According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nine of the ten most obese nations globally are in Oceania. Once a symbol of wealth, obesity here now starkly indicates the opposite: severe food insecurity and systemic poverty. This health crisis is the product of historical colonialism and modern economic structures failing island nations. The Pacific, once home to self-sufficient navigators, is now the epicenter of a metabolic crisis tied to structural dependency, reflecting a profound failure to respect Oceania’s fragile ecological and social balances.

A forced transition: From subsistence to dependency

Historically, Micronesians and Polynesians utilized advanced navigation techniques, subsisting on highly preserved, nutrient-dense foods like breadfruit and taro to survive arduous voyages. Their traditional diet and extreme physical demands favored a strong phenotype capable of efficiently storing nutrients—a survival mechanism for islands susceptible to food shortages. Islanders historically displayed high adaptability; in Tikopia, sustainable practices like rudimentary reforestation were utilized to maintain agricultural harmony, while strict social controls, such as Hawaii’s kapu system, regulated resource consumption.

However, colonial eras dismantled these sustainable systems. Colonizers repurposed islands for extractive industries—phosphate mining in Nauru, sugar in Fiji, and various cash crops—displacing local agriculture and turning fertile grounds into export-driven monocultures. This forced transition from subsistence to a cash-based economy stripped locals of their means of production. Furthermore, modern overfishing by international fleets has put 11% of indigenous fish species at risk, eroding traditional protein sources.

Lacking healthy staples, islanders are forced to rely on global markets for basic needs. Obesity in this context is a survival strategy of the poor, who must consume the cheapest, lowest-nutrient calories to stave off hunger, resulting in a population that is overfed but tragically malnourished.

Structural traps: Spatial poverty and food dumping

The root causes of this crisis are deeply embedded in modern Pacific infrastructure. Decades of resource extraction have left many islands agriculturally unviable. In Nauru, strip mining for phosphate has turned the island’s interior into a wasteland of jagged limestone, forcing the population into crowded coastal strips where traditional farming is impossible and automobile-centric infrastructure discourages walking. Similar spatial constraints in Tuvalu and American Samoa leave little room for agriculture or exercise facilities.

Compounding this spatial poverty is the systemic “dumping” of low-quality food imports. Countries like Australia and New Zealand export mutton flaps—sheep bellies that are nearly 50% fat and deemed unfit for Western markets—to Pacific nations at extremely low prices. These cheap, high-fat meats, alongside refined sugars and white flour, become the primary food sources for impoverished families. Even humanitarian aid often arrives as processed canned goods, reinforcing an obesogenic environment that traps the Polynesian build in a cycle of severe obesity and compounding poverty.

Cultural nuance and the limits of the colonial narrative

While the colonial and economic narrative is powerful, viewing Pacific Islanders solely as victims erases local agency and cultural nuance. Historically, many Pacific cultures associated larger body sizes with high social status and health—a standard predating colonial contact. Though modern food marketing weaponizes this preference, it remains a distinct internal factor complicating a purely economic analysis. Additionally, local governments have sometimes failed to prioritize public health during economic booms.

The crisis is also shaped by internal migration and the challenges of small-scale island governance. Severe obesity and limited local opportunities have forced many to migrate to the US mainland, Australia, and New Zealand, where they face discrimination and high rates of depression and alcoholism, straining already fragile medical infrastructures. Acknowledging these complexities provides a holistic view. Solutions require synthesizing traditional wisdom with modern public health, rather than blindly adopting Western medical models or simply romanticizing a pre-colonial past.

Charting a path forward: Sovereignty and sustainable health

Combating this crisis requires systemic change and localized empowerment. Countries that historically extracted wealth from these islands bear a responsibility to fund infrastructure, nutritional education, and healthcare initiatives. Simultaneously, there is a positive grassroots trend toward fitness and community sports, such as youth basketball leagues in the Marshall Islands, which must be expanded.

To reduce reliance on foreign aid and imported food, islands must develop sustainable, non-extractive revenue streams. Tuvalu’s successful leasing of its .tv internet domain stands as a prime example of innovative economic development. Furthermore, governance must involve the wider populace through deliberative democratic processes, allowing communities to collaboratively design culturally appropriate health solutions. While geopolitical tensions complicate these efforts, the global shift toward green and healthy initiatives positions the Pacific as a natural focal point for progressive change.

Reclaiming health in Oceania

The obesity epidemic in the Pacific is far more than a public health failure; it is a profound symptom of historical and economic poverty. By dismantling self-sufficiency and forcing a dependency on low-quality global markets, colonial and modern governance structures created a crisis that the islands were unequipped to handle. Until underlying economic structures—trade imbalances, extractive land use, and food dumping—are addressed, health initiatives will remain temporary fixes. Obesity is a visible marker of a region struggling to reclaim its sovereignty.

Critical questions remain: Can Pacific nations achieve food sovereignty while integrated into the global economy? How can Western powers support sustainable development without imposing paternalism? Ultimately, can Pacific Islanders leverage their adaptive heritage to redefine “wealth” and “health” on their own terms? The answers will determine the viability of their nations in the decades to come.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr.

Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr. is a graduating Asian Studies student at UST, specializing in history and geopolitics. A versatile generalist with internship experience spanning HR to Knowledge Management across corporate and NGO sectors, he is currently writing his thesis on intergenerational gaps in Thailand.

On April 21, Coins.ph announced that Filipinos could pay for Jollibee using USDT. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas had authorized the move, allowing the local cryptocurrency exchange to route dollar-pegged stablecoins through QRPh, the national QR payment system it created and manages. At checkout, stablecoins convert automatically to pesos. Merchants receive pesos. The transaction completes on the domestic payment infrastructure.

Coins.ph described it as “game-changing,” noting how 700,000 QRPh-enabled merchants are now reachable via USDT and USDC. The framing was correct as far as it went, but it missed the structural question underneath the announcement: what happens when foreign-currency instruments operate inside its own sovereign payment infrastructure?

Why the Philippines?

Overseas Filipino workers remit approximately $37 billion each year, accounting for about 8 percent of the country’s GDP. This sizable group regularly manages dollar transactions, compares transfer costs, and responds to fluctuations in the peso’s value. These conditions have made dollar-linked instruments practical for Filipinos, even before Coins.ph integrated with QRPh.

The announcement met an audience already familiar with digital finance. GCash and Maya have introduced many Filipinos to mobile-first payments, making them comfortable transacting outside traditional banks. Between 7 and 12 million Filipinos now use cryptocurrency, with stablecoins gaining popularity among families receiving remittances, freelancers paid in dollars, and traders moving funds between crypto investments. According to Coins.ph, families of overseas workers have begun using USDT to protect against peso depreciation and avoid high bank transfer fees.

When the peso reached a record low of PHP 61.72 to the dollar on May 15, its second consecutive record low, the incentive to retain dollars rather than convert to pesos increased significantly. These factors are not merely background conditions but active mechanisms. The integration did not create demand for stablecoins in the Philippines; instead, it provided an entry point into the formal payment economy.

The dollar question

The BSP has been operating under an explicit policy of non-internationalization of the peso. Without control over domestic currency circulation, a central bank’s ability to set monetary conditions and manage inflation is diminished. BSP Circular 922 (2016), which regulates cross-border currency transfers under the Manual of Regulations on Foreign Exchange Transactions, states that outward transfers of legal tender exceeding PHP 50,000 require prior BSP authorization to safeguard “control of liquidity and overall monetary conditions.”

Dollar use has always existed informally in the Philippines. But the BSP could tolerate informal dollar exposure because it was fragmented, structurally outside the official payment system, and therefore outside the liquidity dynamics it was actively managing. For example, In practice, traders use stablecoins to park funds between crypto positions.

However, the Coins.ph integration ends the BSP’s ability to look past informal dollar exposure. Dollar-pegged assets now flow through infrastructure that the BSP created, governs, and explicitly maintains as the mechanism for a “safe, convenient, and interoperable payment system” nationwide. That QRPh converts stablecoins to pesos at the point of sale is technically significant, but it does not resolve the upstream question: households and merchants now have an institutionally sanctioned pathway to hold, transact with, and in periods of peso weakness, prefer dollar-linked instruments within the formal economy.

This is the line the IMF has been tracking. It’s 2025 departmental paper on stablecoins identifies currency substitution facilitated by stablecoins as categorically different from informal dollar use. Traditional dollarization requires physical cash or bank accounts denominated in foreign currency, which entails opening a foreign-currency bank account that requires documentation, minimum balances, institutional access, and often physical proximity to a branch. But foreign currency-denominated stablecoins face none of those constraints as they reside entirely on smartphones and the internet, operate continuously, and settle near-instantly at potentially low cost. The IMF further notes that network effects accelerate the replacement of local currencies once adoption begins. Local alternatives struggle to compete unless they provide similar utility and integration, and if a significant portion of economic activity shifts to foreign-currency-denominated stablecoins, the central bank’s control over domestic liquidity weakens, and seigniorage income declines as demand for the local currency decreases.

BSP’s position

What makes the BSP’s posture particularly difficult to read is that five months before the Coins.ph integration went live, its own leadership was articulating exactly the opposite position. Speaking in Hong Kong in November 2025, BSP Deputy Governor Zeno Abenoja confirmed the central bank was maintaining a “cautious approach” to stablecoin proposals, that regulatory work remained at an “early stage,” and that the BBSP was limiting stablecoin entry to controlled channels, insisting on licensed intermediaries and regulated frameworks before permitting broader integration. Most of the proposals being reviewed, Abenoja noted, involved dollar-backed stablecoins rather than peso-backed alternatives.

The BSP’s regulatory record does complicate the picture somewhat. The BSP’s regulatory record does complicate the picture somewhat. Since Circular 944 in 2017, the BSP has pursued a consistent strategy of bringing digital assets inside the regulatory perimeter rather than pushing them out. Licensing requirements for virtual currency exchanges, expanded oversight of Virtual Asset Service Providers under Circular 1108 in 2021, and a regulatory sandbox for fintech and crypto pilots under Circular 1153 in 2022 all follow the same logic: if an activity is happening regardless, regulate it rather than ignore it. The Coins.ph integration fits that pattern. Stablecoin flows through QRPh are now subject to anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) requirements. The BSP gains visibility over dollar exposure it previously could not measure, which is a policy benefit in a country where informal dollar circulation has always outrun official data.

With 7 to 12 million Filipinos already using crypto and stablecoin adoption accelerating through informal channels, the BSP faced a choice between two forms of dollar exposure: unregulated and invisible, or regulated and observable. Controlled integration, on that logic, is preferable to an offshore ecosystem that grows without generating any domestic data, regulatory handle, or policy leverage.

What visibility does not solve

Visibility is not control, and the distinction matters enormously when the peso is under pressure. The BSP can observe USDT moving through QRPh, but observation ends at the blockchain. Tether makes its reserve decisions from El Salvador, and US monetary policy is set in Washington. And when the peso depreciates, adjusting BSP rates does nothing for the share of retail transactions settling in these financial instruments.

When a currency depreciates, the rational household response is to hold dollar-linked assets rather than convert back. In this context, the QRPh integration does not merely accommodate existing stablecoin holdings - it also creates an institutionally sanctioned mechanism for that holding behavior to persist through the formal payment system. Monetary policy can still affect peso-denominated credit conditions, but its transmission weakens at the margin as more of the retail transaction economy touches instruments that do not respond to BSP rate decisions.

The IMF’s April 2026 working paper on stablecoin stability notes this: when stablecoin issuers hold risky or illiquid reserve assets, confidence shocks can trigger runs originating entirely outside Philippine monetary conditions, on a blockchain in another jurisdiction, with consequences that land on QRPh-connected merchant terminals the next business morning. Moreover, once a sufficient share of retail transactions migrates to foreign-currency instruments, the central bank loses traction on domestic liquidity, interest rate decisions in Manila stop transmitting to the parts of the economy settling on dollar-pegged rails, and seigniorage income falls.

The BSP’s FX Manual grants broad authority over cross-border currency flows, but stablecoin transactions through QRPh convert to pesos at the point of sale, which likely places them outside the Manual’s existing definitional perimeter. This gap between what the BSP can observe and what its existing tools can directly address was always theoretical. Now it can be seen as practical, with the peso at an all-time low and dollar-linked instruments now embedded in the national payment infrastructure.

The harder question

What the Coins.ph integration into QRPh ultimately depends on a question the BSP has not publicly answered. By accepting some short-term monetary friction, the BSP gains long-term regulatory oversight over a trend it realized it could not prevent. Features like peso-at-checkout conversion, KYC requirements, and a traceable ledger give regulators policy tools that peer-to-peer stablecoin use never offered.

However, the IMF’s 2025 paper explains what happens next. Once stablecoins are widely used for domestic payments, local options have a hard time competing because network effects support whatever is already built into the system.

But this integration also brings up a question the BSP has not addressed yet. Can a central bank expand its payment system to include dollar-linked instruments without eventually encouraging dollarization?

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

The issue of Violence Against Women (VAW) is one that is pervasively unique, given that it requires an excessive amount of mental, physical, and emotional labor from its victims to prove that the crime committed is one that is valid in the first place. Based on statistics reported by UN Women (2021), Southeast Asia bears witness to a prevalence of 33% of married or partnered women between the ages of 15-49 experiencing sexual and/or physical violence at the hands of current or former male partners at least once in their lives. The ASEAN has established a specific plan of action, one that requires a multi-faceted and multidimensional approach that begins with addressing the root of the problem through implementing preventative measures that approach gender-based violence on a unit-level basis. Specifically, preventative measures against VAW focus on education and building on proven strategies of awareness and empowerment-building amongst both young men and women in how consciousness regarding VAW is framed, emphasizing the way cases significantly harm their victims. The development of protection services for survivors through improving post-harm support systems, including ones that go beyond medical and psychological services, as well as the strengthening of legal structures that provide an improved sense of justice for victims, including the institutionalization of quality assurance, are some of the other regional plans of action that tackle the elimination of VAW in Southeast Asia. While these frameworks present a comprehensive approach to eliminating violence against women, they often fall short in implementation, given that the burden of their execution falls on national governments, which often prioritize other countries’ interests, thus paying less attention to pressing VAW issues. This does not suggest that VAW is not considered a critical concern; rather, it indicates that recognition of a problem alone is insufficient without proper implementation tools.

