ABSTRACT
In 1999, Amartya Sen felt able to write that democracy had attained the
status of a universal value. ‘‘While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly accepted, in the general climate of world
opinion, democratic governance has now achieved the status of being taken
to be generally right,’’ he noted (Sen 1999: 3). The early years of the twenty-
first century, however, saw democracy’s star outshone by a new premium on
security, as an increasing number of states were forced to confront terrorist
threats. In Singapore and Malaysia, which had never been enthusiastic
about liberal democracy in the first place, the discovery of militant cells
within their shores had the effect of further marginalizing the discourse on civil liberties. The two neighboring states joined the war on terrorism in
earnest in late 2001, when they began arresting dozens of individuals on the
grounds of belonging to Islamic terrorist cells. A militant regional move-
ment called the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) was discovered, with links to the Al-
Qaeda network. The men were allegedly planning to bomb American
targets within the region and to lay the ground for the creation of Islamic
theocracies across Southeast Asia (Barton 2005).1 The worst was yet to be:
JI members would be found responsible for the October 2002 Bali nightclub bombing that killed 202 – the deadliest day of terror since the 9/11 attack
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The arrests in Singapore and
Malaysia months earlier may have averted similar carnage in these two
countries.
