Democracy

It is never a dull day in Malaysian politics, but there seems to be a brief pause – for the time being. Malaysia has therefore seen three federal governments over a period of two years, with tremendous upheaval in between. This piece unpacks the political developments over the last two years in its various phases, and ends with examining the country’s future political outlook.

Besides the public health emergency of the coronavirus pandemic, the social and economic impacts have been felt deeply by the Timorese people. Most of the population work in subsistence agriculture and the informal sector, and lockdown measures mean people often choose between two hard decisions: losing their earnings or becoming infected.

Southeast Asia is struggling to contain the spread of COVID-19 amid a resurgence driven by the Delta variant, leaving national governments with no capacity to spare on neighbouring countries. At the same time, ASEAN faces a trust problem due to the intangible nature of regional cooperation, and capacity issues associated with the prolonged deadlock over the selection of a special envoy to deal with the political crisis in Myanmar. Nevertheless, the potential for future regional cooperation after the health crisis subsides is within view.

Women are among the hardest hit by the intersecting and overlapping impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through community mobilization and solidarity, women are also finding solutions.

Economists have called COVID-19 an economic SHE-cession because millions of women have exited the workforce to adopt the role of family caregiver. In the Philippines, the COVID-19 induced SHE-cession which is a compounded crisis of health, economy, and governance that has exposed the uneven vulnerabilities of women across different sectors.

During the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Lao PDR managed to contain the pandemic quite successfully. More than one year later, the virus remains a challenge: in communicating with people via social media, integrating workers returning from neighboring countries, and vaccinating the population.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has been devastating for Timor-Leste. It has overwhelmed the already weak health system, deepened poverty and pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems for women and girls in Timor-Leste.

With Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo’s son and son-in-law winning the December 2020 mayoral elections in Solo, Central Java, and Medan, North Sumatra, respectively, observers are wary of yet another challenge to the country’s democratic backsliding: the persistence of dynastic politics.

I made my first trip to Timor-Leste in 2013. At that time, I must confess I had limited knowledge about the country. In contrast with most scholars, I did not learn the country from books; instead, I started to learn about Timorese politics from the lens of human rights and peace by learning its culture and through the stories of the people I met informally.