The Philippines, in early 2020, became the first country in Southeast Asia to record a COVID-19-related death. A Chinese national visiting from Wuhan died on 1 February. The Philippines ended the year as the country in Southeast Asia the worst affected by this pandemic in combined public health and economic terms. It hammered the Philippine economy, with many predicting that the pandemic's global spread would turn the country's reliance on overseas remittances from a socio-economic buffer to a vulnerability.

The government's crisis response—highlighted by a particularly long and severe lockdown—exposed serious shortcomings in policy planning and implementation by the national government; very credible allegations of corrosive corruption in key government agencies; and President Duterte's ineffective crisis leadership. Many have argued that President Duterte's rhetorical focus on fighting corruption, delivering public services, and the poor is a key factor in his enduring popularity. In 2020, the president and his administration fell short of this rhetoric in practice.

Despite the depth and duration of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the ineffective government response, however, Philippine domestic politics and foreign policy have gone largely undisrupted. President Duterte remains very popular and is in a uniquely powerful position among post-Marcos presidents entering the final quarter of their respective single six-year terms. Philippine foreign policy remains in volatile tension between the president's personal embrace of China and President Xi Jinping and his animus towards America and the bureaucratic state and the Philippine population's opposing preferences. Fortunately, despite predictions of doom, overseas remittances continue to act as an economic buffer, and indeed a more important one, given the steep and sustained fall-off in trade and private capital formation in 2020.

This overview chapter begins by looking at the public health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Philippines. It then looks at how both of these were aggravated by the shortcomings of the national government's crisis response. The next two sections look at how domestic politics and foreign policy remained largely undisrupted. The conclusion offers some predictions for 2021.

The Philippines’ Pandemic

As is clearly shown by the Philippine Department of Health's COVID-19 Tracker website, from March 2020 until the end of the year, the Philippines experienced one continuous wave of recorded COVID-19 cases that crested at a high of 22,813 new recorded cases in the second week of August.

As one of the smallest states in Asia, Brunei Darussalam has demonstrated an enduring stability amidst a turbulent global pandemic in 2020. Though the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be Brunei's sternest test in decades, the country appears to have come through it relatively unscathed, and at the end of 2020 was preparing for a post-pandemic period, including assuming the ASEAN chairmanship in 2021. Brunei in 2020 illustrated the resilience of a monarchy of a small state supported by a largely contented society, with the domestic social compact between the government and its people intact.

The Social Contract Imperative

The social contract tradition in political philosophy refers to the tacit agreement between a ruling government and a ruled society in which social benefits are provided by the state in return for some restrictions on individual freedom. The social contract in contemporary times is often based on trust and cooperation, in what is also described as accumulating social capital—the greater the social capital, the stronger the social contract. For policymaking purposes the social contract is more commonly described in many countries as the social compact. It is seen as a centrepiece of state-society relations, with the government as the interlocutor, and is integral to legitimizing the authority of a government over the citizenry within state boundaries. The stronger the social compact, the greater the legitimacy of the government.

The adhesive that has long held Brunei together is the social contract between its government and society underpinned by Malay cultural traditions and Islamic principles, encapsulated in the ideological trinity of Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB, or Malay Islamic Monarchy). To this end, the kingdom, under the reign of the present sultan, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, provides extensive social welfare for its people such as in education and healthcare, with them paying virtually no tax. This helps preserve the social compact by keeping the society contented with, and pragmatically accepting of, monarchical rule alongside the cultural rationale of reverence for the monarchy. This social compact undergirds Brunei's strategic culture, which continues to be defined and moulded by the MIB.

Apart from sporadic instances of youth restiveness, it was the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic that proved to be the sternest test for the monarchy-led Bruneian government in sustaining the social compact throughout 2020.

