Activists or Acts of Threats – Resisting securitisation in Asia Pacific

Day 1 11am 2 hours English, Khmer and Vietnamese

Over the last two decades the Asia and the Pacific region have witnessed a rise in authoritarian and oppressive regimes that have deployed securitisation policies and measures to create a hostile environment for defenders and activists, and shrinking civic spaces.

The inter-play of securitisation on civic spaces is architected in four ways:

1. weaponising institutions such as banks through implementation of regulation policy on foreign remittances such as Pakistan limiting access to funds for activists and defenders that has led to harassment of activists with inquiries and justifications and frozen bank accounts;

2. Using national laws to clamp down on Freedom of Association and Freedom of Expression such as curating Anti- terrorism laws in Sri Lanka, Foreign Contribution Regulation Act in India, Anti-protest laws among others. Such tactics have been used to weaken social movements, charges such as sedition, unlawful association, defamation and tax evasion to penalise defenders and activists;

3. Conflation of public and private companies [corporation and its state allies] have deployed the legal system to clamp down on climate and environmental activists by spreading violence and chaos; activists struggling for self-determination in contested territories have been killed and arrested for disrupting state development infrastructure. As most of the resource extraction work are contracted to international companies, there are no state mechanisms that can be held accountable nor do they protect their citizens.

4. Counter narratives of activists and defenders is another method deployed by the oppressive state to silence and discredit activists and defenders. The narrative of a good and a bad organisation not only discredits the work of the organisation, but erodes solidarity between civil society.

The government also sets up monitoring committees to monitor and evaluate organisations working on contentious issues of environment, democracy and human rights and blacklists them if their documents are found to be anti-government. Activists fighting for indigenous rights, land rights are labelled as “anti state” and “criminals” for disrupting state led development, and creating anti activists sentiments amongst people.

For UAF A&P, diverse feminist resourcing is the strategy to resource resistance and resilience of women, trans and non-binary activists and defenders. With state deployment of securitised policies, activists at the margin have been discredited and silenced from accessing funds. Feminist resources is another way to respond to securitisation where it manoeuvres through seeps to ensure the resources are reached.

This workshop will be a witness to the lived experiences of activists and defenders working in context of environmental rights, contested territories, freedom of organising among others.