Besides affirming the Muslimhood of the Shia, Hadi Awang has for a long time shown great support for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his regularly published column Minda Presiden, which is available on the party’s news site, he has, on several occasions, highlighted the necessity of unity within the ummah. He considers it essential in the struggle against US imperialism, the great enemy of Islam in our time. He has even gone a step beyond to speak positively about the republic’s state ideology: the Guardianship of the Jurist (wilayah al-faqih). He likens it to the party’s own governance model known as the Leadership of the Scholars (kepimpinan ulama), which was first conceptualised by PAS’s youth leaders in 1982, some years after the Iranian Revolution. It is no secret that the Iranian Revolution had reinvigorated Islamic politics in Malaysia, as it did in the rest of the world. As recently as this year, PAS’s youth wing held a protest near the US embassy in response to Israeli missile attacks on Iranian civilians.

So how is it that my friend seems to have a drastically different expectation of Hadi Awang’s attitude towards sectarianism, given that Shia-Sunni unity has been and continues to be a no-brainer to party leadership? This has to do with the party’s recent track record of appealing to racist ethnonationalist sentiment in their political messaging, reinforcing the status quo of Malay supremacy and contributing to the polarisation between Malays and non-Malays. This behaviour, however, contradicts a public statement made by Hadi Awang himself in 1985 that the party had no intentions of defending Malay special rights as they deemed it an un-Islamic concept. Yet the party’s attitude today reflects none of that. They have even been silent on the plight of the Rohingyas since 2020, despite being among the Islamic groups that popularised the issue before that, simply because the general Malay population today views Rohingya refugees negatively. This contradictory trajectory may seem peculiar at first glance, but it becomes clear once understood within the context of how Malay(sia) and neocolonialism have historically shaped Islam and Malayness.

Yet this orchestrated persecution only confirms the Shinawatra family’s long-held conviction: Thailand’s establishment will tolerate pro-poor reforms only when it lacks the means to block them. Their strategy, enduring judicial harassment and public vilification while safeguarding incremental gains, is not weakness, but a pragmatic understanding of asymmetric political warfare.

For all its flaws, Pheu Thai remains the sole political vehicle capable of challenging Thailand’s military-monarchy complex, the entrenched power structure that has governed unchecked since the Cold War. This latest crisis is another battle in a century-long class war, one where every challenge to the elite status quo by the rural poor has been met with coups, judicial overthrows, or, as now, manufactured scandals. As of early July, the kingdom stands at another precipice: whether the remnants of the coalition can limp on, or whether the tanks will roll again in another coup remains uncertain, though the latter is increasingly likely as, on the 25th of July, the military declared martial law in 8 provinces near the border. What’s undeniable is that the real casualties will be, as always, Thailand’s working class.

It didn’t have to be this way. When Vietnamese forces, along with exiled Cambodians made up of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation liberated Phnom Penh in January 1979, they launched one of the most ambitious post-genocide reconstruction projects in modern history. Vietnamese engineers restored Phnom Penh’s water and electricity within weeks; medical teams vaccinated over two million Cambodians against polio and other diseases; and agricultural collectives revived food production. Assistance from Hanoi’s administration and the hard work of the Cambodian people laid foundations and literacy rates rose from 5% to 88% by 1987. A new generation of Cambodian teachers, doctors and civil servants, many trained in Vietnam, began rebuilding their shattered society…

…Cambodia is a product of UNTAC’s 90s “end of history” free market fever experiment. The state abdicated its role in providing social care and basic infrastructure to the market, supplemented by a vast international aid program (the largest ever in dollar amount at its time). Today though, as aid funds dry up, the state finds itself completely lacking the capacity to function. Very few levers are left for Hun Sen, and his successor son Hun Manet, to pull to address the country’s social and economic crises. 

The “transition” from father to son merely formalises what UNTAC set in motion: capitalism without development and genocide survivors as disposable labour. Thirty years after the UN promised peace, Cambodia’s proletariat remains trapped between the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the sweatshops.

