of rights and justice that are compatible with and can contribute to the promotion of human rights as a much needed albeit evolving and continuing task of contemporary societies. The concept of human rights in the Philippines represents an amalgamation of western and non-western/indigenous influences. Continuing support for human rights in the country will be contingent on the persuasiveness of an evolving human rights position.

  The paper will also discuss contemporary developments in the promotion of human rights in the country.

• Witnessing from the South: Re-centering Human Rights in Southeast Asian Contexts Amy Rothschild Ithaca College

  This paper reconsiders the relationship between witnessing and human rights by shifting the geographic and conceptual frame through which both are typically understood. Scholarship on witnessing, shaped by Holocaust studies and Euro-American memory traditions, has treated witnessing as a foundational practice through which human rights claims gain moral force, often locating the origins of that framework in the global North. In contrast, this paper argues that practices of witnessing—and the human rights claims they generate—are also produced through interactions that take place in the global South.

  Drawing on ethnographic analysis of visitor encounters at sites of mass violence in Timor-Leste, including Santa Cruz Cemetery and the Comarca Balide prison, the paper conceptualizes dark tourism as a form of ritualized witnessing. This process unfolds through three overlapping stages: sacralization, encounter, and transmission. Visitors frame these sites as morally charged spaces, engage affectively and ethically with histories of suffering, and carry these encounters outward through narration, recommendation, and digital circulation.

  Rather than simply reproducing pre-existing human rights frameworks, these acts of witnessing participate in their ongoing formation. Through embodied and mediated encounters in Timor-Leste, visitors do not just absorb human rights discourse; they help constitute and circulate it. By foregrounding these processes, the paper argues that human rights are not merely exported from the global North but are co-produced through situated practices of witnessing in postcolonial contexts.

  In doing so, the paper contributes to efforts to decenter dominant genealogies of human rights and to reconceptualize them as emerging through transnational interactions grounded in the global South.

• Norm Contestation and Regional Agency: Universal Jurisdiction and Accountability for Myanmar in Southeast Asia Emma Lauren Palmer Griffith University

  Accountability for atrocity crimes is sometimes presented as a concept disseminated, in a linear way, from European or international institutions such as the International Criminal Court to domestic jurisdictions. This paper challenges that narrative by examining Southeast Asian engagements with universal jurisdiction as a domestic and transnationally generated process of norm contestation. Focusing on civil society and victim-driven initiatives in Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and the Philippines to address alleged crimes in Myanmar using domestic legal frameworks, it argues that regional actors are not passive recipients of external legal models but active contributors to the construction of accountability norms.

  After reviewing regional colonial legacies and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) emphasis on sovereignty and non-interference, this paper applies a norm contestation framework to explore the actors and strategies involved in these recent examples of regional universal jurisdiction practice. It demonstrates that, in each example, the civil society, legal, and official actors are not easily categorised by local/international binaries, nor do arguments display international-to-national aspects of norm socialisation or localisation. Rather, domestic debates, legislative frameworks, and judicial reasoning reveal how questions of sovereignty, access to justice, and domestic human rights and international law obligations are contested and adapted in light of varied practical, social, and political contexts. These practices demonstrate how accountability norms are shaped through dynamic transnational discourse and practical initiative.

  By foregrounding Southeast Asian universal jurisdiction practice as a domestic legal exercise and situating this within broader debates about localising accountability, the paper highlights the region’s contribution to human rights as an evolving process of contestation and generation, rather than imposition.

Part 2

• Surviving Impunity: Moral Institutions in Southeast Asia Patrick Peralta University of Michigan

  Since the end of the Cold War, accountability for mass violence has been a principal goal of the international community. The adoption of tribunals and truth commissions, lustrations and reparations, amnesties and sanctions have collectively formed a “transitional justice tool kit” from which states need only draw. Yet this vision treats post-conflict institutions as the best, and even only, actors capable of providing justice and peace. How then do survivors of mass violence reckon with impunity, the failure of institutional redress? I take up this concern through the Philippine Drug War and the Cambodian Genocide, after which national cultures of impunity withsthood international prosecution. As a result, many perpetrators not only retain political power, but live alongside survivors. From Manila’s slums to villages in Battambang, I seek to understand how survivors endure, and even prevent, impunity. My early fieldwork, based on archival research and extensive interviews, finds that survivors create and rely on various social networks, which I call “moral institutions.” I argue that these networks offer survivors and perpetrators the means to constructively engage each other. Moral institutions draw their governing power from cultural norms of coexistence, which are expressed, strengthened, and diffused through social interaction. Some networks, in effect, discipline desires for revenge, while others make reparations the vein of community life. In this way, moral institutions install a legitimate and effective social order. This project ultimately rethinks popular and scholarly notions that privilege formal institutions as the agents of transitional justice. I aim to show what motivates survivors to engage in collective action, the kind of symbolic and material solidarities that rebuild social worlds.