In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic hit Southeast Asian states hard. From a health perspective, the region has managed the pandemic comparatively well, with fewer reported cases and deaths as a percentage of the population than other parts of the world. But measures applied to stem the spread of the disease have caused a deep economic contraction in the region, seen rises in unemployment and poverty, strained already fragile governmental institutions, and in some cases created political instability. There are further variations within the region, depending on levels of trade dependency, state capacity and the stringency of control measures implemented by national governments. For the vast majority of states, minimizing the health impacts and pulling through the depths of the economic recession caused by the virus has become the immediate and top priority that dominates all others.

Beyond these domestic coronavirus challenges, ASEAN member states experienced a sharp deterioration in their external strategic environment in 2020 as the already tense relationship between the United States and China became even more hostile and confrontational. From March 2020 onward, the Trump administration accelerated its campaign against a range of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies and diplomatic narratives. It placed the blame for the global calamity squarely on the CCP, alleging a cover-up by party officials about the source of the outbreak and citing the failure of China's leaders to respond rapidly to quarantine the local outbreak, to urgently close internal and international borders, or to disclose key information about the infectiousness and severity of the virus to the World Health Organization and the world. It doubled down on criticisms of Chinese trade and investment practices, its political influence over the World Health Organization, and human rights issues in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The Americans also implemented policies and laws to limit the capacity of Chinese companies to dominate high technology sectors of the world economy.

For its part, the CCP has displayed an acute insecurity and defensiveness of its competence, right to rule and global standing and it has gone on the attack against all forms of domestic and international criticism. It has done so through a mixture of “wolf-warrior” diplomacy, economic coercion against critics like Australia, and further clamping down on sources of internal dissent.

The word of the year for 2020, according to Collin's Dictionary, was “lockdown”. Cambridge Dictionary opted for “quarantine”. Oxford decided there were too many choices to even pick one at all. In the trade world, the best choice for 2020 may have been “disruption”. This paper considers three different sources of tension in trade that created significant disruption: a continuing collapse of the global trading system, the stressors caused by the unfolding US-China trade war, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic with its associated lockdowns and quarantines.

A Creaking Trading System

Heading into 2020, there were already significant signs of trade and economic distress building up in the system. The primary institution for managing global trade issues has been the World Trade Organization (WTO). Created in 1995 out of the post–World War II institution, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO had been struggling to make progress on a variety of fronts.

The GATT/WTO system was built on creating a more liberal and open trading regime based on sets of negotiations among members. Each of these exercises, called a “round”, broadened and deepened the levels of commitment among members. This included creating sets of trade rules that included goods, services and intellectual property rights along with country-specific commitments.

The rulebook at the WTO is legally binding with an institutional structure called the dispute settlement system to manage conflict between member governments. Heading into 2020, however, at least two important stressors had appeared in the WTO regime.

First, the rulebook itself had not been fully updated since 1995. Other than a relatively modest addition to handle customs or border procedures more consistently, the 164 members in the WTO have been unable to agree on a comprehensive set of new rules. The Doha Development Round was launched in 2001 and never reached fruition. It has now been a quarter of a century since the last round was completed. Not every trade rule requires updating or adjustment, but the world has seen some significant unanticipated changes in all this time. An inability to manage updated rules has left governments trying to interpret existing rules for new situations, which is not ideal.

After his inauguration to a second term in October 2019, Indonesian president Joko Widodo (or “Jokowi”) had looked forward to consolidating his political and economic legacy. Politically, his rule was stable. Jokowi commanded high approval ratings in the electorate and a large majority in the Indonesian legislature, and the turmoil associated with the large-scale Islamist mass protests in 2016 and 2017 had died down. Some of the president's former opponents had joined his government (his rival in the 2019 elections, Prabowo Subianto, became Jokowi's defence minister), while others kept a low profile or were even in long-term foreign exile (the leader of the 2016–17 demonstrations, Rizieq Shihab, resided in Saudi Arabia to escape legal investigations at home). Economically, Jokowi wanted to continue his vast infrastructure projects, make Indonesian businesses more competitive, and move the nation's capital from the overcrowded Jakarta to a remote location in East Kalimantan. His second term, the president hoped, would stand in clear contrast to that of his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which had been widely criticized as a missed opportunity.