At the onset of this war Cambodia’s economy is hemorrhaging from self-inflicted wounds by the elite classes and global market shocks. The garment sector, 40% of GDP and a direct legacy of UNTAC’s sweatshop model, collapsed as Western brands fled, with 90 factories shuttering and 85,000 workers laid off in the past year alone. Foreign direct investment cratered by 32%, while youth unemployment hit 18.4%, a time bomb in a median-age-25 population. The riel (currency) is in freefall, inflation hit 4.5% despite stagnant wages, and 1.2 million Cambodians now survive on under $1.90/day as rice exports dwindle under elite land grabs…

…This war is not about a temple. It has also been misinterpreted as a scrap between Hun Sen and The Shinawatras, some kind of 4D chess game between the US and China or simple nationalist grandstanding. It is none of those. This war is the outcome of a decades-long project of anti-communism on both sides of the border, a war against the poor, fought by the poor as commanded by the elite. Both the US and China have called for peace– along with almost every other state in the region. Those who attempt to paint it as Chinese meddling in Southeast Asia obviously try to do so in bad faith, both parties have accepted some Belt and Road funding, bought some weapons, etc. While those inclined to see this as some kind of US instigated conflict completely fail to see the woods through the trees.

Yes, ultimately it was the US pax-Americana project that birthed these repressive state apparatuses decades ago, but today little direct interference remains beyond the “free” markets they left behind, along with their unexploded ordinance and incalculable trauma. To point the finger at the US is to flatter them, particularly the current administration. This war is between two of the aforementioned reactionary state apparatuses they also happened to leave behind…

…In Bangkok there is a rogue military holding a civilian government hostage, in Phnom Penh there is a state gutted by the fever dreams of the Chicago School, both perpetrating a completely unjust and unnecessary conflict. The only losers in this war, however it ends, will be the poor of Thailand and Cambodia. This is what The Eastern Tigers and organisations like UNTAC were made for. Class war against the poor. 

Peace between nations is the only class-based solution.

Shared peoples

Sharing a border, both have a somewhat sizeable shared populations of their national ethnic groups. However, this is more prevalent in Thailand, where the country has a 5-12% Muslim population (there is conflicting information even between different government sources), mostly concentrated in the Malay-speaking south. This has fueled seperatism due to the Southern provinces being ceded to the Thai kingdom after imperial agreements in the early 20th century. Nowadays the separatism has lessened in militancy but faces a stalled peace process between the separatists, and the military/government. That said, there is still deep resentment and continual securitisation in the Southern provinces, with the endurance of emergency laws that started in 2005. This 'insurgency' has largely been hidden from public media and especially Western media, in which all state and non-state actors seemingly agree to lay low to dissuade foreign interference.

A fun fact is that after the dissolution of the Malayan Communist Party in 1991, past guerrilla members resettled into “peace villages” across Southern Thailand due to Malaysia barring Communist members from re-entering the country. There is some evocative writing there, where chinese migrant labourers who ultimately fought for an egalitarian Malaya forced to reside in a region in which itself was separated from Malaya about 80 years prior.

Southeast Asian developmentalism

Both countries were tailing the main “Asian Tigers” (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong), with some level of industrialization and transition towards full industrial capitalism by the early 1990s. This however would see it’s first major cracks in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8. There has been extensive rhetoric for why Thailand and Malaysia failed to escape the middle-income trap and succumbed to neoliberalism and deindustrialization. Many fall into bourgeois-liberal culturalism or “crony capitalism”/“patronage politics” debates that fails to connect the two countries into the global processes of accumulation, uneven development and imperialism while considering local/national class structures. This neglect is itself a product of neoliberalism, leading to atomized analysis of individualistic policymaking of leaders.

The 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis

There has been extensive literature on this topic so I won’t elaborate too much on it and urge people to read through the news and literature if they are interested.