Southeast Asia and violence against women, presented through statistics

To illustrate, Timor-Leste, as reported by CoWater International in 2024, reports a prevalence of 58.8% experiencing Intimate Partner Violence within their lifetime, reporting one of the highest frequencies of VAW globally. Comparatively, Indonesia reports a prevalence of 11.8%, with a study conducted in 2025 also recording a concerning number of reproductive-age women justifying marital violence, which is greatly influenced by educational attainment, socio-economic class, and cultural norms. These statistics do not imply that the women themselves are to blame for the perpetuation of such cultural norms, but are rather embedded in them in adapting to patriarchal norms reinforced by longstanding institutional structures.

In the cases of Vietnam and Cambodia, both boast an increasing decline in physical violence reports, but see a rise in sexual violence cases alongside it. This may be due to the fact that both countries have been somewhat successful in enforcing protections for victims of physical violence, due mostly to how visible a crime it is perceived to be, as opposed to how difficult it is to detect when sexual violence occurs. Rape kits are commonly utilized in the analysis of victims’ bodies to determine whether an assault has taken place, but these examinations also have their limitations in the way that samples are handled or retrieved. Specifically, there have been accounts of needed samples being collected from victims, but not being examined properly or at all.

In contrast, Malaysia reports significantly less cases when it comes to physical violence, but comparatively exhibits a higher prevalence of psychological and emotional forms of intimate partner violence, with these statistics relating significantly to lower educational background, lower socio-economic status, and exposure to substance abuse within the household. Similar to Vietnam and Cambodia’s rising sexual violence cases, emotional and psychological abuse are less detectable by a legal system, thus making it difficult to prove in open court, which goes along with socio-structural tolerance for gender based violence. Despite a lower prevalence in reported cases within Southeast Asia, Malaysia observes a concerning rise in reported VAW cases every year.

Thailand and Singapore, on the other hand, report a significantly lower prevalence in VAW — this, however, does not make them exempt from having any cases at all. In Thailand, despite extensive collaboration with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, data from the Ministry of Public Health’s One Stop Crisis Center indicates that out of approximately 30,000 reported cases of violence, only 5,000 proceeded to police investigation, and just 1,500 resulted in arrests—illustrating a significant drop-off between reporting and legal accountability. Similarly, Singapore reports comparatively low prevalence of intimate partner violence, yet recorded an increase in reported cases, rising from 1,741 in 2022 to 2,008 in 2023.

A more complex case comes from the Philippines, where the Republic Act 9262: Violence Against Women and Children Act of 2004, characterizes intimate partner violence into four specific categories: physical, psychological, economic, and sexual. For physical violence, victims are required to submit a medico-legal form, issued by a certified doctor, or at the very least, detailed documentation with the victim’s identifiable face and injuries sustained from the abuse. However, for most cases, filing a case for VAW under physical violence without a medico-legal will result in the evidence being less credible. Additionally, psychological violence also requires a psychological report from an accredited mental health facility, which states that the victim undoubtedly has sustained mental trauma from the abuse. 17.5% of Filipina women between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced intimate partner violence within their lifetimes, and even through addressing this concern, these numbers continue to grow.

What these patterns tell us

Finding the courage to report intimate partner violence cases is complex in its foundations. Considering the psychological turmoil that comes with retraumatization and a legal system that operates through patriarchal lenses, the process itself can be profoundly draining, both physically and emotionally. Often, the reporting of VAW cases to the proper authorities require complex processes that force victims to re-live some of the most devastating moments of their lives — these procedures include creating detailed written accounts of the abuse; rehashing these experiences verbally for law enforcement, lawyers, mental health practitioners, even before speaking before the court; and dealing with the risk of evidence not being sufficient enough on every level of the reporting process; to name but a few. In assessing the percentages presented above, one must take into account other limiting factors that contribute to the retrieval of this data, given also how not all cases of VAW are reported immediately or at all. This restricts accurate accounts for true frequency, as rampancy is, for the most part, higher than what is recorded. For lower-prevalence countries in VAW cases, their figures suggest that lower rates do not necessarily reflect lower incidence of violence, but may instead reflect variations in reporting mechanisms, institutional responsiveness, and survivor willingness to seek formal assistance.

Another element that complicates the reporting of these cases is how embedded modern society still is in patriarchal norms, which continue to show up even with significant development in women’s empowerment. These complications bleed into the way unit-level interactions address survivors, with subtle victim-blaming language being present even during the reporting process and earlier. Harmful questions such as “Why did you not choose a better partner?” or “Why did you not fight back?” place far too much responsibility onto the victim, overlooking the complexities of the abuse perpetrator and victim dynamic, which, most of the time, begin with the perpetrator projecting kindness before gradually displaying coercive and abusive tendencies. These small, subtle ways that victims find themselves discredited and shamed for actions that were committed toward them play a significant role in the dissuasion of participating in the reporting process, as survivors often anticipate further humiliation and fear that, despite engaging in formal mechanisms within the legal process, the outcome may still leave them vulnerable or at a disadvantage.

Additionally, the rampant rise of red pill content consumption amongst impressionable young men, on top of their engagement in actions that perpetuate rape and VAW culture through “locker room talk” and joking about domestic violence, plays a significant role in sustaining inequality and further victim-blaming behaviors. In this way, patriarchal norms are not only preserved but actively reproduced, undermining both prevention efforts and the effectiveness of existing legal protections.

What is the future of VAW policies in Southeast Asia?

The reality is, we can not reach the total elimination of Violence Against Women until society has reached a specific level of gender equality, where women’s issues are dealt with proper urgency and care. The issue with VAW frameworks does not just lie with policy, but a reflection of deeply entrenched social norms that continue to shape attitudes, behaviors, and institutional responses. The quest for eliminating all forms of VAW requires multiple phases of social reform, which should simultaneously proceed alongside sustained policy development. Significant effort must be directed toward challenging the normalization of abusive behaviors among women, while simultaneously reinforcing the unacceptability of such conduct among men.

This may be further advanced through strengthened policy measures, including the imposition of more stringent penalties for sexual violence and emotional abuse. Policymakers must also sustain collaboration with women-centered organizations to develop more responsive and adaptive frameworks, particularly those that address emerging forms of digitally facilitated abuse. These efforts should be complemented by the continued transformation of law enforcement institutions into safe, accessible, and survivor-centered spaces for reporting, grounded in sustained training that promotes trauma-informed and non-victim-blaming language. However, moving forward, a key question remains whether existing institutional reforms are sufficient to keep pace with the rapidly evolving methods of VAW. Equally pressing is the extent to which policy frameworks can meaningfully shift deeply embedded socio-cultural standards that continue to shape reporting behavior and institutional responses. As Southeast Asia continues to expand its legal and policy architecture on violence against women, future attention must be directed not only toward legislative strengthening but also toward assessing implementation gaps, vulnerabilities, and the persistence of cultural norms that mediate how violence is recognized, reported, and addressed.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Marianne Zabine Generoso

Marianne Zabine “Zabi” Generoso is a graduating senior under the Asian Studies program at the University of Sto. Tomas. She was the former Vice President for External Affairs at the UST Asian Studies Society, a position that allowed her to facilitate community development programs such as “Girl Talk,” and “Sagip Kita Kaibigan: A Disaster Risk Reduction Initiative.” She specializes in wartime feminist research, and has a special interest in the role of Gender in international politics.

As Kuala Lumpur prepares to host SEMICON Southeast Asia 2026, Malaysia appears positioned to lead the regional semiconductor industry. However, persistent structural wage challenges and the misconception of a surplus in STEM talent threaten to undermine this ambition. If these foundational issues remain unresolved, Malaysia risks losing the competition for elite talent to established centers such as Singapore and emerging, state-driven competitors like Vietnam.

Malaysia’s wage vulnerability

With Kuala Lumpur hosting SEMICON Southeast Asia 2026, the conference is more than an industry gathering — it is a declaration of Malaysia’s intent to dominate the regional semiconductor boom. The National Semiconductor Strategy (NSS) has already drawn a staggering RM59.85 billion, over USD 15 billion, in realized investments as of late 2025. Coupled with a bold target to cultivate 60,000 highly skilled engineers by 2030, the government is making a calculated push to shift Malaysia from “back-end” assembly to “front-end” high-value activities, such as integrated circuit (IC) design.

But behind the billions in capital influx lies a critical vulnerability: Malaysia is bleeding the very human capital required to execute this transition.

With the global semiconductor race is now about who can retain the smartest minds to run them, Malaysia’s ambition to ascend the technological value chain will fail unless it fundamentally dismantles its structural low-wage economy. By relying on a massive but severely underpaid STEM pipeline, Malaysia is attempting to build a high-tech future using a cheap-labor framework. If it cannot correct this wage mismatch, Malaysia risks losing its regional talent to aggressive, state-subsidized challengers like Vietnam and its heavily funded Strategy 1018.

The Malaysian reality: The illusion of the STEM surplus

On the surface, the national STEM talent appears robust. According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics data, Malaysia remains one of the world’s top STEM producers, with 40.2% of its tertiary graduates holding STEM degrees. This high yield is the legacy of long-term policy measures, most notably the government’s 60:40 initiative, which aims to steer the majority of students toward the sciences.

However, volume does not equal industry readiness, particularly for the rigorous demands of high-value IC design. Malaysia is suffering from the illusion of a STEM surplus. The domestic pipeline produces thousands of graduates annually, yet the semiconductor sector faces a crippling deficit of specialized talent. The shortage is so acute that the then-Investment, Trade, and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz publicly acknowledged the severity of the gap, going so far as to propose allowing foreign STEM graduates from local universities to work in the country to plug the immediate leaks.

The root of this disconnect is not solely educational; it is also fundamentally economic. While the government frequently highlights that salaries for senior tech and C-suite roles in Malaysia are now rivaling those in Japan, the entry-level landscape—where the talent begins—remains remarkably grim. A sobering metric from the Board of Engineers revealed that 35% of surveyed electrical engineers earned a starting salary of less than RM2,000 per month (roughly $450 USD).

This is an active deterrent. A multibillion-dollar technological pivot cannot be executed while offering top-tier technical minds wages comparable to the local gig economy. Consequently, Malaysia is caught in a persistent cycle of brain drain. Elite graduates either abandon the sector for more lucrative roles in finance and general software, or they simply cross the causeway to Singapore, where starting engineering salaries easily triple those offered in the tech hubs of Penang or Kulim.

A policy error or the “OSAT trap”?

Industry veterans might rightfully push back on this critique. One could argue that the depressed wage ceiling for electrical and electronics (E&E) engineers in Malaysia is not a sudden policy failure, but a deeply entrenched structural reality.

For the past forty years, Malaysia has built its technological empire on Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT). This is the “back-end” of the industry—essential, but notorious for its razor-thin profit margins. From an economic standpoint, the argument goes, local tech companies simply do not have the margin to pay Silicon Valley or even Singaporean wages for back-end packaging and testing. The low salaries are a feature of the OSAT economy, not a bug.

While this was true for Malaysia of the 1990s, it is a fatal mindset for Malaysia of 2026. The entire premise of the NSS is a pivot to “front-end” dominance—specifically IC design and advanced wafer fabrication, which carry massive profit margins. The crisis Malaysia faces today is that it is attempting to hire highly specialized, front-end IC design talent using legacy, back-end OSAT salary scales.

A paradigm shift cannot be executed while clinging to the economics of the past. Malaysia’s historic success as an assembly hub has become a trap; the legacy industry structure is cannibalizing the nation’s high-tech future.

The regional challenger: Vietnam’s strategy 1018

Malaysia’s hesitation to aggressively restructure its talent economics is particularly dangerous given the regional landscape. Southeast Asia does not exist in a vacuum, and the “China Plus One” strategy has emboldened aggressive new players—most notably, Vietnam.

In September 2024, Hanoi launched its own master plan, Strategy 1018. Vietnam’s target is nearly identical to Malaysia’s, aiming for 50,000 highly skilled semiconductor personnel by 2030. However, their approach to the quality problem is starkly different.

Malaysia has largely relied on broad-stroke educational policies, like the aforementioned 60:40 ratio, hoping that the free market and incubation initiatives like SemiconStart will naturally absorb and refine this raw talent pool. Vietnam, conversely, is treating semiconductor talent as a state-led infrastructure project. Hanoi is not just hoping students choose technical sciences; the state is actively subsidizing specialized faculties, building state-of-the-art national laboratories, and directly underwriting the training of elite IC designers to jumpstart its ecosystem.

By aggressively bridging the gap between raw graduates and industry-ready specialists, Vietnam is bypassing the free-market wage friction that is currently stalling Malaysia. If a global tech giant is looking to establish a high-value IC design center in 2026, they are weighing Malaysia’s experienced but underpaid (and therefore shrinking) talent pool against Vietnam’s state-funded, hyper-targeted engineering pipeline. In the battle for front-end dominance, Vietnam’s fiscal intervention may prove far more effective than Malaysia’s reliance on historical momentum.

Escaping the assembly line

The road to becoming a semiconductor superpower requires more than silicon and foreign direct investment; it requires the human capital to design the architecture of tomorrow.

Malaysia possesses the capital, evidenced by the NSS’s early victories, and it possesses the raw numbers, validated by its UNESCO-topping STEM graduation rates. But hardware cannot function without software.

If Malaysia cannot fundamentally restructure the wage ceilings created by its OSAT history and fails to adopt a more targeted approach to elite talent retention, the narrative will shift. SEMICON Southeast Asia 2026 will not be a celebration of Malaysia’s technological ascension, but rather a high-profile showcase of a nation destined to remain the world’s assembly line, while its neighbors design the future.

This is an externally contributed piece. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, or practitioner — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Bijaksabara Hikmawan

Bijaksabara Hikmawan is an international human development specialist and regional education strategist with extensive experience across ASEAN’s higher education ecosystem. A former International Affairs Associate at Southeast Asia’s largest university, he currently consults for international development agencies on the intersection of technology, mobility, and inclusive governance.

Pax Silica is an unequal arrangement. The US gets supply chain security, mineral access, and a compliant jurisdiction insulated from the pressures of cross-strait uncertainty. The Philippines gets development infrastructure, foreign expertise, and a seat in the global tech ecosystem. That asymmetry is the architecture of the deal. And the Philippines has been here before.

On April 16, 2026, the US and Philippine governments announced the creation of an Economic Security Zone (ESZ) in New Clark City, Tarlac, centered on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to the US Embassy fact sheet:

“Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg today announced the United States’ and the Philippines’ plans to establish a 4,000-acre industrial hub to secure inputs vital to American and global supply chains. The site is located in the Luzon Economic Corridor of the Philippines. The site — the first of its kind — is being designated by the Philippines as an Economic Security Zone, a new model for AI-native investment acceleration hubs being developed under the Pax Silica Initiative.”

