Whither Southeast Asia?

What are Southeast Asia’s prospects?  How well equipped and prepared are its people to cope with current and future shocks from inside and outside their region?  With significant exceptions including the wars in Indochina after 1945 and the 1965-66 bloodshed in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s modern history since World War II has been relatively peaceful.  In recent times the region has had its share of turbulence.  Nevertheless, the multidimensional 2022 Global Peace Index ranks nine of the ten Southeast Asian states as more peaceful than the United States.  On the 2021 Democracy Index, four of the Southeast Asian ten are outright “authoritarian,” while the other six join the US in being “flawed democracies.”  What do these and related trends imply?  In addition to politics and geopolitics, visiting scholar Gita Wirjawan’s view of Southeast Asia’s future will touch upon socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental aspects as well.

Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur and philanthropist and a 2022-23 visiting scholar at APARC.  Having established a successful investment business in Indonesia, the Ancora Group, he created the Ancora Foundation.  The foundation has endowed scholarships for Indonesians to attend Stanford and other high-ranked universities around the world and has funded the training of teachers at hundreds of Indonesian kindergartens serving underprivileged children.  Wirjawan’s public service has included positions as Indonesia’s minister of trade, chairman of its Investment Coordinating Board, and chair of a 159-nation WTO ministerial conference in 2012 that focused on easing global trade barriers.  He led his country’s national badminton association in 2012-16 when Indonesia won four gold medals in the sport at world championships including the Olympics.  He advises Indonesia’s School of Government and Public Policy (SGPP) and Yale’s School of Management, among other institutions.  At SGPP he hosts a public-policy podcast called endgame, to which an estimated 471 thousand people subscribe.  His degrees are from the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA), Baylor University (MBA), and the University of Texas at Austin (BSc).