Post-crash recovery

I like to highlight this era a bit more, to set the stage of the slowdown but not full crash of the two national economies, unlike that of other countries facing structural adjustment. This is because after the crash, it lead to heightened class-based struggles that were reflected in some rethinking and resistance to the “Washington Consensus” in both countries, highlighted by responses by Thaksin’s and Mahathir’s post-crash administrations. This was through debt moratoriums, targeted low-interest loans for rural populations and improved healthcare access schemes (Thailand), and capital controls, renationalization and greater emphasis on social-based Islamic financial instruments (Malaysia). These policies helped propelled Thai Rak Thai (TRT) and Barisan Nasional (BN) to overwhelming electoral victories in their respective elections in the early to mid 2000s. But as capitalism always does, another resulting cyclical crash occurred globally (the 2008 financial crisis), which was especially detrimental for the export oriented businesses.

Current political-economic developments

Household debt to GDP in Thailand and Malaysia are one of the highest in ASEAN, and generally in the world. This is symptomatic of debt-based financialization and is especially concerning for underdeveloped and semi-industrialized countries. About 65% of Malaysian household debt is due to real estate and 17% from vehicle purchases, compared to Thailand’s 33% (real estate) and 16% (vehicles). Thailand’s debt problem however has increasingly come from credit card and personal loans (18%).

Thailand’s economy is characterised by quite large disparities of urban and rural classes, with the affluent urban middle classes advocating for democratisation against the military aligned national bourgeosie. Other more savvy bourgeois groups also support democratization due to the perceived outdated superstructure of the military. Meanwhile, the rural classes consist mainly of farmers, petty commodity producers and semi-proletarians, with consistent classism by the urbanites of being uneducated and falling for simple rhetoric and vote-buying practices. Although typical of many other economies, what separates Thailand from other semi-industrialised countries is this large gap and continual failure to fully convert into a ‘developed’ capitalist economy via disciplining financial capital for investment in modern industrial sectors. This can clearly be seen in the patterns of urbanization in Thailand compared to other Asian countries.

Malaysia on the other hand face contradictions stemming from the complete proletarianization of the peasantry and other backward classes. The rise of migrant labour consisting of 10-20% of the total population (15-25% of the workforce) and racialization as means to negate class consciousness is representative of this capitalist development. The near immiseration of the countryside and integration into the global economy has lead to a rise in Islamic and petty bourgeois reformist movements that seek to mediate their class interests with international Capital. It has also lead to the rise of the urban poor and the precariat whose livelihoods majorly depends on the whims of property developers, landlords and technology platforms.

Edit: Minor grammar mistakes.

In Brief

The position of democracy in Southeast Asia has fluctuated since the Asian Financial Crisis, with democratic concerns gaining prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly showcased in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. But a recent shift toward prioritising economic development over democratic values has been observed, largely due to changes in global politics and the retreat of the United States from democracy promotion, leaving Thailand as the only exception to this trend with its continued struggle for political reform.

A familiar trope in the analysis of Southeast Asian politics is that development is a more urgent concern than democratisation. Popular pressures to increase democratic inclusion and protect democratic institutions may periodically arise. But the more fundamental and constant worry of Southeast Asia’s governments and citizens is thought to be making development—not democracy—work.

For the Western observer who live their lives on the throne of the blood and skulls of the colonized, Global South aspirations of development seem idealistic and nonsensical. But when you have lived in the villages tucked away in the jungles, with no running water or electricity, it becomes real, not rhetorical - something material that needs changing.

This was certainly true for the authoritarian regimes that dominated Southeast Asia throughout the Cold War period. Overcoming the historical hindrances and humiliations of colonialism meant that catching up with ‘the West’ or ‘the global North’ became the prime postcolonial imperative in anti-communist authoritarian regimes like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. They all dreamt of following in Japan’s development footsteps. It eventually became true in the reformed communist regimes of Vietnam and Cambodia as well. They sought to accompany China on its path from Second World to First.

