Mass Mobilisations between the Return of Students Protests and New Forms of Digital Protest - Positioning Southeast Asia in Social Movement Studies

Type

Double Panel

Part 1

Session 11
Thu 12:00-13:30

Part 2

Session 12
Thu 15:00-16:30

Conveners

Naruemon Thabchumpon Chulalongkorn University
Tuwanont Phattharathanasut Humboldt University of Berlin
Wolfram Schaffar University of Passau

Discussant

Tuwanont Phattharathanasut Humboldt University of Berlin

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Part 1

Memes, Emotions, and Power: Digital Politics under Authoritarianism in Thailand Naruemon Thabchumpon Chulalongkorn University
Digital platforms have become crucial arenas where political emotions and authoritarian legi¬ti¬mation are produced, circulated, and contested. This article examines how memes, influen¬cer networks, and short-form videos mobilize the political emotions that sustain conservative populism and authoritarian politics in Southeast Asia, with a comparative focus on Thailand and Myanmar. In Thailand, platforms such as TikTok and Twitter host ongoing battles between pro- and anti-military groups: pro-military campaigns emphasize nationalism and order, while opposition activists re-appropriate humor, irony, and fandom to undermine official narratives and sustain democratic resilience. In Myanmar, by contrast, digital cultures reflect a more acute confrontation between junta supporters and pro-democracy forces, with social media operating both as a propaganda tool of the regime and as a vital infrastructure for documenting repression, coordinating resistance, and sustaining oppositional identities. The comparison reveals that both contexts illustrate how digital cultures normalize autho¬ritarianism while simultaneously creating contested spaces for resistance. Thailand exem¬plifies a hybrid authoritarian struggle, where digital contestation coexists with limited political pluralism, whereas Myanmar represents a high-intensity digital battleground under direct military rule. The study argues that authoritarianism in Southeast Asia must be understood not only through coercive state power but also through the mobilization of political emotions that shape how subjectivities are felt, performed, and contested.
The ASEAN Way of (Digital) War: Ignoring Regional Harmony for Domestic Likes. Matthana Rodyim Mahidol University
In the current geopolitical context, platforms like Facebook and TikTok have become significant venues for the development and propagation of nationalist sentiment. This study analyzes the strange connection between Thailand and Cambodia, two countries with centuries of shared cultural, linguistic, and religious heritage, whose interactions are increa-singly characterized by digitally mediated hostility on prominent platforms. This study asserts that confrontations, frequently instigated and exploited by political elites in both Bangkok and Phnom Penh, are exacerbated by the distinctive ecosystems of Facebook and TikTok, resulting in a detrimental variant of ‘political fear’. This digitally disseminated fear surpasses state-level diplomatic conflicts, resulting in unmanageable and self-reinforcing cycles of mutual suspicion and animosity inside society. This research utilizes a comparative critical discourse analysis of selected content, examining the rhetoric of popular Facebook posts, the virality of short-form TikTok videos, and the dynamics within their respective comment sections, to elucidate the discursive strategies employed in constructing the ‘other’ as an existential threat. The results show that users in these algorithmic contexts do not just consume elite-driven stories of historical grievances, territorial invasion, and cultural appropriation. They also actively construct, remix, and radicalize them. This technique creates an emotional feedback cycle in which political dread becomes a key part of modern national identity for some people online. This effectively replaces common heritage with a long-lasting and deeply ingrained hatred. Ultimately, this study concludes that the weaponization of Facebook and TikTok for political fearmongering constitutes a substantial, enduring threat to regional stability, undermining the cultural foundations that could otherwise promote mutual understanding and collaboration between the Thai and Cambodian populations.
The role of Gen Z in the October 6 commemoration Bancharat Polpila University of Passau
From 2020 to 2021, Thailand saw a youth-led political uprising that transformed public engagement with democracy and revived interest in suppressed historical narratives. Central to this awakening is Gen Z’s growing awareness of politics rooted in Thailand’s history, including long-silenced events like the 6 October 1976 massacre. This study explores how young Thais interpret this event today and use commemorations as countermemory to challenge state narratives and demand democracy. By doing so, it also adds to the expanding literature on Gen Z and Gen Z uprisings in various countries of the Global South in recent years.
