Environmental Politics and Governance in Southeast Asia: Power, Capital and Resistance

In this book, Aljunied analyses how ASEAN and its key maritime member states of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia govern environmental issues through strategic engagements with social forces. In the new millennium, ASEAN states’ power is enhanced and solidified through regulatory statehood, strategic renewal and moral ideology in order to subdue civil resistance while managing non-traditional security threats. Through a comparative analysis of Southeast Asia, this book highlights how state-capitalist-society relations are shaped by politics of scale and social conflict in order to reinforce authoritarianism and intensify capitalism development agendas at the expense of environmental preservation. With this, the book explores how civil society challenge and are suppressed by state power at national and regional platforms. A pioneering scholarly work, this book represents a major contribution to the intersection between political science, environmental governance and Southeast Asian Studies by offering rich theoretical and empirical insights into the dynamics of state-capitalist-society relations in an era of global environmental crisis.