For a professor of political science, you seem to jumble your words. The anti-communist states of Southeast Asia were Third World - not Second - and only Singapore was the only country who wanted to uncritically ascend and claim to “First World”. Here is also where falling-back to a generalising “Southeast Asian” umbrella without addressing the specificities that characterise the political-economy of each country results in an analysis without the facts, or in other words, a writing without meaning.

Yet in the quarter-century roughly following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, concerns about democracy came to loom much larger. A ‘regime cleavage’ within the elite and electorate alike thus came to characterise political competition in Southeast Asia’s wealthiest capitalist societies by the early 21st century.

This was especially true in Indonesia, where an exceedingly punishing economic downturn undid Suharto’s personalistic dictatorship and ushered in a competitive multiparty democracy. Malaysia experienced a vicious crackdown on reformist forces in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, but reformist forces refused to fade. Thailand was no stranger to mass democratic protest—popular will prevailed over military rule in 1973 and 1992, with big assists from the widely beloved King Bhumipol Adulyadej. But the Asian Financial Crisis prompted constitutional reforms aimed at enhancing the electoral connection between voters and politicians.

History to liberals marks semi-connected events portrayed to them by mainstream media without any sort of introspection, which is why they are always wrong, having only gotten 5% of the entire picture.

After the wildly popular—and wildly unpopular—Thaksin Shinawatra was toppled in a 2006 coup, Thai politics fractured along the ‘yellow’ side of militarist, monarchist oligarchy and the ‘red’ side of inclusive and energetic populism. Malaysia saw questions of democratic reform rise in relevance with the launching of the Bersih movement for electoral integrity in that same year.

Indonesia’s 2014 and 2019 elections seemed to hold democracy’s survival in the balance, with Joko Widodo the final rampart against strongman Prabowo Subianto’s ascendance to the presidency. Even in Singapore, the historically weak opposition to the ruling People’s Action Party gained headway in the 2010s largely by promising to constitute a solid procedural opposition in the city-state’s pseudo-democratic institutions.

It would be a stretch to say that democracy had displaced development in the driver’s seat by the 2010s. Still, the fate of democracy certainly loomed larger in election campaigns in the first two decades of the 21st century than the final two decades of the 20th.

Democracy in the Global South is a perpetual victim that needs saving from the United States - this I think more accurately characterises the article’s position than the idealistic bubble it tries to insulate itself with.

But now, democracy is firmly back in the back seat. This is of course not merely a regional story. Donald Trump’s second, far more aggressively authoritarian presidency in the United States starting in early 2025 has taken democracy promotion entirely off the global agenda.

This marks a definitive end to a global era. If democratic concerns are to play any meaningful role in any country’s politics, it can only be through domestic dynamics, not geopolitical pressure or transnational diffusion. The ‘democracy versus autocracy’ framing of world politics so favoured by US administrations from Bush to Biden is dead and buried.

Perhaps an indirect admittance that colour revolution tactics elsewhere in the world failed to gained any sort of relevance in Southeast Asia. But regardless, this sort of “apolitical” “democracy promotion” throughout this article absolves the role of the United States in enacting economic siege on Southeast Asian economies, and blames the plight of under-development as merely inevitable. Will this lead to any thorough introspection of what democracy means beside the mainstream liberal understanding of “procedures”?

I doubt it.

Development is again sidelining democracy in Southeast Asia. The United States’ retreat from global leadership means that Southeast Asian nations will now maximise their economic ties to China, Europe and other Asian economies with less geopolitical hesitation. US tariffs on China will likely divert more lucrative investment projects to the region. As China begins transitioning from its unsustainable export-dependent economy to a domestic demand-driven growth model, Southeast Asian exporters will be first in line to feed the world’s most massive market.