Current cross-strait tensions have made it vital for the US to look for alternatives in technological development. The Philippines, rich in critical earth minerals like cobalt, nickel, chromite, and copper, and home to a proven semiconductor workforce, fits. Policymakers like Philippine Department of Finance Undersecretary Frederick Go view Pax Silica as an opportunity to leverage domestic resources, secure critical nodes in global supply chains, and pioneer next-generation industries.

Domestic opposition, led by groups like the Makabayan bloc, views the alignment as a strategic liability by contending that tethering Philippine industrial policy to Washington’s defense sector risks Chinese economic or military retaliation, characterizing the move as a capitulation of state interests. The more productive question is: on what terms does the Philippines engage?

What the Philippines stands to gain

The Philippines is no stranger to semiconductors, with the sector making up 63–65% of its merchandise exports. However, because of corruption and insufficient power capacity, the industry has stagnated, focused on assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) rather than fabrication. Pax Silica, if negotiated well, could be the mechanism that breaks that stagnation.

The ESZ would encourage international companies to establish operations in the Philippines, bringing expertise to advance and propel local industries. The Philippines would not only extract its critical mineral endowments but also process them domestically for semiconductor manufacturing — positioning itself as a vital hub in the global tech ecosystem. This would boost the national economy and expand job markets at a moment of rising unemployment, affecting even college graduates. Investments by the US and corporations could create infrastructure that can be taxed, and a wider job market for graduates in the IT and engineering sectors.

The US Embassy fact sheet notes this ambition:

“The Economic Security Zone is intended to fuse American expertise in institutions and legal regimes – internationally enforceable contracts, transparent regulatory standards, and expert dispute resolution – with enhanced access to the Philippines’ outstanding workforce and talent, mineral endowments, energy resources, and strategic position at the crossroads of Indo-Pacific trade.”

What the critics get right

Progressive and leftist groups, columnists, and everyday people online have raised legitimate concerns. Dan Somera has written that the US would have a two-year free lease of the ESZ, renewable for 99 years, as an “in-kind contribution” from the Philippines. The Makabayan bloc and Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, progressive groups, have compared the ESZ to America’s former military bases in Clark and Subic, pointing to its diplomatic immunity provisions and the practice of US common law within its boundaries.

They fear the amplification of unsustainable mining, land grabbing, and militarization within the Luzon Economic Corridor. Critical discussion online has also centered on the power and water consumption demands of AI infrastructure and the environmental costs of expanded mining. Some analysts warn that job creation could be minimal, with American experts filling skilled positions while Filipinos are left with lower-value work.

The precedent that matters

The Clark and Subic bases offer the most instructive and most complicated precedent. For decades, the US military presence generated significant local economic activity: employment, commercial ecosystems, and infrastructure that became structurally embedded in the surrounding communities of Angeles and Olongapo.

At their peak, the bases employed tens of thousands of Filipinos directly, with estimates of total dependent employment, including service industries, running considerably higher. When Mount Pinatubo accelerated the American withdrawal and the Philippine Senate voted against lease renewal in 1992, the economic dislocation was severe enough that both cities faced prolonged depression before reinvention as the Subic Bay Freeport Zone and Clark Freeport Zone eventually took hold.

The infrastructure the Americans left behind, runways, port facilities, and utilities, became the foundation for post-base economic development. The arrangement had been asymmetric throughout: the US got strategic Pacific positioning, the Philippines got an economy built substantially around foreign military expenditure. The harm was real. Documented labor exploitation, environmental damage, and the social costs of base economies are part of the historical record and should not be minimized.

The argument here is narrower. Asymmetric arrangements, even extractive ones, can deposit durable infrastructure and economic capacity that outlasts the arrangement itself. Pax Silica can operate on a similar structural logic. The question for policymakers and civil society is not whether the arrangement is equal, it isn’t, but whether the Philippines can negotiate terms that maximize what remains after the Americans’ strategic interests have been served.

The window that remains open

The ESZ’s legal framework is still a work in progress. According to the US Embassy fact sheet, the Philippine and American governments are still discussing and finalizing the legal and development framework for long-term development. That unfinished status is leverage, not a red flag.

Jurisdiction, local hiring requirements, mineral processing terms, and environmental standards are all still on the table. Civil society groups and policymakers who oppose the ESZ’s current trajectory would do more by engaging that process than by opposing the zone’s existence outright. Outright rejection risks foreclosing the development pathways the Philippines needs. Proactive negotiation for parity, even if it means allowing Washington to claim the political win, could be the more strategically sound position.

The Philippines is at a crossroads. Pax Silica could represent a meaningful step in its economic development, but only if the Philippines enters the arrangement with clear-eyed awareness of what it is, what it is not, and what still remains to be determined. The government and Filipinos just need to pay attention.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr.

Rocco Carmine B. Paragas Jr. is a graduating Asian Studies student at UST, specializing in history and geopolitics. A versatile generalist with internship experience spanning HR to Knowledge Management across corporate and NGO sectors, he is currently writing his thesis on intergenerational gaps in Thailand.

Southeast Asia’s security landscape has never been as simple as the US-China binary suggests, but for decades, that binary provided its dominant logic: Washington as the primary guarantor for maritime states, Beijing as the dominant partner across much of the mainland.

Alongside that competition, middle powers like Australia, India, South Korea, and, above all, Japan have been quietly deepening their security footprints in the region, mostly through non-lethal means. But that will soon change in April 2026, as Japan’s decision to scrap its ban on lethal weapons exports changes the terms of that involvement decisively.

For years, Tokyo had been building a quiet architecture of defense relationships across the region through two main instruments. The first was a series of bilateral Defense Equipment and Technology Transfer agreements with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This created the legal framework for non-lethal equipment transfers before the export ban was ever lifted. The second was the Official Security Assistance (OSA) program, introduced in Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy and launched in 2023, which enabled Japan, for the first time, to provide military aid directly to the armed forces of like-minded countries.

This was a meaningful distinction from its longstanding Official Development Assistance, which explicitly prohibited military use. OSA crossed that line, signaling that Tokyo’s conception of regional security cooperation was expanding. OSA’s first recipients were the Philippines, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Fiji, and the program has since expanded to include Indonesia, Thailand, and East Timor, with approximately $116 million budgeted in fiscal 2026. This was a 125 percent increase on the previous year. Through OSA, Japan delivered coastal radar systems and patrol boats to the Philippines, rescue boats to Malaysia, and, in 2024, signed a Reciprocal Access Agreement with Manila to facilitate joint exercises and logistics sharing.

However, in April 2026, the ceiling on the scope of that presence changed. Specifically, on April 21, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s cabinet approved scrapping Japan’s longstanding ban on lethal weapons exports. This decision opened the door to overseas sales of warships, missiles, fighter jets, and drones. However, exports remain limited to 17 countries with existing agreements, subject to National Security Council approval. Japan maintains a ban on transfers to countries at war, except in narrow cases affecting its own national security.

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have strained US weapon supplies and production, and stretched Washington’s commitments. Allies across Asia and Europe are diversifying as confidence in American guarantees wavers under the Trump administration. And Japan’s own defense industry, long limited to serving the Self-Defense Force, needed external customers to remain viable. As Takaichi put it: “No single country can now protect its own peace and security alone.”

From pacifist to arms supplier

The foundations were laid over a decade. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2014 reinterpretation of the Three Principles on Arms Exports allowed Japan to begin exporting non-lethal defense equipment to select partners. Early results were modest: patrol boats to Indonesia and Bangladesh, radar systems to the Philippines, and, in 2016, the leasing of five TC-90 trainer aircraft to the Philippine Navy.

This 2026 revision effectively removes five legacy export categories that had confined Japanese defense products to support roles: rescue, transport, surveillance, mine-clearing, and instead authorizes the transfer of complete weapons systems across air, land, and naval domains. This development is not a sudden break from pacifism, but rather the policy endpoint of a decade-long incremental shift.

The market Japan is entering

Japan’s biggest immediate deal is with Australia. On April 18, Tokyo and Canberra signed what is now Japan’s largest postwar defense export contract: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will build the first three of a planned 11-ship fleet of upgraded Mogami-class frigates for the Royal Australian Navy, with the remaining eight to be constructed domestically by Austal in Western Australia. The initial three-ship contract is valued at approximately A$10 billion (US$7 billion), with the broader program potentially reaching A$20 billion over the decade. Australia selected Mitsubishi Heavy Industries over Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, not, as sometimes reported, over a South Korean bid. What made this deal incredibly unique was that, while it was agreed in 2025, the contract was only formally signed in April, signaling that the agreement was designed with Japan’s 2026 Arms export liberalization in mind.

In Southeast Asia, Japan is entering a market where South Korea already has a foothold. South Korea is the Philippines’ top defense supplier, with Korean-made systems including FA-50 light attack aircraft, frigates, and patrol vessels worth around $3 billion delivered over the past decade. Indonesia has purchased six Jang Bogo-class submarines from Korean shipbuilders and co-developed the KF-21 fighter with Seoul. Malaysia acquired 18 FA-50 aircraft in 2023. South Korea’s more explosive growth, though, has come from Europe, which includes Poland, Romania, Estonia, and Norway, driven by post-Ukraine demand. In Southeast Asia specifically, Japan is not displacing a dominant supplier so much as entering a crowded field that already includes South Korea, India, France, and the United States. That crowding matters for the alliance-management problem that arises later.

The growing division

The reception to Japan’s policy shift maps almost exactly onto Southeast Asia’s existing fault lines.

The impact of Japan’s policy shift is shaped by existing regional divides. Mainland states offer limited opportunities: Cambodia and Laos maintain close ties with Beijing. Thailand, though officially a US treaty ally, has been diversifying its arms purchases toward Chinese suppliers. Without serious maritime disputes, demand for Japanese naval platforms across most of the mainland is thin. Myanmar is excluded from Japanese arms transfers due to restrictions on exporting to conflict-affiliated areas.

Vietnam is the interesting exception. Historically reliant on Russian-origin equipment, it has been quietly diversifying toward Japan, India, South Korea, and the US as Moscow’s position weakens. A 2020 agreement for six Japanese coast guard-based patrol vessels was an early signal of that shift. But Vietnam’s Four No’s policy limits how openly it can engage with Japan, which is increasingly aligned with the US-led security architecture. Hanoi will take what it can get without being seen taking sides.

In contrast, maritime Southeast Asia is where Japan’s new posture will be most consequential. Indonesia is reportedly negotiating to acquire Mogami-class frigates, with four potentially constructed by state-owned shipbuilder PT Pal under a 2021 technology transfer agreement. Malaysia has deepened its defense partnership with Tokyo through bilateral agreements since 2018 and was among the first recipients of OSA. The Philippines has been the most openly enthusiastic: Defense Secretary Teodoro welcomed the policy change as a contribution to “regional stability through deterrence,” and Japan has already delivered 12 coastguard patrol vessels to Manila. Japan is also considering transferring decommissioned Abukuma-class destroyer escorts to the Philippines, though, as of late April 2026, no formal offer has been made, and discussions remain at the inspection stage.

Ultimately, maritime Southeast Asia, facing real Chinese pressure in the South China Sea, is gravitating toward a Japan-US security network. In contrast, mainland Southeast Asia, insulated from such pressures and economically integrated with Beijing, is not. Japan’s expansion of arms exports will not by itself create these divisions; they already exist, but the new export policy could deepen them, and ASEAN’s claim to regional centrality will bear the cost.

Market-alliance management

Japan is entering a market it helped build. A decade of quiet diplomacy, non-lethal transfers, and OSA grants has given it real relationships across maritime Southeast Asia. Now it arrives with far more powerful tools. The risk is proportional.

The instructive precedent is AUKUS. When the US, UK, and Australia announced their submarine partnership in 2021, France was not merely outbid; it was blindsided and shocked when Australia suddenly canceled the Submarine contract it had enthusiastically agreed to in 2016. Paris had treated its submarine contract with Canberra as the cornerstone of its Indo-Pacific strategy. What collapsed was not just a contract but a relationship that took years to rebuild. Paris recalled its ambassadors to Washington, London, and Canberra, an extraordinary diplomatic rupture between supposed allies. While diplomatic tensions were eased, the scars they left still affect confidence between France and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Japan faces an analogous risk. If Tokyo signs a defense deal with the Philippines or Indonesia that undercuts an existing arrangement with the US, a European partner, or South Korea, without prior consultation, it risks the same rupture. South Korea warrants particular care. It is simultaneously Japan’s most direct competitor in Southeast Asian naval and aviation markets and a critical security partner in any scenario involving China or North Korea. Their complicated bilateral history makes missteps here politically costly, extending well beyond the defense market. Whether Japan can compete with South Korea’s well-established export industry, which has a strong track record of timely delivery, remains to be seen. Japan must still demonstrate that it can be a dependable supplier as expected by its partners, especially given that delivery delays were among the key reasons Australia walked away from its submarine agreement with France in 2021, which triggered a diplomatic crisis.

US Ambassador to Japan George Glass called the export rule change a “historic step.” Washington’s enthusiasm is genuine. But enthusiasm from the top doesn’t automatically translate into coordination on the ground, and Japan’s defense ministry is now engaged in simultaneous discussions with multiple Southeast Asian partners. Managing those relations in market terms, without disrupting confidence among countries that rely on each other, will require diplomatic discipline Tokyo has not yet demonstrated at scale.

Japan spent a decade earning regional trust through restrained, non-lethal security cooperation. That credibility is now being staked on its transition to an arms exporter.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

In May 2022, one false claim on Facebook — that no critic of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was ever arrested during Martial Law — accumulated 187 million views and tens of thousands of likes before fact-checkers could mount a meaningful response. By then, it did not matter. The claim had already circulated through thousands of partisan feeds, reinforced by algorithmic recommendations, and absorbed into a political reality that many Filipinos experienced as simply true.

What made this episode significant was not only its scale, but what it revealed about the changing conditions under which political truth is produced and recognized. In this context, information no longer moves through a shared public arena where claims can be openly contested and evaluated. Instead, it circulates through segmented, algorithmically curated networks that privilege engagement over accuracy, allowing falsehoods to harden into belief before they can be meaningfully challenged.

Decades before social media platforms existed, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was already asking the question that now sits at the heart of politics across Southeast Asia — what happens to democracy when the space where citizens form public opinion is captured, fragmented, or manipulated? This is no longer just a theoretical concern but a lived reality, as contemporary electoral politics increasingly unfold within digitally mediated environments shaped by algorithmic amplification, strategic communication, and unequal distributions of power.

Habermas and the public sphere

To understand what is at stake, it is necessary to first understand what a functioning public sphere is supposed to look like and why Habermas spent his intellectual life defending it.