Of course, 2020 did not turn out the way Jokowi, or anyone else for that matter, had expected. From January, the world's news cycle was dominated by COVID-19, fundamentally changing political and economic trajectories. Jokowi's annoyance with this massive interruption of his second-term plans was palpable. At the start, he tried to ignore the issue and project a business-as-usual attitude, hoping that the virus would spare Indonesia. Indeed, he initially viewed the outbreak as an economic opportunity for Indonesia as it could—or so he claimed—absorb tourism flows from countries badly affected by the pandemic. Once Indonesia reported its first cases in early March, Jokowi realized that action was needed, but he was adamant to limit such action so as not to damage the economy. As a result, many epidemiologists criticized Jokowi for his soft approach, which led Indonesia to record the highest death and infection numbers in Southeast Asia. However, despite the fact that most of Indonesia's Southeast Asian neighbours did significantly better in containing the virus, Jokowi largely succeeded in keeping Indonesia out of the international COVID-19 headlines. To no small extent this was because of the massive outbreaks in the United States, Europe and parts of Latin America, which overshadowed Indonesia's own poor record.

On 30 December 2019, speaking at the virtual year-end national conference between the central and local governments, the secretary-general of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and president of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trong, set the scene for the country in 2020:

Unforeseen in Trong's vision were the ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19. Though COVID-19 had significant adverse impacts on both domestic politics and foreign relations during the year, Vietnam's effective response to the pandemic not only earned credit for the Vietnamese government overseas but also intensified the CPV's legitimacy at home. At the same government function on 28 December 2020, almost one year later, Trong was able to define 2020 as “more successful than 2019 and the most successful year in the past five years”. Trong singled out achievements on the following five fronts:

Cambodia currently finds itself caught between Beijing and Washington in a geopolitical tug of war. Strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific has intensified since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The United States has confronted China over perceived unfair trading practices and intellectual property theft, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea and Mekong region, and in October 2020 it ordered the Chinese consulate in Houston to close over concerns about economic espionage. China has responded in kind, through increasing tariffs on American products, expelling American journalists and revoking visa exemptions for US diplomatic passport holders in Hong Kong and Macau.

Central to the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia finds itself as the primary theatre of US-China strategic rivalry. Positioned within this context, Cambodia appears to be caught in the middle of tensions between Washington and Beijing as it seeks to balance relations without compromising its interests. Both the United States and China are crucial to Cambodia's development and, of course, the Cambodian ruling elite's maintenance of power. Chinese investment and development assistance have contributed significantly to Cambodia's national development, albeit with some reputational risks associated with Beijing's generosity. Meanwhile, Washington has tended to prioritize investment in Cambodia's civil society organizations, with an emphasis on addressing governance, corruption and human rights issues—much to the annoyance of the Cambodian government.

For small authoritarian states like Cambodia, regime survival is a key driver of foreign policy towards great and regional powers. In the wake of increasing geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China, Cambodia increasingly finds its foreign policy shaped by the power play between these two superpowers. This chapter explores Cambodia's contemporary foreign policy in the context of US-China great power rivalry. First, it proceeds by providing a brief overview of how Sino-Cambodia and US-Cambodia relations have developed over recent decades and key events leading to 2020. A review of Phnom Penh's foreign policy to date shows that Cambodia has steadily disengaged from Washington and moved closer to Beijing on a number of key issues; nowhere more so than in the realms of economics and defence.