The study examines commemorations at Thammasat University from 2018 to 2025, covering the period before and after the 2020 uprising. It includes interviews with organizers and participants, as well as an analysis of online discourse, to understand how the memory of 6 October is utilized or perceived by those involved. My observations show that these commemorations have grown larger, more participatory, and more political, organized by young people since 2020. What was once a modest memorial has expanded into a broader remembrance of state violence, linking the 1976 massacre to other incidents such as Tak Bai in 2004 and recent repression in 2021. These practices indicate that youth are engaging with the past politically, reinterpreting events, constructing alternative stories, and using memory to critique authoritarianism, confront impunity, and promote democracy.
This analysis shows how youth turn remembrance into political action, contributing to studies of memory politics, social movements, and democratization in Thailand. It highlights how countermemory challenges official silence and helps young people envision a more democratic future.
Soft Power, Hard Resistance: Arts Resistance as Fuel, Bridge, and Voice in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution Minnie Free Scholar
Since the military coup of 1 February 2021, Myanmar’s Spring Revolution has unfolded across two simultaneous fronts: armed resistance and arts resistance. This paper draws a deliberate distinction between these terms — departing from the broader and more passive concept of “cultural resistance” — to argue that artistic production in post-coup Myanmar plays a major, strategic, and irreplaceable role in the revolution. Arts resistance functions simultaneously as a driving force that sustains collective will under extreme repression, a medium of communication that transcends physical, linguistic, and national borders, and an infrastructure of collective identity in a country as ethnically diverse and historically fragmented as Myanmar (Callahan, 2003; South, 2008; Walton, 2022).
The paper’s central contribution is an original analytical framework and typology of arts resistance forms deployed in the Spring Revolution, encompassing visual art and illustration, music and resistance anthems, underground and exile film festivals, dark humour and political memes, solidarity merchandise, and the public sacrifice narratives of celebrities and artists — including well-known film actors, musicians, and filmmakers — who have joined the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), faced arrest warrants, and surrendered careers and public prominence in political resistance against the military junta (The Irrawaddy, 2021; Progressive Voice, 2023). For each form, the paper examines its strategic political functions and advantages across five dimensions: affective (building emotional resilience and shared feeling), communicative (reaching diaspora communities and global audiences), economic (fundraising for displaced communities and resistance groups), political (delegitimising junta authority and affirming collective identity), and archival (creating an irreplaceable historical record of the revolution that the military cannot fully erase).
This analytical framework builds on scholarship on protest repertoires (Tilly and Tarrow, 2015), collective identity formation (Melucci, 1996), and digital resistance under authoritarianism (Lorch, 2021; Brooten, 2023). Drawing on an interpretivist paradigm, the paper employs qualitative digital documentary analysis as its primary methodology. Data are drawn from publicly available materials: Facebook pages and posts of resistance-aligned artists, art collectives, and celebrities — reflecting Facebook’s position as Myanmar’s dominant digital public sphere, where 98% of social media users are Facebook users and the platform functions simultaneously as news source, communication channel, marketplace, and social archive (Athan, 2022; Hashmeta, 2023) — alongside published reports from resistance media including aninternational media coverage.
Myanmar’s Spring Revolution constitutes a uniquely rich and urgent contemporary case study for theorising the strategic role of arts in political struggle — one that advances understanding of how soft power and armed resistance operate as parallel and mutually sustaining forces, and that offers a Southeast Asian-grounded contribution to broader conversations in social movement studies.