In his landmark 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that democracy is not simply about elections or formal institutions. It depends on the prior existence of a communicative space where citizens can freely assemble, debate issues of shared concern, and form public opinion through the force of reasoned argument rather than money, power, or coercion (Habermas, 1962/1989). He traced this ideal to 18th-century European coffeehouses, literary salons, and the early press: spaces where social rank was, in principle, set aside, and what mattered was the quality of an argument. His term for this was the “public sphere” — the arena between the state and private life where citizens constitute themselves as a political community through rational-critical debate.

For Habermas, this sphere operates on three fundamental conditions: open accessibility to all citizens, the bracketing of social status in debate, and the orientation of discussion toward common concerns rather than private interests (Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox, 1974). When these conditions hold, deliberatively formed public opinion becomes democracy’s check on power. When they collapse, what remains is what Habermas called “staged public opinion” — the manufactured appearance of democratic consensus masking its actual absence (Habermas, 1962/1989).

Habermas was already pessimistic by mid-century. Commercial mass media, he argued, had colonized the public sphere, replacing substantive political discourse with entertainment and ideological packaging and turning citizens into passive audiences rather than active deliberators. His most pointed warning, however, came much later. In his 2022 essay “Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere,” he identified platform media as the critical new threat: algorithm-driven platforms generate “centrifugal forces” that fragment public discourse into self-enclosed bubbles, making it structurally impossible for “competing public opinions which are representative of the population as a whole” to form. His most recent work, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (2023), extended this diagnosis: the digitalization of media is “radically altering” the structure of the public sphere, fragmenting it into countless “pseudo-publics” — communities of shared belief incapable of generating the cross-cutting deliberation on which democratic legitimacy depends (Habermas, 2023).

Southeast Asia is where this diagnosis has become most visible and most consequential. The region’s cases are not interchangeable; each illuminates a distinct way in which the Habermasian public sphere is being deformed.

When the algorithm chose a president

The 2022 Philippine presidential election was the fullest expression of what Habermasian fragmentation looks like when deployed by a single, well-resourced political machine. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s victory was not built primarily on policy platforms. It was built through a years-long, coordinated social media operation spanning Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, which had approximately 35 million Filipino users by early 2022. The campaign constructed a singular historical narrative — that the Martial Law era of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was a “golden age” of discipline and prosperity rather than one of authoritarianism and documented human rights violations — and seeded it systematically across non-political pages, entertainment accounts, and fan pages, reaching users with no prior reason to apply political skepticism to what they consumed.

Habermas theorized this dynamic, where well-resourced actors convert “social power” into political influence through professionalized communication strategies, thereby structurally disadvantaging ordinary citizens. Analysts at ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute described the result as “digital autocratisation” — the systematic undermining of democratic norms through digital technologies. Fact-checkers from the Tsek.ph coalition described the disinformation environment as a “firehose of falsehood” — designed not to convince but to overwhelm, collapsing the very possibility of shared factual ground.

By 2025, the disinformation machinery had fractured along with the Marcos-Duterte political alliance, turning inward ahead of the midterms. AI-generated deepfakes and coordinated bot networks amplified competing partisan narratives, while a record seven in ten Filipinos reported being more concerned about disinformation than at any previous point. As the 2028 election cycle approaches, the structural vulnerabilities that made this possible remain unresolved, including low digital literacy, with 51 percent of Filipinos struggling to identify fake news as recently as 2022, weakening independent journalism, and ongoing platform deregulation.

The cute grandfather

Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election offers a variation on the same Habermasian theme, but with a crucial distinction. Whereas the Marcos campaign deployed disinformation to rehabilitate a tarnished legacy, Prabowo Subianto’s campaign employed a different strategy, using emotional spectacle to render accountability effectively irrelevant.

Prabowo, a former general credibly accused of human rights abuses during the Suharto era, rebranded himself through TikTok into “gemoy” — Indonesian slang for “endearingly cute.” Viral videos of him dancing, playing with children, and engaging in light-hearted performances were amplified by TikTok’s engagement algorithm, generating 376 million interactions in a single week in January 2024. The correlation between platform exposure and voting behavior was significant: of Indonesians who accessed TikTok daily, 61.6 percent reported they were likely to vote for the Prabowo-Gibran ticket, reflecting the platform’s structural capacity to convert emotional resonance into political preference.

In the foregoing, the gemoy campaign represents a textbook instance of what Habermas described as the decline of rational-critical debate in a commercialized public sphere. It did not suppress competing viewpoints through disinformation; it bypassed the conditions for rational deliberation entirely. As one analysis concluded, the result was a public sphere dominated by “performative populism and sentiment-driven support,” in which emotional appeal, digital virality, and symbolic branding often outweigh historical accountability and policy platforms. Prabowo secured a first-round victory with approximately 58 percent of the vote.

The Indonesian case then produced what is perhaps the region’s most instructive Habermasian reversal. The same algorithmic platforms that served as Prabowo’s campaign infrastructure became, months later, the organizing infrastructure for mass civic opposition. When the Prabowo administration imposed sweeping budget cuts in early 2025, the hashtag #IndonesiaGelap (“Dark Indonesia”) mobilized hundreds of thousands of students into the streets in what became the largest sustained protest wave since the Reformasi era.

The government’s response was to flood the same digital space with counter-narratives, principally under the hashtag #IndonesiaTerang (“Bright Indonesia”). Research by the Monash University Data and Democracy Research Hub found that #IndonesiaTerang generated only 2,209 tweets compared to approximately 3 million under #IndonesiaGelap, drawn from fewer than 2,000 unique accounts versus 104,000 for the protest hashtag. This is precisely the communicative pathology Habermas described: a state deploying strategic communication to manufacture the appearance of public consensus while civil society actors attempt to sustain an autonomous deliberative space against it. The disparity in numbers suggests the state lost that particular exchange; the structural conditions enabling such manipulation, however, remain fully intact.

When the feed was not Enough

Thailand’s 2023 election presents a third and perhaps most sobering case. It shows what happens when a demonstrably robust digital public sphere generates clear democratic legitimacy, yet offline institutions refuse to recognize or uphold it.

Move Forward’s campaign was, by measurable standards, an instance of what an inclusive digital public sphere can achieve. Its organically driven social media operation dominated electoral discourse across Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The party accounted for 56 percent of the most popular posts under the election hashtag #election23 on Facebook, generating more than 10 million interactions with over 80 percent positive sentiment. Its leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, grew his Facebook base by more than 200 percent in 60 days; each post averaged 59,000 interactions, 99 percent of which were positive. Move Forward won the popular vote, becoming the largest single party in the lower house with 151 seats.

In hindsight, the movement never formed a government. Under a military-drafted constitution that granted an appointed Senate a role in selecting the prime minister, Move Forward was blocked from assuming power despite its electoral mandate. The Constitutional Court subsequently ordered the party dissolved and banned its leaders from politics for ten years, ruling that its campaign to amend Thailand’s lèse-majesté law constituted an attempt to “overthrow” the constitutional monarchy.

Thailand’s case illustrates the sharpest possible gap between communicative power and political power. Move Forward successfully constituted itself as the dominant voice in Thailand’s digital public sphere, achieving in the online arena precisely the kind of open, accessible, cross-cutting deliberation Habermas describes as the normative ideal. It was shut out regardless. As one academic analysis concluded, the Thai case “demonstrates powerfully how autocrats might lose an election due to social media, yet still manage to hang on to power through entrenched authoritarian institutions.”

This represents the outer limit of the problem in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines and Indonesia, the public sphere is being reshaped from within by disinformation, algorithmic spectacle, and manufactured consensus. In Thailand, it was overridden from without. Both dynamics lead to the same conclusion. A functioning digital public sphere may be necessary, but not sufficient, for democratic outcomes.

Looking ahead

In retrospect, Habermas’ theory does not require every citizen to be trapped in a filter bubble to carry analytical weight. It requires only that the structural conditions for shared, cross-cutting deliberation be meaningfully weakened. Across these three national cases, the evidence suggests they have been, in three distinct ways: through coordinated disinformation that dissolves a common factual ground in the Philippines; through algorithmic emotional spectacle that bypasses the conditions for rational deliberation in Indonesia; and through institutional suppression of a public sphere that functioned largely as intended in Thailand.

However, Habermas argued that democracy’s deepest precondition is not a constitution or an election commission. It is a public sphere in which citizens can reason together, across difference, toward a shared political will. That precondition is under stress across Southeast Asia — not uniformly, but structurally, and in ways that are intensifying as AI-generated content, weakening institutional safeguards, and entrenched political disinformation networks reshape the terrain ahead of upcoming election cycles in the Philippines and beyond.

The algorithm does not care about democracy. And for now, those who understand that best are using it most effectively.

The question for policymakers is whether regional responses — cross-border platform accountability, independent media investment, and digital literacy infrastructure — can outpace the technology before the next election cycle forecloses the possibility of a shared public sphere. But the harder question, the one that no institution can answer on our behalf, is whether we as citizens are still capable of the critical distance that democracy asks of us: whether we can pause before sharing, question what we feel certain about, and hold open the possibility that the feed we scroll through is not the whole of political reality.

Habermas believed that rational-critical debate was not merely a procedural nicety. It was the act through which a society constituted itself as free. Across the region, the next elections will be, in part, a test of whether that belief still has any purchase here.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Timothy John Santiago

Timothy John Santiago is a graduate of BA in Philosophy from the University of Santo Tomas. Professionally, he works in risk intelligence AI, leveraging DaaS and SaaS platforms alongside open-source intelligence to support data-driven research. He is also active in public service, serving in various youth and policy initiatives.

The United Nations Security Council has shaped the fate of global peace, but Southeast Asia has rarely had a front-row seat in the council. The Philippines’ bid for a non-permanent seat in 2027-2028 is not just a national ambition; it is a rare opportunity to bring ASEAN’s growing voice into the room where the world’s most influential security decisions are made.

The Philippines’ UNSC bid through an ASEAN lens

The Philippines’ renewed bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2027-2028 is not just a domestic diplomatic project; it is an opportunity to amplify ASEAN’s voice inside the world’s most powerful security organ. Manila’s campaign explicitly links its candidacy to the Association’s collective interests, such as peaceful dispute settlements, climate resilience dialogues, and post-conflict peacebuilding. This positions the Philippines as a regional conduit rather than a lone nationalist actor. If elected to a non-permanent seat, the Philippines would become the first ASEAN member state to sit on the Council in years, underscoring the bloc’s underrepresentation in a Council that shapes global security while ASEAN remains largely absent from the permanent table.

From an ASEAN viewpoint, a Philippine seat would greatly strengthen the region’s leverage in debates over maritime disputes, climate-related security, and as well as its expertise in post-conflict governance. The Philippines’ experience with the Bangsamoro peace process and its participation in UN peacekeeping operations gives it practical lessons in conflict resolution and regional stability that are directly relevant to ASEAN’s own security challenges. When ASEAN’s Foreign Ministers and the Philippines coordinate their positions, the impact is clear. The bloc reaffirms its commitment to multilateralism and the UN Charter, and the Philippines, in turn, projects ASEAN’s concerns and views, such as the need for climate-security integration and inclusive peace processes by delivering it in the Security Council deliberations.

The Philippines’ bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council faces both domestic skepticism and as well as a tight international competition, complicating the regional representation. Domestically, some Philippine officials and commentators raise questions to the narrative of prioritization of the UNSC campaign amid pressing socioeconomic and governance crisis within the nation, arguing that resources and diplomatic capital could be better allocated toward domestic reforms or for more concrete regional security mechanisms like the ASEAN rather than multilateral prestige. Internationally speaking, the Philippines is not alone in bidding for a non-permanent seat for one of the Asia-Pacific seats in the council. Central Asian nation Kyrgyzstan also vies for a 2027-2028 non-permanent seat, and has already secured backing from several UN member states and regional blocs, sharpening the race for the limited spots and raising the risk that the Philippines could be out-organized or out-mobilized in behind the scenes diplomacy. These dual pressures, as well as domestic criticisms about the cost-benefit and external competition for thin quotas of support, could mean that Manila must not only justify the bid in ASEAN-centric terms but also demonstrate that the Philippines’ presence in the council is a strategic regional necessity, not just a symbolic national aspiration.​

ASEAN-centric observers also note that Manila’s campaign is framed as a “pathfinder and peacemaker” role, not as a platform for narrow bilateral disputes. The Philippines have emphasized that for decades, the Philippines bring experience in multilateralism and readiness to listen, engage, and represent the broader Asian and global interests, including ASEAN’s own priorities. Having an UNSC Seat means ASEAN would have a voice in the global security architecture.

​Domestically, the bid is often read through a national pride viewpoint where the Philippines could take advantage of prioritizing the south china sea disputes alone. Yet from a regional standpoint, the more compelling argument is that ASEAN is needed in global representation. In a body where the Asia-Pacific is chronically underrepresented, the Philippines can serve as a regional bridge, especially on issues like maritime disputes, climate-related displacements, and post-conflict governance. This then aligns with ASEAN’s doctrine of centrality and multilateralism, and if the bid succeeds, it signals that a dynamic and middle-power ASEAN member can project the bloc’s values into the center of global security decision-making.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

When the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed in late February 2026, four ASEAN members - the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia - negotiated with Iran for safe passage of their vessels.

The Philippines was the first among these four, negotiating on the 2nd of April with Tehran to be recognized as a non-hostile country and to ensure the safe passage of Philippine-flagged vessels. Malaysia followed five days later, securing safe passage and reiterating its commitment to freedom of navigation and the safety of maritime passages. Indonesia and Thailand are currently in the midst of their own negotiations with Tehran to secure the safe passage of their ships.

While the region seems to be inching toward dialogue, Singapore refused to do so. Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, stated, “As a matter of principle, and not because we’re taking sides, I cannot engage in negotiations for safe passage of ships or negotiate on toll rates.” Malaysian politicians were quick to respond to Singapore’s stance. Nurul Izzah Anwar, Deputy President of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), asserted that Malaysia would not be lectured on its engagement with Iran, defending the country’s preference for dialogue over disengagement.

This exchange was presented as a principled disagreement. But it revealed that during crises, states prioritize the protection of their economic foundations and subsequently invoke principles to justify their actions. The country able to maintain the strongest principled stance did so because neighboring states absorbed costs it did not incur, costs that ultimately became irrelevant when Washington imposed its own blockade on the strait weeks later.

