Exploring the Nexus between Technologies
and Human Rights
28
spaces are run, “short of boycotting the product”, as put by a respondent. Some digital
rights advocates also view the rise of Southeast Asian tech companies with trepidation,
pointing out that these companies are bound by data protection and privacy regulations
of their own country, which the advocates view to be not as stringent as laws in developed
countries.
The Digital Rights Movement in Southeast Asia
While scholars have written about various aspects of digital rights and related violations
in Southeast Asia (e.g., Liu, 2014; Laungaramsri, 2016), the digital rights movement itself
has not been documented much within the literature. This is the first such attempt to give
a snapshot of the movement within the region, drawing from insights of national-level
and regional-level digital rights advocates and activists within Southeast Asia. All of the
following observations come from the FGDs unless otherwise stated.
There are eleven countries within Southeast Asia with varying levels of progress in their
advocacy on digital rights. Naturally, the digital rights movement as a smaller subset
of civil society within a country would reflect the characteristics of the country’s civil
society. From the impression of one of the respondents, the most active countries appear
to be the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar – groups have galvanised behind various
digital rights issues and worked together on governance issues. In Thailand and Malaysia,
there are pockets of activism happening, but mostly ad hoc and issues-based. Cambodia,
Laos, and Vietnam as a cluster of countries have civil societies that are fractured; some
segments are more closely aligned with the government, hence, there is limited resistance
towards state violations of digital rights – there are champions of issues but not a
movement per se. In Singapore, Brunei, and Timor-Leste, there is no perceived digital
rights movement; while Singapore and Brunei have a weak civil society in general, TimorLeste as the youngest country in Southeast Asia has a civil society that is focused on other
developmental priorities.
There is not much of regional advocacy in terms of digital rights. Respondents have
attributed the lack of a regional voice to some few factors. Firstly, as a region with
diverse cultures and tongues, the digital rights movement faces language barriers in
understanding what is happening in each country, which obstructs movement building.
For instance, a non-Thai speaking respondent who lives in Thailand expressed that it is
difficult to understand the dynamics of what is happening, as most of what is translated
to English is just a summary. Another respondent asserted that a joint movement would
have to first start at the national level and move on to the regional level because of the
language barriers, as opposed to Latin America which can mobilise across borders in a
more efficient manner, with fewer language-related challenges.
Secondly, there is no viable platform to advocate for digital rights issues at the regional
level common to the Southeast Asian states. While there is the inter-governmental