Protest and State Reaction: An Intra-Regional Comparison (Indonesia, Vietnam)

The project investigates the follwoing research questions:
- Do democratic and authoritarian political regimes (such as those in Indonesia and Vietnam) (re-)act differently to certain forms and contents of protest?
- Or do those states (re-)act in similar ways and can this be explained by the assumption that in both polities there is a “state in a capitalist society”?
- Does regime type matter?

This project, which is part of a larger EU project on Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia (CRISEA), is kind of a pilot project. Data come from selected issues of four national print editions of newspapers (from Indonesia: “Tempo” and “Kompas”; from Vietnam “Tien Phong” and “Tuoi Tre”) whose reporting on protests and state reactions during 2016 and 2017 is systematically analyzed. Methodological speaking, “Protest Event Analysis” (PEA) is applied. Also, we use individual data concerning the continuation of protest and state (re-)actions in two policy areas (infrastructure and ecology) from various newspapers. Analysis of our data set and of those additional data, using methods of descriptive statistics and the interpretation of the data, is designed to provide confirmation, at least in principle, of our leading hypothesis. Roughly shortened this says that although governed differently, the state in Indonesia and Vietnam (re-)acts in rather similar ways and forms vis-à-vis protest. This is because both are “states in capitalist societies” (Jessop).
The project pursues two empirical aims:
- To identify any protest event where the protest targets the state/government, and where such a form of (conflicting) interest articulation and subsequent state reactions involves more than three people.
- To cover different forms of state (re-)actions. Whereas repression of protest has been widely researched, accommodation and ignorance, especially as regards (re-)actions the state in authoritarian regimes shows vis-à-vis protest, do seem to be under-researched.
From a theoretical perspective the project wants to answer the question how potential similarities and/or differences can be explained in a theoretically substantial way.