Three economic structures, three responses

The Philippines had the least room to maneuver in this crisis. Importing 98 % of its crude oil from the Middle East, with confirmed fuel reserves of roughly 51 days at the point of crisis, Manila’s negotiation was less a foreign policy decision than a fiscal emergency. Manila had already declared a State of National Energy Emergency on March 24, making negotiating with Tehran paramount.

Malaysia’s situation was also similar. Despite being an oil-producing country, it still imports 70% of its crude oil to meet domestic demand. However, Kuala Lumpur presented the security of safe passage as the outcome of high-level diplomatic engagement, emphasizing its commitment to freedom of navigation in accordance with international law. The underlying circumstances mirrored those of Manila, but the official narrative differed.

Singapore’s refusal was based on fundamentally different considerations. Unlike its neighbors, Singapore’s economy relies on the uninterrupted movement of ships through the Strait of Malacca rather than on oil imports. The maritime sector contributes approximately 7 % of Singapore’s GDP, and its trade-to-GDP ratio is about 320 %, among the highest globally. When Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan stated in Parliament that transit passage “is a right, not a privilege,” he was correct in legal terms and was also safeguarding a critical national asset. For Singapore, the legal framework supporting freedom of navigation is not abstract; it is essential to the port economy.

Thailand and Indonesia are also in negotiations, making Singapore the sole outlier against a near-unanimous regional response. Every country whose economy depended on energy imports reached the same conclusion, and the one whose economy depended on something else reached a different one.

What was actually being paid

Reports of confirmed toll payments for the Philippines or Malaysia were never substantiated, and Manila’s foreign department explicitly denied that any fees were paid to Iran. However, the absence of a financial transaction does not imply that no cost was incurred. Each country implicitly accepted that passage through the strait required negotiation rather than being exercised as a right under international law. Every government that entered negotiations treated access as conditional, a legal position that Singapore refused to validate.

The objection here, of course, is that negotiating under duress, without formally acknowledging Iran’s legal right to condition passage, doesn’t constitute legal precedent in any strict sense. International law requires both state practice and opinio juris, the belief that the behavior is legally required, before a norm shifts. Countries like the Philippines, which are acting in an emergency, don’t necessarily signal legal acceptance.

But of course, legal norms don’t only erode through formal acknowledgment. They can also erode through accumulated behavior. When enough states treat passage as something to be negotiated rather than exercised as a right, the reality shifts regardless of what anyone formally concedes.

Singapore recognized this cost explicitly. The Philippines and Malaysia were unable to do so, not due to flawed reasoning, but because their circumstances precluded long-term considerations. A government facing only 51 days of fuel reserves lacks the capacity to prioritize the erosion of behavioral norms over immediate supply security. And with the Philippines already became the first country globally to declare a State of Emergency, the calculus is inherently asymmetric: the consequences of fuel shortages are immediate, tangible, and politically severe for these states. In such a context, the cost of contributing to a shift in the treatment of maritime passage under international law becomes secondary and is not reflected in any single national account.

This perspective was available to Balakrishnan, whereas his counterparts in Manila and Kuala Lumpur could not afford such clarity. However, this insight does not equate to moral superiority. The point is not that Singapore acted in bad faith, its position is consistent with decades of historical doctrine, but that consistency is far easier to maintain when the costs are diffuse and borne by others.

Singapore’s position also contains an unacknowledged contingency. Its principled refusal to negotiate with Tehran remained viable because neighboring states adopted pragmatic approaches. Had every ASEAN member maintained the legal position, the regional energy crisis would have intensified, and Singapore’s principle would have entailed significant costs. Singapore benefited from both legal consistency and regional energy stability without incurring the associated costs. Its unblemished stance was, in part, sustained by the compromises of its neighbors.

Then Washington did the same thing

Following the failed negotiations by the United States (US) and Iran in Pakistan, US President Donald Trump announced a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, targeting vessels entering or departing Iranian ports. By April 16, US Central Command confirmed that the blockade was fully implemented and that no vessels had passed in the first 48 hours.

The Philippines maintains that its agreement with Iran remains in effect. Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro publicly confirmed the arrangement, noting that coordination with Iranian authorities continues and that the Iranian ambassador personally contacted her regarding Philippine-flagged vessels scheduled to transit the strait. Manila is thus simultaneously upholding its agreement with Iran while operating under the military protection of the United States, its treaty ally, which is now enforcing a blockade on the same waterway.

Moreover, in the same negotiations, the US and Iran brokered a 10-day ceasefire, with Iran recently announcing that the Strait would be open to commercial vessels for the remainder of the ceasefire.

The blockade rendered the bilateral agreements operationally moot, but the accumulated behavior of states treating passage as conditional rather than inherent will persist beyond this crisis, available as precedent the next time a chokepoint closes (Singapore’s Strait of Malacca, for example). By the time Iran declared the strait open and Washington maintained the blockade, diplomatic assurances secured by the region had become irrelevant in the face of a situation far beyond the influence of any Southeast Asian country.

This was always the deeper truth of the episode: small states do not set the terms of access to global chokepoints. Rather, they negotiate within the margins that great powers leave them - and when those powers act, the margins disappear.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

In 2024, Asia and the Pacific recorded a staggering 24 million disaster-related displacements—accounting for over half of the global total. This figure, highlighted during the March 2026 International Organization for Migration (IOM) dialogue, is often framed by states as a logistical nightmare or a failure of border security. However, viewing these millions through the lens of cold statistics conceals a deeper, more corrosive crisis of human dignity. When migration is treated merely as a panicked flight from rising tides or scorched earth, the agency of the individual is erased.

While international bodies like the IOM provide the necessary high-level platforms for cooperation, they often operate in a vacuum of abstraction. The true “reality check” resides within the region’s (Civil Society Organization) CSOs, which are actively reclaiming the narrative of climate mobility. By grounding policy in frontline experience and indigenous customary systems, these organizations argue that migration should not be a desperate last resort of the vulnerable, but a proactive, dignified strategy for adaptation. Ultimately, the path to regional resilience lies in moving away from top-down management toward a framework in which the right to move—and the right to stay—are defined by the communities themselves.

The temporal gap

The climate crisis in Asia and the Pacific is not a single event but a spectrum of hazards that demands a sophisticated, dual-track response. On one end are sudden-onset disasters—the flash floods, heatwaves, and droughts that triggered over 24 million displacements in a single year. These are the headline-grabbing shocks that typically command state attention. On the other end, however, lies the more insidious threat of slow-onset processes: the creeping sea-level rise, shifting rainfall patterns, and gradual environmental degradation that erode the very foundation of habitability.

The structural tension within the region arises from a fundamental mismatch between political “short-termism” and cumulative reality. Government disaster responses are largely reactive, designed to manage the immediate logistics of temporary evacuation and emergency aid. Yet, for millions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, climate mobility is a long-term, cumulative process in which the point of “no return” is reached well before a storm hits. When policy remains fragmented—focusing only on the next monsoon or fiscal cycle—it fails to address the permanent loss of ancestral lands and the total restructuring of local economies.

This creates a profound “top-down” disconnect. International frameworks and national mandates often prioritize bureaucratic efficiency over the indigenous customary systems that have governed mobility and land use in the Pacific for centuries. In nations like Fiji, these traditional systems are not merely cultural artifacts; they are the primary mechanisms through which communities negotiate risk and define belonging. When regional policies overlook these local realities, they inadvertently strip agency from the displaced. The analytical problem, therefore, is not a lack of data but a lack of integration. By ignoring frontline insights from civil society, top-down strategies risk treating climate migrants as passive victims of a “natural” disaster rather than active participants in political and social transformation. The stakes are clear: without aligning formal policy with indigenous resilience, the region’s response to migration will remain as dangerous as the coastlines it seeks to protect.

Practice-based resilience

The intellectual heart of the climate mobility debate is not found in the displacement statistics, but in the concept of “Dignified Livelihoods.” For too long, regional policy has viewed migration as a binary: a person either stays and suffers or leaves and survives. CSOs are dismantling this reductionist view by arguing that true dignity is rooted in choice. If a community is forced to move because of a total collapse of local opportunity, that is not “adaptation”—it is a failure of the state.

A primary example of this is seen in the work of Mars Ashir, Project Coordinator at the National Workers Welfare Trust in India’s Narayanpet district. By securing 125 days of guaranteed rural work annually, local initiatives have transformed the “Right to Stay” from a theoretical hope into an economic reality. This is a critical intervention against urban vulnerability. When rural workers are not forced to migrate to cities to work in often exploitative informal economies, they retain their social capital and community ties. Dignity, in this context, is the financial and structural power to resist unwanted displacement.

Simultaneously, for those who must or choose to move, the narrative is being rewritten through digital sovereignty. In Vietnam, Khanh-Linh Ta’s “Green Path Migrants” project demonstrates that the modern climate migrant is not a silent victim, but a digitally connected agent. With over 80% of its engagement coming from youth aged 18–34 and a significant majority of users being women, this platform uses “youth-focused language” to navigate the complexities of mobility. This digital shift allows vulnerable groups to share practical solutions and peer-to-peer insights, effectively bypassing top-down information systems that often fail to reach those most affected by shifting rainfall or saline intrusion.

The reasoning for this shift is that CSOs provide the “practice-based knowledge” that high-level frameworks lack. International agencies can model sea-level rise, but they cannot model how a mother in a rural household negotiates the risk of a drought against the risk of sending her child to an unfamiliar city. They cannot map the “informal and collective action” that sustains a community when a storm passes. Because CSOs operate at the household level, they understand that mobility decisions are deeply gendered and generational. By centering the experiences of women and youth, these organizations ensure that “resilience” is not just a buzzword in a synthesis brief, but a lived reality that prioritizes the dignity of the person over the efficiency of the policy. In the end, a dignified move is one made with a clear map, a full stomach, and a protected identity.

The limits of localism

While the argument for grassroots agency is compelling, it must be tempered by the sheer magnitude of the coming crisis. By 2050, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and Asian Development Bank project that up to 48.4 million people in East Asia and the Pacific could be forced to move. Critics of the decentralized approach correctly ask: Can a network of relatively small CSOs truly manage a human migration of this scale? The necessity of state-led intervention and massive top-down infrastructure—ranging from planned city expansions to international visa frameworks—cannot be ignored. Local resilience projects like those in India or Vietnam are vital, but they cannot build the cross-border legal protections or the multi-billion-dollar sea defenses required to protect tens of millions.

Furthermore, intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits of “localism” and indigenous customary systems. While these systems provide deep cultural continuity, they often lack the sustainable resources and formal legal standing in international law to protect migrants once they cross a sovereign boundary. A traditional land-tenure system in Fiji, for instance, offers little protection to a family that has relocated to an urban center in Australia or New Zealand. Without a high-level policy bridge, the “dignity” of local systems risks being lost in the friction of international bureaucracy.

Finally, we must confront the internal complexities within these communities—specifically the persistent gender gap. As Mars Ashir noted, migration decisions are still largely dictated by male household members, often sidelining the needs and voices of women and youth. If CSOs are to be the true “reality check” for regional policy, they must also act as internal disruptors of the patriarchal structures that silence vulnerable members within their own ranks. The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between top-down and bottom-up, but to create a symbiotic governance model where the state provides the massive structural “canopy” under which local, dignified, and inclusive agency can actually flourish.

The legislative litmus test

As the March 2026 IOM dialogue concludes, all eyes turn toward the forthcoming synthesis brief—a document that must be more than a record of shared grievances. For this dialogue to transcend mere rhetoric, its “Common Principles” must undergo a rigorous transition from high-level advocacy into the hard reality of national budgets and international law. Analysts and citizens alike should watch closely: will the proactive strategies be codified into state-funded resilience planning, or will they remain marginalized as “best practices” while top-down infrastructure continues to dominate the fiscal landscape?

The true test of regional cohesion lies in whether governments can move past reactive disaster management toward a framework of Climate Sovereignty. This requires a fundamental shift in how we define success in the face of environmental collapse. In an era where 48 million lives hang in the balance, we must confront a final, existential provocation: does the future of the Pacific and Southeast Asia depend on the height of the sea walls we build, or on the strength of the legal and social protections we afford to those forced to move beyond them? The answer will define the dignity of the region for generations to come.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Cyril Karl Carandan

Cyril Karl Carandan is a dedicated humanitarian worker with a bachelor’s degree in Diplomacy and International Affairs from De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. He formerly served as the Secretary-General of the 1st Benilde Model ASEAN Meeting. Cyril specializes in MEAL frameworks, research, and ASEAN.

Restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz have exposed the structural dependence of the Philippines on oil imports. In response, the administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. recalibrated into a pragmatic approach in the South China Sea (SCS)–a joint oil and gas exploration with China. Analysts believe Trump is making China win, who only needs to watch its rival collapse from within without firing a single shot. A joint oil and gas exploration in the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), or within the West Philippine Sea (WPS), is indeed transformative for Filipinos, but it would also hand another win for China. Viewed historically, it is a reactive fallback, not a strategic choice for the smaller country trapped in asymmetric relations and a global energy crisis. Although triggered by a 21st-century war, the eventuality of this move is path-dependent on decades of institutional paralysis and underinvestment in a unified maritime strategy that integrates resource use.

This is the third time since the 2005 Tripartite Agreement for Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) between the Philippines, China, and Vietnam, and the 2018 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Cooperation on Oil and Gas Development between the Philippines and China, that the two countries are exploring the possibility of a hydrocarbons cooperation in disputed waters. In 1994, a consortium among the Philippines, China, and the United States was also proposed but never pushed through.

Each attempt fails for the same reasons. The ownership and exploitation of natural resources by wholly-owned foreign corporations is unconstitutional. More importantly, the legal and political implications of joint exploration remain deeply contentious.

While UNCLOS allows joint exploration in contested waters, the 2016 arbitration’s nullification of the nine-dash line makes the WPS legally undisputed. To enter a “joint” arrangement would imply that the waters are disputed after all, undermining Manila’s own legal victory. Domestic politics compounds the dilemma. No administration wants to be remembered as the government that compromised sovereign rights in favor of accommodation with Beijing, particularly when anti-China sentiment remains a matter of political legitimacy.

From China’s perspective, “setting aside disputes and pursuing joint development” has been a constant call in its dispute settlement since the 1980s. In principle, it promises mutual economic gains for both sides. However, it comes at the cost of accepting China’s sovereignty, binding smaller states into its laws that must govern operations, and thereby normalizing its status quo presence, albeit illegal. Furthermore, there is a trust deficit in China’s commitment to comply with rules and agreements.

