ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the differing trajectories of civil society organisations (CSOs) in Indonesia and Malaysia. In both cases, socio-economic developments have resulted in shifting social structures and global pressures for economic and political reforms. A strategy of export-oriented industrialisation is combined with strong control of labour organisations, yet there has been a remarkable mushrooming of CSOs since the 1970s, a growing salience of Islamist and ethnicist groups and, in the late 1990s during the Asian economic crisis, an emergence of broad social movements for reform. This chapter also highlights the ambiguous role of civil society during democratisation. The relationship between civil society and the state is often blurred. Civil society activists may even more or less willingly back authoritarianism or engender autocratisation. This dark side of civil society includes groups that may seem to be innocuous at the beginning but could become increasingly anti-democratic, and groups that were from the start only established to obstruct democratisation or to undermine already existing democracies. A differentiated understanding of regime change in Southeast Asia thus necessitates an analysis of the various, often contrasting impacts of CSOs.