As with the rest of Southeast Asia and the world, the coronavirus outbreak took the entire Philippines by surprise in early 2020. But the response by the Philippine government was quite distinct compared to those of its neighbours. It placed the entire country in a highly-securitized lockdown—one of the longest and strictest in the world. The series of harsh lockdowns has also been coupled with an order from the president for security officers to use lethal force against violators—“shoot them dead!”, as Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte commanded in April 2020. Yet, close to the end of the year it had become clear that the harsh measures taken by the government had failed to keep the outbreak from turning into a full-blown economic, health, political and social crisis. Along with close to 475,000 confirmed cases and more than 9,200 casualties of the coronavirus recorded by year's end, hunger and poverty among Filipino families and the loss of jobs and economic opportunities reached historical highs. A record 7.6 million Filipino households experienced involuntary hunger, a strikingly high 7.2 million Filipinos were jobless and the economy contracted at an unprecedented rate of 9.5 per cent, making it the worst in Southeast Asia. The COVID-19 pandemic has become a most complex and challenging crisis all over the world, but even more so for the national administration in the Philippines.

But rather than being a curse for the populist Duterte, the pandemic turned out to be a gift. Despite leading one of the worst-managed responses in the region to the outbreak, the crisis gave Duterte an opportunity to renew the public mandate for his illiberal agenda. The series of spectacular failures by his administration in curbing the spread of the virus did not dent his popularity. At the height of the pandemic, a 50 per cent spike in the number of casualties from the administration's brutal war on drugs was recorded, and Duterte's assaults on democracy and human rights worsened. By September 2020, public trust and support for Duterte's performance was at a record-high 91 per cent. This is his highest rating so far, and this remarkably high score sets him apart from all the past presidents in the post-authoritarian years. Duterte is now the most powerful and popular Philippine president since the country's return to democracy in 1986.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • The rise of religious extremism in public discourses is a cause for concern for government officials and moderate Muslims.

• • While a substantial body of research on violent extremism is available, the issue of non-violent extremism remains neglected by scholars.

• • Although exposure and subscription to non-violent extremism do not automatically lead to violence, it still needs to be curbed because it can fan hatred that in turn can lead to physical violence and repression of human rights. Non-violent extremism also boosts polarization in the community.

• • Given this potential impact, the government needs to pay more attention to the dissemination of non-violent extremist public discourses, especially on social media. It could work together with influential religious organizations which possess immense religious authority and legitimacy.

What a difference a week makes in politics! The year 2020 saw the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government in less than a week—from 23 to 28 February—in what has been dubbed the Sheraton Move. The PH government began the year with persistent political splits caused by the unfulfilled transition of the premiership from Mahathir Mohamad to Anwar Ibrahim before it was deposed in the Sheraton Move. The new coalition of Perikatan Nasional (PN), led by Muhyiddin Yassin, has held on to power despite many forecasts of its impending collapse and multiple political manoeuvrings to bring this about on the assumption its precarious grip on the federal government is thought to be a majority of two parliamentarians in the House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat). The Muafakat Nasional (MN), an alliance between the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS), that backs the PN had proven its mettle in by-elections in 2019 and continued to stabilize in 2020, winning yet another by-election in Sabah and, most crucially, helping the ruling coalition win the Sabah state election in September.

The peculiar, unprecedented, political development in Malaysia in 2020 was the establishment of a ruling coalition that has within it three other coalitions; namely, the MN, Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) and Gabungan Rakyat Sabah (GRS). (The latter two are groupings of state-based parties in Sarawak and Sabah, respectively.) In terms of developments for the Opposition, the PH Plus parties have continued to unravel after Mahathir's reluctance to concede a leadership change to Anwar broke up the original coalition. Elite feuding and factionalism within Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) was sparked by the Azmin Ali camp versus the Anwaristas. The PKR was previously led by Rafizi Ramli, who took leave of politics after being defeated for the post of deputy leader by Azmin Ali. Simmering differences between the Anwaristas and the Azmin camp had vitiated PKR solidarity for most of its tenure in the PH ruling coalition. The factional in-fighting peaked in July 2019 when a series of sex tapes surfaced that alleged Azmin Ali's involvement in a gay relationship. Anwar's calls for Azmin to resign if the allegations were true was met with Azmin's retort that Anwar should “look at the man in the mirror.”