There are both risks and opportunities in pursuing joint exploration with China in the WPS. However, what is often missing from public discourse is a deeper scrutiny of the prevailing assumption that compromise is the only way to harness the energy sources sitting in the WPS, and that China’s aggression is the only thing that has been stopping the Philippines from doing so independently. This is not to critique joint exploration itself; if carefully structured and aligned with legal grounds and developmental objectives, a negotiated arrangement may indeed prove to be the most practical move. Rather, the more important question is how the Philippines arrived at a point where such a compromise is perceived as the only path forward.

Other Southeast Asian claimants have not accepted this option.

In the history of SCS disputes, multiple claimants have employed several approaches to assert territorial claims. These are not limited to China’s active maritime enforcement and militarization of the features, or the Philippines’ media transparency, defense alliances, and international law. Vietnam and Malaysia’s strategies, despite China’s protests and periodic harassment, also include economic integration in sectors such as hydrocarbons and fisheries. Arguably, sovereignty must not be asserted merely through legal rhetoric or militarization, but through sustained physical and economic presence. After all, territorial demarcations in contested areas are also driven by the need to determine who gets access to which resources.

Historically, the Philippines pursued hydrocarbon exploration in the WPS since the 1970s. It was also one of the early movers in Southeast Asia to occupy several features in the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) and legalize the claims. But rather than a politically sustained strategy of physical assertion, occupied islands never truly expanded, and oil and gas explorations remained an economic activity separate from sovereignty and discouraged by weak enforcement, years of stalled operations, and risk aversion or defensiveness.

Today, the Philippines stands as the only major Southeast Asian claimant not actively developing new hydrocarbon resources in waters contested by Beijing. And this was not always due to China.

Successful extraction has been conducted with state-owned and private service contractors in safer, nearer oil and gas blocks in offshore Palawan, outside core contested areas. This includes the almost-depleted Malampaya, the decommissioned Nido-Matinloc Complex, and ongoing exploration and production in the Galoc, Malampaya-East (extension), and Calamian oil fields, among others. Limited deepwater drilling technology, geological uncertainty, and commercial viability concerns that require years of exploration before production largely constrain operations. It was only in the 2010s that security concerns became a decisive factor in hydrocarbon operations. The 2011 Reed Bank incident involving MV Veritas Voyager and the 2019 Reed Bank collision involving the Filipino vessel Gem-Ver conducting survey work for Forum Energy were turning points.

Yet by then, the Philippines had already lost valuable time on an investment that takes years to generate returns.

This reflects a deeper institutional weakness in Philippine maritime policy and the persistent tendency to oscillate between legal-diplomatic and military approaches instead of employing a broader statecraft, one that integrates a market-centric lens.

Philippine exploration at Reed Bank (Recto Bank) was halted for decades by both Manila’s legal moves and fear of Beijing’s retaliation. In 2014, the government banned oil and gas activities in the WPS while the arbitration trial was ongoing. Even after the ruling and calls from contractors to lift the moratorium in Reed Bank, persistent Chinese aggression prevented companies from consistently exploring the WPS. Reed Bank is believed to be almost on par or even greater than the Malampaya gas field, which has been supplying 30% of Luzon’s energy until its expected depletion by 2027.

Following the 1995 Mischief Reef incident, Fidel Ramos responded by modernizing the armed forces. The incident caught the Philippines off guard, exposing maritime incapacity due to its delayed discovery of China’s construction activities. Although Ramos already ordered the expansion of facilities, including the construction of lighthouses in 1994 to reinforce claims and expand petroleum exploration, major renovations only began in 2018, largely due to institutional paralysis. In the end, the only “solution” that materialized at the time was the signing of the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States, which at the time was looking for an alternative military base in Southeast Asia after it left Subic in 1991.

In 2011, before the Scarborough Shoal standoff in 2012, and the filing of the arbitration case in 2013, Benigno Aquino III created the Zone of Peace, Freedom, Friendship and Cooperation (ZOPFF/C) to separate non-disputed and disputed waters based on international law. The goal was to determine areas for marine conservation and national development, where a “Joint Cooperation Area” may be conducted under applicable laws. Central to this approach is the Philippine Coast Guard’s role in upholding the “white-to-white, gray-to-gray” principle, where civilian vessels (“white hulls”) should enforce civilian law, and reserve military assets (“gray hulls,” such as naval ships) for military encounters to prevent escalation. It did not last long when the Philippine Navy arrested Chinese poachers, which then escalated into a military standoff with China that most likely saw this as an opening to seize control of the Scarborough Shoal. In 2013, this forced the government to pursue arbitration. Since then, fishers and enforcement authorities have been restricted from the area.

These present a pattern: initiatives were never institutionalized into a long-term, unified maritime doctrine. There is evident fragmentation across maritime institutions and non-state actors that have stakes in the dispute. Philippine policy remained reactive, responding to crises after they emerged rather than shaping facts before they did. The sudden revival of joint exploration talks with China triggered by the war in Iran is the price of a state confronting the consequences of having waited too long to invest in oil and gas exploration as part of its maritime policy. Not to mention underlying structural vulnerabilities caused by an overreliance on oil liberalization and imports.

Now, years of strategic failures leave Manila cornered. With Malampaya nearing depletion, energy supply vulnerable to geopolitics, and a Filipino public demanding tangible actions from the government, the pressure to exploit WPS is intensifying. But after decades of delay, the Philippines now confronts that imperative under far worse conditions as China’s physical presence becomes more entrenched than it was in the pre- to early 2000s.

There could be more than just institutional (in)competence why the Philippines has been less willing than its Southeast Asian counterparts to pursue unilateral, high-risk exploration in contested waters. There is a need for more public data and scholarship to conclusively attribute legal, geographic, commercial, or alliance-related considerations in shaping Manila’s calculus in the WPS. This includes deepwater drilling costs, investor risk tolerance, uncertainty over reserve viability, and the differing intensity of Chinese presence across claimant states. In this light, the Philippines’ repeated linkage of offshore development to joint exploration with China may also reflect a broader recognition that unilateral development has become politically and operationally difficult under present conditions.

If joint exploration is the way forward, the debate should not be simply whether it should proceed, but how it should be pursued. Any future arrangement must be anchored in full transparency to ensure public trust and avoid the secrecy that undermined previous initiatives such as the JMSU. Negotiations should clearly affirm that any agreement remains subject to Philippine laws. Equally important is the inclusion of non-state stakeholders that have long been left out in WPS policies in overall consultative processes, not only in matters of energy resources, to ensure that strategic decisions are not made solely within closed political channels.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Shane Yumikura

Shane Yumikura worked at the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of National Defense, and served as the Philippines’ Media Liaison Officer at Expo 2020 Dubai. She studies China at the University of the Philippines and majored in Consular and Diplomatic Affairs at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde.

The United States’ Artemis program is more than just NASA’s traditional scientific mandate; the Artemis program is a pivotal move of Western power through the multinational alliance aimed at countering China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) ambitions. This space rivalry marks the beginning of the global power marathon to set the next domain for global and space dominance, the lunar race between the US and China presents profound implications for Southeast Asia and the Pacific as both regions are involved in both powers’ alliances. Far from a mere discovery race, the new space race signals a new era of space warfare, where lunar footholds dictate the pace for future Mars missions, resource control, and terrestrial influences. Policymakers must view it as such to safeguard strategic equities. The new era for the space race is no longer a showing of scientific innovation prowess of the two sides, but it transcends space exploration as the next battlefield for global and space power.

The US’ Artemis program was launched in 2017, in close collaboration between the United States of America, Japan, Canada, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the United Arab Emirates under the Artemis Accords, which now has 45 nation signatories. Artemis targets a sustainable lunar presence by 2028, including a Lunar Gateway station and south pole bases that are believed to be rich in water ice for rocket fuel and life support to test humanity’s capabilities before taking on the next step, going to Mars.

This is no isolated NASA ingenuity, but a deliberate counter to China’s ILRS that aims to put the first non-American foot on the moon by 2030 with international partners like Russia, Pakistan, and others through the “Group of Governmental Experts.” China’s Tiangong station and Chang’e missions have demonstrated rapid progress, aiming for lunar helium-3 mining and military tech like precision landing. Artemis positions the US to enforce the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 norms, such as the peaceful use and no sovereignty claims. While China denies unilateral dominance. Think of it as NATO for space, wherein shared infrastructure secures US leadership in cislunar space (Earth-Moon sphere), where it is vital for satellite defense and supply lines.

In the context of the Southeast Asia region, the region’s chokepoints amplify lunar stakes as US allies like Japan, Australia, Singapore, and the Philippines, which is an active signatory of the Artemis Accords, bolster its program with tech and basing rights, this move counters China’s existing Belt and Road space ties with Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia.​

The Philippines hosts US rotational forces under its Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the United States. This enables Pacific launch monitoring, like Australia’s Harold E. Holt station, which tracks lunar trajectories, and Japan’s H3 rocket, which supports Artemis cargo.

Other Southeast Asian nations are also active on China’s bid on lunar missions, as Indonesia is eyeing ILRS radar tech. Thailand, on the other hand, is a signatory of both the Artemis Accords and China’s space alliance with Thailand, which trains Chinese astronauts. Malaysia is also an active agent as its space agency partners with China’s Chang’e mission data.

Its implications are that lunar success yields pacific leverage, the United States bases could track hypersonic threats from lunar relays, which China could weaponize lunar south pole helium-3 for fusion energy, tilting ASEAN energy security that is currently in a volatile state. Tensions mirror the current South China Sea disputes as space assets could jam regional GPS or enable surveillance, forcing SEA nations like Vietnam (US partner) or Laos (China partner) into alignment dilemmas.

This scientific race for a breakthrough also echoes a race for new global and space power. Take a closer look, as this is a hybrid warfare in orbit. Lunar bases enable persistent presence for kinetic anti-satellite tests, cyber ops on rival sats, or even resource denial, which both sides have done in the past. This 21st-century space race echoes Cold War proxy battles but with trillion-dollar economics at stake as the lunar economy is projected at least $100 Billion by 2040.

China’s 2024 anti-satellite test debris has endangered the International Space Station. Artemis envisions armed defense under the US Space Force. It is not just a race for discovery, but a race for domain control. The winners claim regolith rights, propellant depots, and Mars gateways, heavily marginalizing the loser of this race.

Lunar victories precondition future missions to Mars. Artemis’ Gateway tests deep-space habitats, while China’s ILRS prototypes nuclear propulsion. By 2039, which is NASA’s Mars goal, lunar helium-3 could fuel reusable Starships, while ILRS enables rival landers. A US-led Moon secures Pacific Mars trajectories. China’s race for dominance invites exclusionary blocs, risking arms races. For Southeast Asia, Mars tech spillovers promise economic growth, but alliance choices lock in dependencies, as the US is for open access, while China is for closed tech transfer.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

In the humid, bustling common areas of the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), the premier university of the Pacific, I stood as a young woman commanding a crowd of hundreds from diverse backgrounds. I was not just speaking; I was articulating a vision for student welfare and national development that cut through the noise of corruption, culturally ingrained mindsets, and the repeated systems that constitute a disease affecting our people.

In that moment, I felt like a confident and capable leader until I was hit by a sad reality that broke my confidence as a female and had me question my passion for leadership in my future endeavors the very moment I stepped my foot in the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea (PNG) - the largest Island Nation in the Pacific and the world at large home to thousand tribes, diverse cultures and more than 800 languages.

This experience reflects what can be described as the “Pacific Paradox”: our universities are laboratories for female leadership, but our national parliaments remain guarded fortresses of patriarchal political culture.

My visit to PNG’s National Parliament should have inspired hope, but instead, it revealed a gap that demands urgent attention. I expected to witness leadership in action, but instead, I was confronted with a silence that spoke volumes. In 15th of December 2025 after contesting for 2026 UPNG Female Vice Presidential seat, I was selected as one of the top 60 successful Youth applicants among 430 applicants across PNG for an annual event known as the PNG National Mock Youth Parliament Program (NMYPP) - a weeklong event fully sponsored by international institution such as United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA), European Union (EU), United Nation Development Program (UNDP), and United Nations Human Rights in partnership with National institutions like PNG National Youth Development Authority (NYDA), National Capital District (NCD) Commission, and PNG National Parliament.

It was an eye-opening experience and a wake-up call for me during our tour of the PNG National Parliament as a female student, exclusively involved in student politics, pursuing my passion for leadership. Many thoughts and questions ran through my mind as I studied the building structures, artifacts, the hidden meaning behind the symbols, the number of seats, and the elected members of parliament who represent us as the voice of our people in PNG.

It was a sad reality check for me to learn that, out of 118 seats in Parliament, only 3 were represented by women. I sat there hopelessly imagining my future fast-forward some years later, working a quiet desk job with my political ambition discouraged by a reality I did not face on the school campus, while my male peers were contesting provincial seats with massive war chests. The near absence of women in the space meant to represent us all forced me to question the true inclusivity of our nation’s leadership and whose voices are truly being heard when women (half of the population) are underrepresented.

Student politics to national governance

The transition from student politics to national governance is a broken bridge. Across the Pacific region, Women remain significantly underrepresented in political leadership. According to UN Women, women hold less than 8% of parliamentary seats across the Pacific, the lowest regional average globally. Pacific countries are grouped into three main regions - Melanesia (Black Islands such as PNG, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji), Micronesia (small Islands including Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Kiribati) and Polynesia (many Islands namely Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands and Niue) because of our geography, culture, language and history.

In PNG, the situation is even more concerning: as of early 2026, only 3 women sit in a 118-member parliament. Since PNG’s national independence day on 16 September 1975, only 10 women have been elected to parliament. This represents our current average for women’s representation at 2.7%, which is far below even the Pacific region’s already low average of 8-9%, placing PNG among the countries with the lowest representation of women globally.

While countries like Fiji and Samoa have made progress, the broader region, including Vanuatu and Tuvalu, continues to struggle with near-zero or single-digit representation, with the overall trend reflecting persistent gender inequality in political leadership. This suggests that while the Pacific accepts women as student leaders in academic settings, it rejects them as legislative authorities in the national arena.

Thus, the gap between student leadership and national governance raises an important question: “Why does this disparity exist?” The answer lies in the merit-based environments rather than the culture-based “Big Man” politics. In student politics, leadership is often judged on communication skills, ideas, competence, policy, and the ability to unite diverse student bodies. However, national elections in PNG and the wider Pacific are governed by the “Gift Economy” and deeply rooted Patriarchal norms, traditional beliefs, or mindsets that often position men as natural leaders, while women are expected to take on supportive or domestic roles. These perceptions influence public attitudes and voting behavior, making it difficult for women candidates to gain trust and support.

