ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the grand historical processes and transformations that have increasingly led to the rise of variegated patterns of market governance in Southeast Asia and presents evidence of this trend. I argue that while postwar and post-independence contexts saw Southeast Asian states variously undertaking non-liberal and or heterodox development paths, the demise of the Cold War and the rise of what Harvey (2007, 75–6) has dubbed “flexible accumulation” has brought new challenges (and for some elites, significant opportunities) and narrowed the range of policy choices for these states considerably. This is reflected in the increased uptake of various broad-based neoliberal market-oriented policy sets evident within national development plans that look markedly different from their forebears and relatedly, new institutional reforms. Here, reinvigorated interest by Southeast Asian states in signing new trade and investment agreements and neoliberal efforts towards establish “enabling environments” for capital are paramount in institutional reform agendas to keep growth going, increase productivity and competitiveness, attract fresh sources of foreign direct investment (FDI) and escape “middle income traps”. In detailing this trend, I specifically point to a combination of disciplinary world market pressures amplified and animated by various iterations of neoliberalism and the evolving alignments of elite interest in relation to world market challenges and opportunities. Taken together, these pressures and alignments of interest have played important roles in yielding “variegated market states” and “variegated capitalism”, with the latter often generating particularly pernicious outcomes in Southeast Asia (Brenner et al. 2010; Carroll and Jarvis 2015; Jessop 2015). Here, elites have been able to asymmetrically profit and plunder from (and around) the neoliberal agenda with relative ease while transnational capital has been able to flexibly exploit new sources of cheap labor and new markets – realities accompanied by heightened inequality, colossal environmental degradation and stalling developmental possibilities.