Opportunities and Challenges in
Southeast Asia, 2019 (Bangkok, Thailand)
35
• To support digital rights organisations with capacity-building on the administrative and financial
management aspects of running their organisations. As new organisations are being set up
to advocate for digital rights as an emerging issue, these organisations need support
and training in terms of managing projects, human resources, cash flow, and so on.
Incubators have been suggested, or even the pooling of secretarial resources, in order
to ease organisations from administrative bureaucracy and enable them to focus on
their advocacy work.
• To increase the amount of research and documentation that originate from within the region. Although
there are reports generated by international organisations which touch on the realities
within the region (such as the Freedom on the Net report by Freedom House), there is
a lack of regional-based reports and studies that focus on improving digital rights
advocacy in terms of concrete strategies. Homegrown research would be able to better
incorporate Southeast Asian cultural and political contexts, as well as the perspectives
of regional activists into strategy-building. It was also mentioned that those who attend
international conferences should bring the insights back to the local communities in
order to build capacity, whether in the form of reports or presentations.
• To seek out more platforms for the mainstreaming of digital rights. National Human Rights
Institutions (NHRIs) at the country levels were mentioned as potential platforms
for mainstreaming, and also the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission of Human
Rights (AICHR). Free trade agreements and their negotiations may be good transborder
platforms to champion digital rights. Also somewhat overlooked by Southeast Asian
digital rights advocates are multistakeholder platforms such as the Internet Society, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), or the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), mainly from the perspective of inserting digital
rights into web standards and hard coding ethical considerations into the Internet’s
architecture.
Conclusion
Many of the challenges within the digital rights field in Southeast Asia stem from the
lack of a conceptual understanding of what digital rights is. Without a clear vision of
the big picture, the movement ends up being fragmented into silos working on individual
issues instead of working across issue areas to generate greater support. Advocacy is
reactive instead of proactive due to the lack of a coherent framework to support strategy.
Communication of problematic issues to the wider civil society and the general public is
also weakened, leading to a slow growth of the movement itself.
The conceptual framework proposed within this paper aims to address the gaps
mentioned. From the focus group discussions conducted with digital rights advocates,
four spheres of digital rights arose: two that were based on different ways of viewing
the digital (as spaces, or as data representation of physical entities), and two that were