Part 2

Exploring Activist Publics in Indonesia: Concept & Research Design Dayana Lengauer Austrian Academy of Sciences
Young people have long been central to imaginaries of Indonesia’s future. This resonates with scholarship on earlier waves of student activism, which highlights the close entanglement between the student movement and the history of Suharto’s authoritarian regime (Aspinall, 2012). These studies foreground enduring narratives that cast students as both a moral and revolutionary force, a role that became especially visible in the 1998 movement that helped bring about democracy after 32 years of authoritarian rule. Yet even in 1998, scholars such as Doreen Lee (2016) showed that mobilization extended beyond university campuses into streets and private homes, where students produced the visual iconography of youth politics.

Today, digital media have radically expanded the infrastructures of student activism into spaces where distinctions between public and private are increasingly blurred. The ease of public commentary, the obscurity of online identities, and the policing of digital spaces reshape young people’s experiences of visibility, exposure, and silencing. At the same time, activist forms are crafted to compete for attention, developing genres such as civic-journalist video formats featuring influencers and mimicking late-night talk shows, alongside short Instagram and TikTok videos combining clips, memes, and sound. This proliferation of formats mirrors the internal diversity and rhizomatic diffusion that characterize contemporary youth movements in the region (Sastramidjaja, 2023).

This presentation introduces an early-stage research project on student online activism in Indonesia. The project brings together literature on Indonesia’s student movement and digital activism while proposing theoretical innovation around activist students’ efforts to generate publics. It explores how shifting communicative forms shape activist practices and subjectivities, and how different activist publics interact with dominant narratives, including religion and nationalism. In this presentation, I focus in particular on the concept of activist publics and on the methodological challenges involved in moving between interpretive online analysis and empirical inquiry.
A Breath of Fresh Air: Learning from Youth for Climate Action in the Philippines Teresa Lorena Jopson-Gloeckl Arnold Bergstraesser Institute
The global demands for climate action have inspired youth-led organizations and student councils in the Philippines to form the Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines (YACAP) alliance, a local counterpart of the Fridays for Future, in 2019. In addition to the demands of the global campaign Fridays for Future on keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, ensuring climate justice and equity, and listening to the best science currently available; YACAP additionally demands to defend environmental defenders, and system change. The actions they take beyond school and digital strikes include rebuilding in the wake of climate calamities like typhoons.
I ask, how do local environmental movements contribute insights and repertoires of action to global demands for climate justice? Against assumptions that youth climate action originates from the Global North, I examine the case of YACAP, and how its member organizations in fact used the global demand to popularize actions that they were already doing for decades, and embrace digital protests. As the Philippines is one of the most vulnerable countries to the climate crisis and one of the most dangerous countries for environmental activists, the local analysis requires rigorous postcolonial lens, and actions utmost urgency. Further, their demand for system change suggests a reimagination of governance, resource distribution, and comprehensive rights (including beyond the human). Thus, through interviews with YACAP members and digital ethnography, I explore how these impetus propel local theoretical insights and practical projects for global social movement praxis.
Political Change, Social Media and Everyday Resistance in Cambodia Mark Vong Royal University of Phnom Penh
Cambodia’s state repression after 2013, when the ruling party nearly lost its decades-long grip on power, has resulted in the main opposition party being dissolved and civil society organisations being constrained. With the institutional foundation for social activism depleted, how can social activism in Cambodia be maintained? This paper examines social media control imposed by the Cambodian government since 2013 and the actions taken by social groups and individuals in response to a more restrictive online environment. Drawing on the concept of everyday resistance and existing accounts of online political participation in Cambodia, I argue that everyday resistance on Facebook can partially fill the void left by a weakening political and civil society. I underscore Facebook as a site of political contestation in Cambodia and its potential to engender political change in the long-term.
From Awareness-raising to Healing: Spaces to Foster Solidarity and Political Imagination in Asia Adhiraaj Anand German Institute for Global and Area Studies/Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Since at least 2019, Southeast Asia has seen a number of social movements that have become notable for innovative and transnational forms of contention, particularly in the digital space. While protests and the online campaigns that drive them ebb and flow, activists across the region continue to gather and exchange within and across borders, at events (online and in-person) organized by NGOs, collectives and other groupings and under the banner of transnational solidarity movements. Such meetings and gatherings serve to generate solidarity, incubate new initiatives and endow participants with new knowledge and skills, among other functions.
This paper, based on an interpretivist research design, seeks to investigate and understand these networks and exchanges, zooming in on the role and work of specific organizations and collectives that organize events and maintain spaces. How do actors in different Asian social movements support each other and sustain movements for democracy and justice? How do they bridge each other’s movements and different national contexts at events and spaces? What visions and meanings are created in such exchanges? My analysis is based on data during field research trips to Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand between 2024 and 2026. This includes interviews with activists from and/or based in each country and observations at events and spaces where activists from across the region gather and exchange.
At the time of abstract submission, data collection and analysis are ongoing. I plan to complete these processes by mid-April 2026. My findings will contribute to discourse on social movements and transnational networks, and the role played by events and spaces in sustaining movements during periods of lower protest or online activity.
Techno-Determinism versus Immaterial Work – The Autonomy of Social Movements on Platforms: The Example of the #MilkTeaAlliance and the #TikTokRefugees Wolfram Schaffar University of Passau
It seems evident that platforms and social media play a central role in the rise of authoritarian forms of rule. Southeast Asia is an especially revealing example for investigating this phenomenon. The region is a world leader in terms of both social media penetration rates and the amount of time people spend on these platforms. At the same time, it has witnessed some of the most striking instances of democratic backsliding, many of which are closely connected to social media. Examples include the success of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in 2016, which was linked to a social media–based electoral campaign; the Rohingya conflict, often described as a “Facebook Genocide”; and the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which was heavily aggravated by influencers on both sides.