• Decolonizing the Classroom: Pedagogy as a Site for Southeast Asian Human Rights Thought Vachararutai Boontinand Mahidol University

  Dominant genealogies often frame human rights as a Western imposition, yet Southeast Asian educators are actively reclaiming these concepts through localized pedagogical innovations. Drawing on a 2023–2024 study involving surveys and interviews with lecturers across the region, this paper examines how the teaching of human rights in regional universities serves as a creative process for generating indigenous rights thought.

  While much of the regional curriculum remains anchored in international legal frameworks, our findings reveal a significant shift toward “law and society” and “critical praxis” approaches. The paper illustrates how educators in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand are moving beyond didactic socialization to “re-contextualize” human rights through decolonial dialogue and ethical engagement with local struggles. Key examples include the use of amicus curiae as a teaching tool in Indonesia, the integration of indigenous peace strategies in the Philippines, and the co-creation of knowledge with social movements in Thailand.

  By navigating the tensions between universalism and local cultural/religious values—ranging from Islamic gender perspectives in Aceh to national ideologies in Brunei—these educators are not merely “transmitting” a Western project; they are facilitating a Southeast Asian process of rights-making. This paper argues that these pedagogical spaces function as vital laboratories where human rights are being “indigenized” and reimagined, challenging the false narrative of rights as a foreign invention and asserting the region’s intellectual agency in the global human rights discourse.

• Beyond Imported Rights: Rethinking Human Rights Thought from Malaysia Ying Hooi Khoo Universiti Malaya

  Human rights discourse in Southeast Asia is often framed through a persistent misconception, that the idea of human rights is primarily a Western invention imposed upon non-Western societies. This paper challenges that assumption by examining how human rights thought and advocacy have evolved within the Malaysian context. Rather than treating human rights as an imported project, the paper conceptualises rights as an ongoing political and social process shaped by local actors, institutions, and struggles. Malaysia’s experience illustrates how human rights ideas have been negotiated within a postcolonial state marked by multicultural governance, developmental priorities, and strong assertions of sovereignty. While the Federal Constitution embeds guarantees of fundamental liberties, the interpretation and implementation of these rights have been continuously contested. Civil society organisations, lawyers, student movements, and grassroots activists have played a central role in translating international human rights norms into local political discourse, particularly in debates on freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, minority rights, and democratic reform. By tracing these interactions between constitutional frameworks, civil society activism, and regional debates, the paper argues that Malaysian engagements with human rights represent a locally grounded intellectual and political tradition. In doing so, it highlights how Southeast Asian societies actively shape human rights discourse rather than merely receiving it from external sources.

• The Catholic Church’s Campaign against the “Ethnic, Cultural and Religious Extinction of the Identity of the People” of East Timor: 1981–89 Michael Leach Swinburne University of Technology

  This paper examines the evolution of Catholic Church campaigns over the “ethnic, cultural and religious identity” of the East Timorese people from 1981 onward, and the way these campaigns strategically drew on newer developments in Catholic social doctrine, associated with Vatican II theology. These were employed to justify Church support for nationalism, despite explicit Vatican prohibitions on overt political involvement. This paper focuses on a series of letters sent by successive Apostolic Administrators of the Timorese church, which expressed the evolution of this view among the East Timorese clergy. It is argued that these Church campaigns over East Timorese ethnic, cultural, and religious identity contributed substantially to the development of a national identity, and reinforced claims of national self-determination. This campaign would prove central to the Catholic Church’s evolution from an essentially foreign institution in the colonial era, into an East Timorese national institution by the late 1980s.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Global South
• Indonesia
• LGBTQ
• Malaysia
• Myanmar
• Philippines
• Southeast Asia
• Timor-Leste
• critical pedagogy
• dark tourism
• decolonial dialogue
• decoloniality
• human rights
• human rights education
• human rights thought
• imported rights
• impunity
• indigenous rights
• international law
• justice
• knowledge production
• mass violence
• memory
• non-Western societies
• norm contestation
• social networks
• social order
• transitional justice
• universal jurisdiction
• witnessing