Women also face other underlying factors or barriers, such as financial limitations, political violence, intimidation, harassment, and lack of institutional support. On the school campus, debate is regulated, while in national elections, women face psychological and physical violence. A 2025 study found that over 75% of female politicians in the Asia-Pacific reported experiencing psychological abuse. Also, national general elections campaigns require immense capital for gift giving, “mumu” feasts, compensation, and logistics—resources women rarely control compared to their male counterparts. Moreover, the Student leadership is often seen as a “learning phase”, but national leadership is viewed as a “customary” domain for men. These challenges create an uneven playing field, limiting women’s participation in national politics.

Beyond student politics

The issue is not about women’s lack of ability to lead, but rather the structural barriers, cultural expectations, patriarchal systems, lack of resources, trust, and financial support for women. Student leadership provides the skills but fails to offer the institutional support or a safety net pipeline needed for women to transition from student politics into the “real world”. Addressing these challenges requires collective effort from government, institutions, communities, and individuals to challenge existing norms, thereby creating opportunities and conducive environments where women can thrive as leaders.

Also, to change this, the Pacific region must move beyond Temporary Special Measures (TSMs) and implement them by reserving seats for women in Parliament to bridge the gap between the school campus lecture hall and the floor of Parliament, enabling women to equally participate in national decision-making processes and politics.

We also need to start asking questions like: “Is student leadership a pipeline or a ceiling?” We must reflect and ask ourselves: “If we trust women to lead our students today, why do we fear them leading our nations tomorrow?” Ultimately, true representation in parliament should reflect the nation it serves. Until women are equally represented, the question remains—whose voices are truly being heard in our national parliaments?

This is an externally contributed piece. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, or practitioner — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Alice Francis

Alice Francis is a final-year Business Management student at University of Papua New Guinea, driven by leadership, gender advocacy, and empowering Pacific youth. She has held key roles including SBPP Female Representative, BMSU Vice President, and Welfare and Gender Officer for the Komo Mt. Sisa Nationwide Tertiary Student Association. Alongside her leadership journey, she contributes to youth career development through PNG Career Development Inc.

The irony of speaking English in the Philippines is that proficiency only gets you in the door, but sounding a certain way grants you access to the room.

The Filipino accent has long occupied an ambiguous cultural space. For one, the Philippines has been consistently ranking among countries having the most proficient English speakers in both the world and the region - a distinction that has naturally brought upon Philippine English, complete with its own vocabulary and inflections. From this emerged a distinct Filipino accent, and with it, an identity marker that travels with the diaspora.

However, recognition has not meant acceptance. Unlike hierarchies based on name and wealth, the Filipino accent is subject to a different system—one rooted in pride, humor, shame, and discomfort in sounding distinctly Filipino. This tension is perhaps most visible when comparing Filipino-American comedian Jo Koy’s use of the accent to English teachers’ experiences in the Philippines.

Jo Koy built much of his early career on the impression of his Filipino mother. The structure of his sets follows a familiar and simple diasporic formula: He would start with a childhood anecdote, his mother’s “Filipino-ness” set against American norms, and a punchline that lands on the exaggeration of her accent. What is worth observing here is not just that the jokes worked, but who they worked for. His special Coming in Hot holds a 7.4 on IMDb, and the material was received warmly by both American and Filipino audiences as a form of representation. But representation of what, exactly? The accent in Jo Koy’s sets becomes a comedic shorthand that is legible, repeatable, and affectionate on the surface, especially in callbacks to his mother, but it still positions the Filipino accent and “Filipino-ness” as the thing being laughed at. He is not alone in this; creators before and after him have built punchlines on the same foundation. It’s important to note that the humor is rarely cruel, but it consistently frames the accent as a deviation from an unnamed norm.

English educators in the Philippines, however, tell a different story from a different pressure point. Research from the International Journal on Multilingualism found that English teachers in the Philippines feel increasingly compelled to suppress their Filipino accent in favor of a more “neutral” tone. Notably, the teachers in the study did not deny the cultural significance of their accent, as many acknowledged it as a part of their identity and their teaching of Philippine English. Yet their professional and social networks consistently pushed them toward a more “neutral” register, treating their natural accent as something to be managed.

These two examples reveal the complex negotiation at the center of this piece. Filipinos themselves actively participate in and shape this dynamic — the accent functioning simultaneously as a vehicle for self-deprecating humor, a marker of cultural identity, and a source of professional shame. What makes this particularly difficult to untangle is that it operates on the same axis as English proficiency itself, a skill long measured against standards of class, intelligence, and social worth.

That is why, for Filipinos, speaking English with an accent is not merely about pronouncing words differently, but about being located within hierarchies of value and credibility.

English in the Philippine social order

When the Americans replaced Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines, one of their first steps was to institutionalize English. In 1901, over 600 American teachers and volunteers, boarding the USAT Thomas, arrived in the Philippines and established a public educational system with English as the medium of instruction.

This effort extended beyond the capital Manila to far-reaching provinces throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, and its effects on the country were sweeping. English came to occupy almost every aspect of Filipino life, from governance to science, mass media, and more.

Filipino media reflects this hierarchical sorting. The familiar “rich versus poor” narrative in Filipino dramas frequently assigns more English lines to wealthy characters, while working-class characters speak predominantly in Filipino or broken English. Consider Bobbie Salazar in Four Sisters and a Wedding: her polished English, professional demeanor, and New York cosmopolitan confidence are not presented as incidental details. They function as signals of education, of refinement, of a certain kind of belonging. Characters who are less cosmopolitan, by contrast, are written with heavier local accents and less code-switching. The message consistently pushed forward in these dramas is that English, and a particular kind of English, marks who has arrived.

This association does not stay on screen. It also shapes how English is spoken in real spaces, including among young people. The “conyo” accent, a Filipino English heavily inflected with a Western tone, has become closely associated with elite universities like De La Salle and Ateneo de Manila. While it has drawn its share of mockery, it has also solidified into a distinct sociolect, a recognizable register of inflection that signals class affiliation as much as it does language preference. To speak conyo is, in part, to signal where you studied and with whom you belong.

In professional settings, this logic becomes formalized and even an economic decision. In the business process outsourcing industry, where 1.3 to 1.8 million Filipinos work today, accent training is standard practice. “Neutralization” programs aim to minimize the natural features of the Filipino accent and replace them with an American English register, specifically to appeal to North American clients. The demand for this kind of training has become an industry in itself, with American English training centers operating across Manila and on online platforms. Here, the pressure to sound a certain way is literally written into the job.

Over time, these patterns, habits, and professional requirements do change, but continue to have consequential cultural work. They reinforce the idea to associate English, and often a certain kind of English, with intelligence, refinement, and authority. And they also reinforce its complete opposite: that sounding distinctly Filipino when speaking in English is, at best, charming, and at worst, a liability.

The pressure here is not merely to speak English, but to sound a certain way while doing so.

The politics of belonging

Linguist Braj Kachru mapped English into three concentric circles. The inner circle comprises countries where English is historically native - the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The outer, expanding circles represent countries where English functions as a second language or as a global lingua franca.

Notice that Kachru’s model was descriptive, not hierarchical. It was meant to explain how English circulates globally, not to rank its speakers. Yet in the Philippines, these circles operate as if they were ranked. Proficiency matters, but so does the accent you use to speak the language. Where you fall in this framework, or how closely you mimic the inner circle’s “standard”, determines your place in the social order and your prospects for mobility.

Rosina Lippi-Green, in English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, argues that the so-called “standard” is simply the accent of a white, upper-middle-class, educated speaker. She argues that no variety of a language is inherently superior to another. Institutions that push for a “standard” do not merely teach a register. They construct a hierarchy, one that sorts English speakers by perceived intelligence, professionalism, and belonging. This happens in schools where students are pressured to conform, in workplaces where employers use accents as a proxy for competence, and in media where “non-standard” accents mark the villain, the comic relief, or the uneducated supporting character. The analysis is uncomfortable precisely because it describes the Filipino setting with such accuracy.

But the persistence of this hierarchy raises a deeper question. It is not an argument against learning, adapting, or code-switching. Language is fluid, and people shift registers for practical reasons every day. The issue is not the act of modification but the expectation underneath it. The expectation that professionalism, class, and intelligence must sound a particular way reveals a hierarchy of legitimacy, one that the Philippines did not author but has nonetheless internalized.

For many Filipinos, modifying their accent is an economically rational decision. Migration, outsourcing, and transnational labor markets reward this kind of adaptability, and the incentive is real and material. It would be too easy, and frankly unfair, to frame every instance of accent modification as capitulation. People navigate systems they did not design, and doing so skillfully is its own form of agency. But there is a difference between adapting strategically and adapting because no other version of yourself feels credible. Again, the deeper issue is not accent modification itself. It is the absence of a framework that allows Filipinos to define legitimacy on their own terms.

The global hierarchy of accents did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed economic and political power. For decades, the United States set the standard not only in markets and media, but in sound. To speak like the center was to signal proximity to it, and proximity to it meant access. That logic made sense when American cultural and economic dominance went largely unchallenged.

But power shifts. Southeast Asia is no longer peripheral to the global economy. It is central to supply chains, manufacturing networks, and long-term growth projections in ways that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago. The geography of influence is changing, but the geography of linguistic legitimacy has not caught up. Until the Filipino accent is treated as fully legitimate on its own terms, sounding “standard” will continue to function as a shortcut to credibility.

On whose terms?

The same study that documented Filipino English teachers’ pressure to adopt a neutral accent also documented their response to it. Neither teacher simply complied. Over time, both adapted their classroom practice to incorporate other varieties of English. Their classrooms became small sites of negotiation, and then of redefinition.

The Filipino accent does not need rehabilitation. What it needs is for the structures around it to stop treating it as a problem to be corrected and minimized. That means policy in how schools train teachers, in how BPO companies use accent neutralization, in how Philippine media writes its characters. It means being honest that the pressure to sound neutral for legitimacy is not neutral. It is a pressure with a deep history.

But legitimacy is not only granted from above. It can also be claimed. And the decision to keep a Filipino accent in certain spaces can, in itself, be a deliberate act.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

In mid-2025, gunfire broke out near the Temple of Ta Muen Thom, a centuries-old Khmer ruin sitting on the contested border between Thailand and Cambodia. Over the following days, clashes spread across twelve border locations.

For a region whose diplomatic identity is built on consensus, restraint, and the careful avoidance of public rupture, it was a striking image. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has long prided itself on managing regional tensions through consultation rather than confrontation. Border clashes, despite having historical precedence, between member states were not part of the script.

And yet de-escalation came. Not through ASEAN’s formal mechanisms, but through Malaysia, whose Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim stepped in to broker talks, with the quiet assistance of the United States and China, even after Thailand’s Foreign Minister had rejected third-party mediation outright.

While most have criticized ASEAN for taking a back seat, a better question is: if the formal institution did not resolve the crisis, what did? And what does that tell us about how regional order in Southeast Asia actually works?

The answer, this article argues, is that ASEAN operates not just through a single channel, but through two distinct souls, one institutional and one political.

The case of two ASEANs

The idea that ASEAN contains more than one logic within itself is not new. Jose Bagulaya, a professor at the University of the Philippines, argues in ASEAN as an International Organization that the organization has always operated with two souls: one legal, one political. The ASEAN Charter formally confers decision-making power to the Summit, but remains silent on what the organization is actually empowered to enforce, effectively placing matters of compliance in the realm of politics rather than law. For Bagulaya, this is not a design flaw. It is a design choice. As he puts it, “ASEAN is a political animal, and the States wearing of the ASEAN mask is just one of the many ways of performing politics.” The result is a permanent tension between acting in accordance with the rule of law and acting in accordance with power politics.

This tension is not merely theoretical. It has a structure. The first soul of ASEAN is institutional. It is structured around the ASEAN Charter, three community pillars (Political and Security, Economic, and Socio-Cultural), and key bodies such as the ASEAN Summit, Coordinating Council, and Secretariat. All of which are consensus-bound, meaning that all member states must agree before mechanisms are adopted and statements are issued. This makes ASEAN deliberately slower to address crises like border clashes than most regional organizations, but for a reason.

According to Bilahari Kausikan, former UN Representative of Singapore, a consensus decision is not a weakness but a preservation mechanism. It ensures that smaller states do not get overwhelmed by the will of bigger states such as Indonesia, and it reassures that the bigger states will not be overwhelmed by a coalition of smaller states. In this line of thinking, consensus is what keeps ASEAN intact.

”Achieving consensus among member states is the central mechanism of ASEAN’s functionality. This consensus is founded upon the idea that the regional interest is interlinked with each member state’s national interest,” Kausikan noted.

The durability of this consensus model was seriously tested in 2012. In July that year, under the Cambodian chairmanship, ASEAN ended a ministerial meeting without issuing a communiqué for the first time in its 45-year history. Following the maritime stand-off in the Scarborough Shoal between China and the Philippines in April 2012, Phnom Penh refused to allow mention of the South China Sea dispute in the joint statement. Vietnam and the Philippines resisted, and the Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong remained firm, arguing that the foreign ministers’ meeting was not a court and had no business issuing verdicts on bilateral disputes.

“I requested that we issue the joint communique without mention of the South China Sea dispute ... but some member countries repeatedly insisted to put the issue of the Scarborough Shoal… I have told my colleagues that the meeting of the Asean foreign ministers is not a court, a place to give a verdict about the dispute,” Namhong argued.

Yet ASEAN still did not collapse. The deadlock exposed the structural limits of consensus, but it also demonstrated ASEAN’s capacity for internal repair. Then Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa undertook rapid shuttle diplomacy across regional capitals, eventually securing agreement on a six-point consensus on the South China Sea. It was not an ASEAN mechanism that resolved the crisis. It was a member state, moving faster than the institution could, using bilateral initiative to do what collective consensus could not.

It is at this point that the second soul of ASEAN becomes visible. It does not replace the foundational mechanisms of ASEAN, nor does it openly defy it. Rather, it comes in at moments where consensus is slow or has not been reached. Usually, it operates through bilateral initiatives, shuttle diplomacy, and quiet coalition-building. It is political in exactly the way Bagulaya describes: the ASEAN mask is still worn, but the hands moving underneath it belong to individual states.

The political ASEAN in practice

Malaysia’s mediation between Thailand and Cambodia was unexpected, but only if you were watching the institutional ASEAN. Thailand’s Foreign Minister had already rejected third-party mediation outright. Yet Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim moved ahead with the involvement of both the United States and China. As Dr. Ilango Karuppannan, a retired Malaysian Ambassador, observed, Cambodia’s acknowledgment that the meeting was “co-organized by the U.S. with the presence of China” did not diminish Malaysia’s role; if anything, Malaysia’s willingness to host and announce the talks swiftly was what made it possible. Kuala Lumpur did not wait for institutional endorsement.

