With their national origins in Spanish and US imperialism, and in the subsequent wake of intense waves of cultural colonisation, educated Filipinos are often at a loss about what their roots are. In order to bring much needed clarity to the ongoing debate about what it means to be Filipino, this...

The article examines both civil society initiatives that seek to address the mass violence of 1965 and 1966 and the state’s responses to them. Unlike other political-transition contexts in the world, a transitional justice approach is apparently a formula that state authorities have found...

The case of the Philippines provides an interesting example of how post-colonial governments in Southeast Asia are trying to govern multi-ethnic nations. The Philippines, despite being the country in Asia with the most vibrant civil society, is still dealing with a war on the southern island of...

Three recent works – Social Activism in Southeast Asia, Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance, and Southeast Asia and the Civil Society Gaze: Scoping a Contested Concept in Cambodia and Vietnam – provide a timely update on the contemporary landscape of...

Book Review of Somchai Phatharathananunth (2006), Civil Society and Democratization. Social Movements in Northeast Thailand, Copenhagen: NIAS Press; ISBN 10: 8791114381, 251 pages.

In this article, findings from 300 standardized interviews with representatives of Civic Organizations in Ho Chi Minh-City and Ha Noi are presented. Following a view of civil society as a specific mode of social action and interaction, data analysis unveils the existence of core dimensions of...