In January 2020, when Thailand reported the first COVID-19 case outside China, the country was predicted to be among the worst hit by the pandemic. In November, the head of the WHO praised Thailand as an “excellent example” of containing the virus. The death toll was sixty. Almost no deaths or domestic transmissions had occurred since June. The economic and social impact, however, was brutal, and the future prospects are uncertain. This article has four parts. The first summarizes the course of the pandemic. A lockdown over March to June choked off domestic transmissions, and a fortress strategy of closed borders prevented a subsequent wave. In the second part, we attribute this relative success in controlling the virus to the public health system developed over four decades by activism within the medical community. In the third part, we describe the economic impact. The lockdown was severe because around half of the workforce remains in the informal sector with little social protection, and because the fortress strategy inflicted severe pain on an economy highly dependent on exports, foreign investment and tourism. Recovery over the second half of the year was partial and patchy. The final section looks at prospects for the future. As the global recovery will be slow, the tourist industry and parts of manufacturing will suffer permanent damage. Thailand's outward-dependent economic model, which has been faltering for several years, is due for a makeover.

The Course of the Pandemic in 2020

The first case of COVID-19 outside China, a woman from Wuhan, was identified in Thailand on 12 January 2020; the first Thai case, a woman returning from Wuhan, was found ten days later; the first local transmission, a Bangkok taxi-driver, on 30 January; and the first death involved a retail worker exposed to Chinese tourists who was hospitalized on 16 February and died two weeks later. At this early stage, Thailand was predicted to be among the countries worst hit by the virus because of the large number of Chinese tourists—eleven million in 2019. Yet, as cases accumulated slowly, reaching forty-two at the end of February, economic analysts predicted only a short-term hit on the tourism industry, shaving less than 1 per cent of annual GDP growth, and a recovery by the end of the year. Both predictions proved to be spectacularly wrong.

INTRODUCTION

The dissemination of extreme religious discourse remains a cause for concern among government officials and moderate Muslims in Indonesia. On 3 December 2020, Minister of Religious Affairs Fachrul Razi warned religious teachers across Indonesia that extreme religious ideas could reach students via three “doors”: teachers, the school curriculum, and extracurricular religious activities. He called for teachers to exercise extra vigilance and be more active in guiding students so that they do not fall victim to religious extremists’ agendas via those “doors”. Two weeks later, Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo sat with academics and ulama (Islamic religious scholars) to discuss pressing issues facing the nation. Following the meeting, they issued a statement saying that they would jointly fight against “radical contents in social media”.

Muhammad Bukhari Muslim of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN Jakarta) argues that in comparison to the moderate ulama, Indonesia's conservative figures and groups have the upper hand in promoting their extreme religious views. They appear more convincing and possess better social media skills as compared to the moderate ulama, and therefore, have better access to Muslims who are increasingly turning to social media to study Islam. Alexander Arifianto (2020, p. 11) explains that new information and technologies (such as social media)—which are spurred by various government regimes that had been promoting freedom of expression since 1998—have opened up access for conservative ulama to disseminate their views. These conservative views have challenged and eroded the religious authority of moderate ulama from mainstream Muslim organizations.

The first part of this article looks at non-violent extremism discourses that appear on the social media accounts of the eleven most popular preachers in Indonesia. Social media have increasingly played an important role in shaping people's minds. A 2017 national survey jointly carried out by Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (PPIM) UIN Syarif Hidayatullah and UNDP Indonesia, shows that social media was the most popular site for university and school students studying Islam, followed by religious texts, television, and offline religious events such as Majelis Taklim (Saputra 2018, p. 31). The survey found that exposure to content on social media boosts religious extremism among students rather than enlightens them.