ASEAN's Engagement of Civil Society: Regulating Dissent.

• Author: Muchtar, Yanti
• Position: Book review

ASEAN's Engagement of Civil Society: Regulating Dissent. By Kelly Gerard. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hardback: 196pp.

As ASEAN moves towards the goal of an ASEAN Community by 2015, civil society engagement has become more important for the organization, along with the need to mobilize mass support to legitimate its initiatives. This has resulted in the promotion of the idea of a people-oriented ASEAN. Yet civil society remains skeptical of this idea and has called on ASEAN to transform itself into an organization that puts the interests of Southeast Asians at the heart of its decision-making processes. This tension has attracted the attention of some scholars, though there has been no critical study examining the "unhappy marriage" between ASEAN and civil society. Kelly Gerard's admirable book represents an attempt to fill this gap. The book explores why ASEAN's policy on civil society participation in its decision-making process has taken place and how ASEAN engages Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). More importantly, it is also an effort to provide an explanation of how underlying social conflicts have shaped the boundaries of civil society participation in governance institutions, determined which CSOs contribute to policy-making and the nature of their participation.

The main strength of ASEAN's Engagement of Civil Society is the author's theoretical framework which skillfully frames her analysis throughout the book. The author deploys critical political economy to reveal how the nature of civil society engagement with ASEAN has been shaped in the context of larger conflicts over power and its distribution, and dominated by specific interests and alliances that have changed over time. More precisely, the author employs the political economy framework of Jayasuriya and Rodan (see Kanishka Jayasuriya and Garry Rodan, "Beyond Hybrid Regime: More Participation, Less Contestation in Southeast Asia", Democratization 14, no. 5 (December 2007): 773-94, where modes of participation serve as the unit of analysis. In this view, institutional structures and ideologies have important roles to play in determining the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups in the political process. In other words, this approach addresses "the question of who is represented", what "forms of participation are deemed permissible", as well as what struggles have occurred to establish political spaces and "whose interests are furthered by their...