And this pattern of a Southeast Asian state moving faster than ASEAN’s mechanisms is not entirely new. Indonesia took on a mediating role in the peace process between the Philippines and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in the 1990s. When an impasse was reached between the Philippines and the MNLF, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) expanded its committee and placed Indonesia in charge of mediating talks. This has led to facilitated negotiations that eventually produced the 1996 Final Peace Agreement, which aimed to fully implement the 1976 Tripoli Agreement and established the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Moreover, up to the early 2000’s, Indonesia has provided personnel to the OIC for ceasefire monitoring.

More recently, during Indonesia’s 2023 Chairmanship, Jakarta engaged in extensive quiet consultations with multiple stakeholders, including the junta and opposition-linked actors. Rather than publicly confront Naypyidaw, Indonesia pursued what officials described as “silent diplomacy,” attempting to operationalize the Five-Point Consensus through sustained engagement.

Dr. Karuppannan argues that such intervention became necessary precisely because ASEAN’s formal mechanisms were not designed for speed, but for regional unity.

”Its foundational norms of consensus and non-interference, which are critical to regional unity, also inhibit timely responses to intra-regional crises. The Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) provides for peaceful settlement and even a High Council, but these mechanisms remain inactive,” Dr. Karuppanan noted.

In the Thailand-Cambodia case, the situation was further complicated by the fact that the ASEAN Secretary-General at the time was Cambodian, which made it politically difficult for the Secretariat to assume a visibly mediating role. In such circumstances, bilateral and informal mechanisms became, as Dr. Karuppannan described, the “default approach.”

When the institutional ASEAN stalls, individual member states step into the gap, not to replace the organization, but to do what it cannot do quickly enough. The ASEAN mask, as Bagulaya might put it, is still on. The hands moving underneath it simply depend on the moment.

Timor Leste’s new approach

On February 2, 2026, judicial authorities in Timor-Leste opened legal proceedings against the Myanmar junta, including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case was initiated after the Chin Human Rights Organization presented a criminal file to a senior Timorese prosecutor in Dili two weeks prior. The file documented specific atrocities allegedly committed against the ethnic Chin minority, including targeted killings, sexual violence, and aerial attacks on civilian infrastructure protected under international law. It was the first time an Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) member state had initiated such proceedings against a fellow member.

However, the move was not new. In 2023, Timor-Leste engaged with the National Unity Government, Myanmar’s government in exile, which led to the expulsion of their top diplomat in Yangon.

What explains Timor-Leste’s willingness to act where others have not? Deputy Research Director of the Lowy Institute, Susannah Patton, argues that Timor Leste has a distinct international personality from its Southeast Asian counterparts.

”Timor-Leste may be in ASEAN, but its leadership will not quickly assimilate the political culture of the group,” Patton argued.

This does not come as a surprise. According to the ISEAS State of Southeast Asia Survey in 2025, respondents from Timor-Leste placed a higher priority on the Myanmar crisis than any other ASEAN country except Myanmar. Moreover, respondents from Timor-Leste reported being less concerned about the principle of non-interference than those from other ASEAN countries.

The deeper explanation may also be historical. Timor-Leste’s international identity is shaped by its own history of occupation and international advocacy. Its path to sovereignty was secured not through consensus, but through the help of the international community and UN peacekeeping missions. This background may explain why Dili appears more willing to externalize disputes rather than absorb them into ASEAN. The solidarity framing was made explicit by Salai Za Uk, Executive Director of CHRO, who noted that “given Timor Leste’s history, and the indignities the Timorese people suffered in their struggle for independence, there is a real sense of solidarity with the people of Myanmar.” For Dili, the instinct to externalize a crisis rather than absorb it into ASEAN’s diplomatic space is not a departure from its international identity but an expression of it.

This is where Timor-Leste’s move complicates the two-soul framework. The political ASEAN described in the previous section, Malaysia’s mediation and Indonesia’s shuttle diplomacy, works within ASEAN’s diplomatic culture even as it moves faster than its mechanisms. This is because it is centripetal; it pulls crisis response back toward the regional frame, keeps the ASEAN mask on, and resolves tensions without rupturing the organization’s foundations.

Timor-Leste’s legal action is something different. By relocating the contestation from ASEAN’s diplomatic space into the international arena, Dili is stretching the second soul toward something centrifugal. The proceedings do not openly defy ASEAN because Timor-Leste remains a member and has not called for Myanmar’s expulsion. But the logic of juridical escalation such as appointing prosecutors, building criminal files, pursuing accountability through domestic courts, operates on a different axis than consensus and quiet mediation.

Whether this represents a new direction for the political ASEAN, or an outlier shaped by Timor-Leste’s singular history, remains to be seen. But it suggests that the second soul is not monolithic. It too contains multitudes.

Does this strengthen or weaken ASEAN centrality?

At first glance, these episodes appear to strain ASEAN’s foundational norms. But ASEAN has long possessed mechanisms for consultation and dispute management. What these crises reveal instead is a tension between process and urgency.

ASEAN’s formal mechanisms are consensus-bound and intentionally rooted in deliberate diplomacy rather than speed. But crises move faster than consensus. When that happens, Southeast Asian states increasingly supplement institutional procedure with their own initiatives.

The immediate interpretation is that this weakens ASEAN centrality. If mediation is conducted by individual states and if legal proceedings are pursued outside collective endorsement, it’s easy to see how ASEAN can be easily put on the sidelines.

However, this interpretation assumes that centrality requires institutional monopoly. That may no longer be the case.

Even when member states act independently, they rarely depart from ASEAN’s diplomatic culture. Mediation remains consensual, and no state openly calls for expulsion or structural rupture. In this sense, ASEAN may not always execute a crisis response, but it continues to define the boundaries within which crisis response occurs.

Now, Timor-Leste’s legal action tests this logic. By moving the contestation into the international legal arena, Dili stretches ASEAN’s principle of non-interference. Yet it does not abandon the organization; it remains within ASEAN as its newest member while pressing on Myanmar.

The durability of ASEAN centrality, therefore, may not depend on whether ASEAN leads every crisis response. It may depend on whether member states continue to recognize ASEAN as the frame within which the regional order is negotiated.

ASEAN was always a political animal. What these crises reveal is not its weakness, but the full range of its instincts.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

When Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced that the Philippines had approximately 60 days of reserve gasoline, fuel oil, and kerosene following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the countdown began - at least in the headlines. The figures have inspired fear, calls to stockpile, and pointed questions about government mismanagement and preparedness.

The Philippines is not alone. Across the region, oil reserves of different countries are suddenly being measured against a number and found wanting at different degrees. Japan has 254 days, while Thailand has 61. China has 200 days, while Indonesia has 25. But reserves were never designed to measure how long a country can survive without energy imports. They exist to stabilize markets while global supply adjusts, specifically to prevent panic, smooth price volatility, and buy governments time. Essentially a strategic buffers against sudden supply chain disruptions such as the US-Iran war.

This is a misreading of the crisis. Focusing on counting down the days to which reserves last displaces the real issue because the crisis does not begin on day 61 when tankers run dry. It begins when prices move - and they already have.

How shock actually travels

When the Strait of Hormuz closed the immediate problem is not that the region ran out of fuel. It was that among the 3000 vessels stuck inside the Persian Gulf, 200 oil tankers are physically trapped with nowhere to go. Iraq has already begun shutting down operations at the Rumalia oil field because tankers cannot leave and onshore storage is reaching its capacity. According to Marine Insight, only three tankers carrying 2.8 million barrels of oil crossed the straight on early March, far below the usual daily average of about 19.8 million. This is an 86% decline.

But markets do not wait for the physical shortage to run out before reacting because of how oil is bought and sold. According to research from the Revenue Watch Institute, two-thirds of all traded oil moves through long term contracts between producers and refineries. These are agreements that give both sides predictability over supply and demand. The remaining third is sold on the spot market, where individual barrels are bought and sold in real time. That small share matters disproportionately because long term contracts don’t have fixed prices. They are rather written with formulas tied to whatever the spot market says oil is worth at delivery. This means spot prices set the benchmark for the entire system.

On top of this is the layer of futures trading. Futures contracts, or the agreement to buy or sell oil at a fixed price on a future date, are traded on exchanges in volumes the exceed physical supply. When traders anticipate a supply disruption, they bid up futures prices immediately, then spot prices follow, and because term contracts are pegged to spot, the reprice cascades across the whole market at once.

While this structure is designed to price risk in advance, it also means that he moment news of the Hormuz closure broke, markets were already repricing every barrel that would need to move through or around that strait in the weeks and months ahead.

On March 6, crude futures rose to their highest level in two and a half years, climbing 12% to $90 a barrel. International Brent crude followed the surge over 28% to above $86 a barrel in the days following the closure. JPMorgan Chase warned that prices could spike to $120 per barrel if disruption in the strait is sustained, estimating that Gulf producers can only sustain normal production for roughly 25 days.

Moreover, because oil is priced and settled in US dollars, the exchange rate matters as much as the barrel price for the Philippines and Southeast Asia. According to ING Think, even a brief oil price spike in June 2025 was enough to pull down the Philippine peso, Korean won, Thai baht, and Japanese yen by roughly 1.5 to 3%. The Philippine peso depreciated to around 59 per dollar in early march, a historical low, as risk sentiment deteriorated alongside the conflict. What this means in practice is that the the region pays more for oil in dollars at the exact moment its currency buys fewer dollars.

That double hit then travels through the economy in a chain that reaches ordinary households long before the supply of oil actually runs out. For example, transport costs rise first with fuel surcharges on trucking, fare increases on public transport, higher operating costs for fishing boats and delivery vehicles. According to ING Think Regional Head of Research for Asia Pacific, Deepali Bhargava, inflation in the Philippines could climb up to 0.4% for every 10% increase in oil prices. A price shock of this magnitude, coupled with peso depreciation, could push Philippine inflation to the upper end of the BSP’s 2-4% target range.

The picture is not unique to the Philippines. According to MUFG Research, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and South Korea are the most sensitive economies in Asia to oil price increases, with CPI inflation projected to rise by between 0.1 and 0.9 percentage points across the region. Under the assumption of a six-week Hormuz closure and oil prices rising from $70 to $85 a barrel, regional inflation across Asia could rise by 0.7 percentage points, with the Philippines and Thailand the most vulnerable.

Who was always going to be exposed?

That vulnerability did not begin with the Hormuz closure. When governments and analysts compare reserve levels across the region, it is easy to read these numbers as a performance table. Simply a ranking of which countries planned well and which didn’t. Japan at 254 days, South Korea at 208, China at 200. Thailand at 61, The Philippines at 60, and Indonesia at 25. The assumption is that these gaps reflects choices and that better choices would have produced better numbers, but that assumption misses something important.

The 90-day reserve standard that serves as the global benchmark was established by the International Energy Agency, whose membership obligation requires countries to hold stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of net oil imports and to be ready to collectively respond to severe supply disruptions.

It is a standard designed by and for IEA member countries, which in the region include Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. However, most of the region are only Association countries in the IEA because in part because full membership requires holding oil stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of net imports. But according to the IEA’s Southeast Asia Energy Outlook, mandatory oil stockpile regimes across the region are generally only equivalent to fewer than 40 days of oil use and in some cases as few as six days.

According to an IEA-affiliated study on oil stockpiling options for Southeast Asia, financial constraints are among the most common factors slowing down oil stockpiling across the region. Crude purchases alone account for at least half the total cost of maintaining reserves, with significant capital and operational expenditures layered on top of storing and distribution. For example in Indonesia, the financial burden of oil stockpiling was estimated at over $1.1 billion in 2015 alone.

Storing oil is expensive and it ties up capital that developing economies cannot afford to lock away under normal conditions. According to the IEA’s report on energy security in ASEAN+6, developing emergency oil response capabilities and integrating them into global supply security mechanisms will take time and money, precisely the two things fiscally constrained economies have the least of. The result is a reserve gap that reflects not poor planning in the abstract, but constrained choices made under imitations.

The other constraint is where the oil comes from in the first place. Even if the region’s economies could build larger reserves, they would largely be filling them with Middle Eastern crude. Asia imports 60% of its crude oil from the Middle East, and the Philippines sources 90% of its oil imports from the region. Diversifying away from that dependence is not simply a matter of finding new suppliers, it requires retooling the refineries themselves.

“If you put a new crude into the refinery, you have to change the cutoff points. You have to change gasoline blending. There’s a lot of things you need to change. It’s hard work. This is why diversification has been so poor in a lot of countries,” Adi Imsirovic, director of consultancy at Surrey Clean Energy, explains.

The implication is that even the will to diversify runs into a physical ceiling. Refineries across the region were built and configured around Middle Eastern crude. This includes the specific density, sulfur content, and chemical composition of said crude - a product of decades of infrastructure built around a single supply corridor.

“Simply put, even replacing a modest share of the roughly 16 million barrels a day of Middle Eastern crude that arrives to Asia with Atlantic basin supply is not feasible,” Energy Aspects analyst Richard Jones said.

What energy security actually means here

According to a peer-reviewed study on global energy security, countries including the Philippines, Myanmar, and Cambodia were already in a precarious position before the strait closed, held back by poor energy resource endowments and limited domestic production capacity.

The panic about reserve levels treats that vulnerability as a policy problem, one that better preparation might have prevented. But the region was never fully inside the global energy architecture to begin with. The IEA’s 90-day benchmark, its emergency coordination frameworks are membership obligations, and most of Southeast Asia and the Pacific sits outside full membership precisely because meeting those obligations requires resources the region doesn’t have.

The 60-day countdown obscured all of that. It made a structural problem legible as a planning failure, which is a more comfortable story because planning failures have solutions. Structural ones are harder to sit with.

None of this fully excuses the choices made within those constraints. A 90% import concentration from a single region reflects fiscal limitation, but also decades of institutional inertia. Both are true at the same time, and both are part of what needs to change.

But the harder question, the one the Hormuz crisis leaves sitting with this region, is not simply how to build more reserves or diversify supply lines. It is what energy security actually means for economies that were never fully designed into the system meant to provide it. And whether that system, as currently built, is even capable of answering that question.

This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.

About Matthew Parra

Matthew Parra is a student at the University of Santo Tomas and the founder and Executive Director of The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier — an independent analytical platform dedicated to rigorous, evidence-grounded analysis of Southeast Asia and the Pacific across economics, society, and geopolitics.

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