Strategizing Pushbacks Against Digital Repression: Insights from Southeast Asia

Digital repression facilitates ruling elites’ control over online dissent. Such a trend is intense in Southeast Asia where autocratic governments increasingly rely on information-related laws, cyber troops, surveillance and interception technologies, and internet shutdowns to tighten their grip on power and undermine oppositional civil society. Despite these developments, Southeast Asia’s civil society has managed to at least partially counter these techniques using three tactics: protests and legal action, knowledge- and capacity-building activities, and alliances with domestic policymakers and cross-border civic networks.1 To advance this tactical trifecta, activists should better combine institutional and extra-institutional activism, forge cross-border networks, and muster societal support.