These developments raise a fundamental question of agency: do the technical specifications and economic rationalities of the respective platforms themselves contribute to the violent and authoritarian character of certain movements and campaigns? Studies by Grohmann and Ong (2024) present empirical data pointing in this direction. These findings, however, stand in contrast to the optimistic outlook of late Post-Workerism (Negri, 2019), which draws on the notion of immaterial labor and envisions - albeit in a somewhat utopian and detached manner - the emancipation of political subjects in the age of digitalization.

In my presentation, I will discuss data from two movements that emerged in East and Southeast Asia: the #MilkTeaAlliance (2020) and the #TikTokRefugees (2025). Based on these cases, I will revisit the question of agency and techno-determinism, arguing that social movements demonstrate a high degree of autonomy and unpredictability, despite the constraints imposed by technical specifications.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

In recent years, Southeast Asia has witnessed a renewed cycle of social mobilisation. While some developments echo earlier waves of activism—most notably student-led democracy movements in Thailand and Myanmar—others point to qualitatively new forms of collective action. Phenomena such as the Milk Tea Alliance, the mobilisation of K-pop fandoms, and influencer-driven activism highlight modes of mobilisation that are deeply embedded in digital platforms and shaped by their economic, technical, and algorithmic logics.
These mobilisations challenge established understandings of social movements. They employ platform-specific organisational forms and protest repertoires that draw heavily on commercial pop culture and often exhibit fluid or ambiguous political positioning. At the same time, they coexist and intersect with more “traditional” movements, raising questions about continuity, hybridity, and transformation in contemporary activism.
This panel explores how insights from Southeast Asian social movements can contribute to broader debates in social movement studies and advance efforts to decentre and globalise the field. Two guiding questions structure the discussion: how can social movements in Southeast Asia be integrated into broader frameworks of social movement knowledge, and how can context-sensitive concepts and theoretical insights be developed from Southeast Asian cases?
Given that dominant theories of social movements remain largely grounded in Euro-American experiences, Southeast Asia offers rich empirical and analytical potential. The region’s diverse histories of mobilisation—from anti-colonial and pro-democracy struggles to labour, environmental, women’s, LGBTIQ+, far-right, and digitally mediated movements—invite a critical reassessment of claims to universality.
By foregrounding Southeast Asian experiences, this panel aims to identify alternative pathways of mobilisation and to refine or challenge established theoretical frameworks. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to a more inclusive, plural, and genuinely global social movement studies.