Indonesia and Malaysia are currently the most vivid examples of what happens when development sidelines democracy in national politics. Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election saw questions of democracy become almost entirely irrelevant. Prabowo’s nice-guy makeover allowed him to ride on Jokowi’s long coattails—lengthened by Indonesia’s strong economy—to a comfortable victory. In Malaysia, the opposition’s fight to displace the long-ruling Barisan Nasional coalition has produced a government which acts like it has no latitude to pursue deeper democratising reforms. At times it seems as if cost of living is the only political issue that matters in Malaysia, much like in neighbouring Singapore.

How much does this guy make writing articles about how the poors care too much about living and not much about crossing a paper every 5 years?

The fascinating exception to this trend is Thailand. Among Southeast Asia’s upper-middle-income countries, Thailand is at once the least democratic and the one where democracy still matters the most. Young voters in particular remain deeply committed to replacing the military–monarchy alliance with a far more democratic and inclusive political arrangement. In current times when external pressures for democratisation have evaporated, Thailand is the only Southeast Asian middle-income country where homegrown forces are pressing hard enough for a democratic breakthrough to threaten authoritarian elites’ entrenched interests.

You mean the country that suffered the most under the Asian Financial Crisis, now poorer than China, dealing with multiple instabilities at its borders, is the country in which political mobilisation is much more established? Color me shocked!

The lesson is an ironic one. When authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia stonewall on democratic reforms, they keep democracy at the forefront of the political agenda. When they concede even partial democratic reforms, politics is largely reduced to the quotidian demands of cost-of-living politics, which does not threaten political or economic elites in the slightest. The overall picture appears to be a ‘middle-democracy trap’ to accompany the ‘middle-income trap’.

You all get paid to speak nonsense.

which does not threaten political or economic elites in the slightest

The irony is so painful it’s searing my eyeballs.

The narrowing of political discourse between democracy and selective US foreign policy choices is about what I expected for the filth called the East Asian Forum. I critically support Amerikan (and in this case, Australian aswell) Academia in directly stunting and hampering effective countermeasures to Global South autonomy.

Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.

Midwest freak needs to go fishing instead of wasting everyone’s time talking about topics outside their intellectual capability.

To be clear, there is clear evidence of US involvement in aspects of the opposition. This is inevitable, Malaysia has a large professional English educated middle class owing to British colonization and many who aspire to be professional activists in the NGO industrial complex. The government’s continuation of colonial-era policies of unions and radical political organization meant that in modern-day Malaysian society there are really two avenues for those that want to be politically active: fall under the bureaucracy of parliamentary parties or go through ‘independent’ NGOs in “civil society”. However, this also implies that the past ruling coalition of nearly 50 years as somehow the anti-imperialist or atleast anti-US position. This isn’t the case.

Brief background on Malaysian Foreign Policy

Malaysian foreign policy has stayed remarkably consistent despite changes of government. This is due to the position of Malaysia in the global world economy, where through it’s colonial history and subsequent independence through build-up of native industries, it anchors Malaysian foreign policy and dissuades large changes. As such a lot of the country’s foreign policy hedges on free trade and ensuring domestic political stability and openness to foreign investment. This status-quo remains comfortable for most of the national bourgeoisie. That said, continual pressure from the diverse masses and popular classes ensure that the government could never take an outwardly pro-West position.

In practical terms this means broad alignment with Global South and Islamic interests, despite the prevalence of comprador classes. This means a firm anti-Zionist stance, extensive economic and cultural co-operation with China, close historical and cultural ties with Indonesia and India, and engagements with internationalism through the Non-Aligned Movement and others. It has one of the most progressive foreign policies in Southeast Asia, or at-least in the ASEAN-5, especially concerning China.

Back to the present

The government is now in the process of drafting the 13th Malaysia Plan - the next 5-year plan for 2026-2030, which is when Malaysia is finally forecasted to reach high-income status according to World Bank classifications. This economic development is what I attribute to as the cause of the fracturing and instability of the Malaysian political scene - the fall of Barisan Nasional and rise of Pakatan Harapan and Perikatan Nasional. It represents a shift of power from the old ruling classes to the aspiring and modern national bourgeoise and petite-bourgeoisie, represented by the new or rising political parties, who grew and responded to an environment nearing the end of the Cold War, at the midst of neoliberalism’s establishment. The “radical change” as hoped and expected by the NGOs, Western and Alternative media never happened - which was to no one’s surprise except the liberals.

The current government is currently pursuing a lot of fiscal reforms, while echoing neoliberal phrases that has become all too common. This isn’t especially new - this is merely a continuation of neoliberal policies since the 1990s, before any large changes within the Malaysian parliamentary scene. Generally, neoliberalism in the country has never taken a fully radical turn like that found in Argentina. For parts of the national bourgeoisie, privatization means a loss of their own class’s accumulation, and so neoliberalism trickles in targeting particular industries that maximizes their own racial-class gain. The so-called “third position” found in many semi-peripheral global south countries.

The current Prime Minister does have more of an assimilationist foreign policy rhetorically, especially when compared to some of the previous prime ministers. It falls quite well in line to the coalition’s class base of “sensible” and “smart” (read “business friendly”) policymaking, but again this falls quite in line with past precedent of telling the West what it wants to hear but never actually acting on everything said. The “liberal reformer” seemingly is not much of a reformer after all - but he definitely fits the liberal bill though.

To give another example, he echoes decades old refrains from neighbouring Singapore - whereby the Palestinian cause is “divisive” that threatens “social harmony”. The context of this is that there have been continuous protests and mobilizations for Palestine, especially after October 7th, with demonstrations infront of the US embassy in particular. Sometimes organized by left-wing organizations, sometimes by mainstream political parties - often by the new opposition after the liberals gained power (especially that of Parti Islam Se-Malaysia).

This binary understanding of the role of religion and race is part and parcel of the government’s liberal minded coalition when it comes to racial relations - too simple, sometimes naive. Don’t mistake this rhetoric as being pro-Zionist though, for that is an untenable position in Malaysia. Just recently the Prime Minister emphasized the need to speak against Israeli aggression and crimes in Gaza and Iran and maintaining “centrality” (neutrality), not relying on any one country too much.

What holds for the future?

The so-called rise of “protectionism” has put Southeast Asian economies in a somewhat lucrative position through the China+1 strategy and others. This in effect has risen the trade and foreign investment with the US but it remains to be seen if this foreign investment can be sustained or will actually yield long-term benefits. Malaysia will continue straddling this neutral position, but for a majority of Malaysian policymakers, dealing with the US is merely an economic necessity, but does not hold any of the cultural, political or historical significance like it does with China. Over the longer term, Asian trade and investments will only continue to increase in relevance, with the flagship BRI project, the East Coast Rail Link, on track to finish by next year, bringing needed development to deprived east coast communities and enabling another potential rail link to Thailand.

The Malaysian establishment’s continual acquiescence to Western Capital and unwillingness to be at the forefront of a Global South alternative will undoubtedly continue to roadblock further prosperity and harm the country when the middle-ground becomes impossible, giving further ammunition to those outside the current ruling coalition.

To reiterate what I have wrote in the past, this means that Malaysia can only lean more East as time goes on. It is simply unfeasible for Malaysia to shift West. Economically, politically, culturally, and historically. Do not believe the “analysis” of those that have only stepped foot in this country to visit the beaches. All signs are leading to greater Eurasian and especially ASEAN integration.

And to connect it to current events, having never recognized the Zionist Entity, the country has called the “Israeli Zionist regime” strikes on Iran a “flagrant violation of international law” but falls short of naming the key supporter of “Israeli” aggression, the US of A. Furthermore, Malaysia-Iran relations are friendly although minuscule. In the long-term, I do see growth as the US empire weakens due to both being Islamic countries and high potential for co-operation in many industries, but especially in oil and gas.