International and local civil society organisations have usually been identified amongst the key actors for the conceptual and practical development of liberal and post-liberal peace approaches. The concept of hybrid peacebuilding, for example, has highlighted the need to empower local civil society groups. Critics of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding, however, argue against the conceptual idealisation of hybridity. Using examples from Mindanao, this chapter contends that the debates on liberal-local hybridity can most meaningfully gain from asking questions not only about the processes of internationalisation and localisation, but also about the ways in which hybrid mechanisms are able to produce more or less stable outcomes. By turning into the agency of civil society actors, it suggests that the concept of hybridity, which is often represented using dichotomised categories (e.g. ‘liberal-international’ and ‘illiberal-local’), tends to oversimplify the conceptual intricacies and dynamic processes between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The analysis in the chapter aims to contribute to the discussions on hybridity by illustrating the manner civil society actors are able to negotiate their complexities within the frictional binaries of liberal ideas, institutions and resources vis-à-vis local practices, power relations and norms.

This article seeks to analyse how conceptions of global climate change norms have contributed to the framing strategies and tactics of local indigenous people’s rights movements using the cases of Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance (CPA) from the Philippines and the Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) from Indonesia. Drawing on the combined theoretical frameworks of the world society approach and the social movement framing theory, this article argues that global climate change norms have provided indigenous people’s rights movements in Indonesia and the Philippines with new sources of vocabularies towards collective action. In theoretical and empirical terms, it contends that the exposure of the local indigenous social movements to global normative mechanisms have shifted local activism, as the world society approach envisages, while framing theory elucidates the manner in which movement-actors are able to interpret and transform the ideas they receive. A paired comparison, based on data collected from the CPA and AMAN’s public pronouncements as well as in-depth interviews with local indigenous movement leaders and members, shows material ideas and instruments that social movements receive from global institutional sources (such as the United Nations climate change agreements, global indigenous declarations, and international climate justice coalitions) have enabled them to produce novel frames for collective action at the local level. Contrastingly, it demonstrates how indigenous climate justice activists have also been able to frame their contentions against the prevailing global norms and ideas about climate change.

This article explores the possibility of examining a storytelling platform, which has largely been ignored by scholars of visual politics about Southeast Asia: comics. It particularly describes how comics can serve as a discursive mechanism for visual representation within the purview of the Rohingya refugee crisis in the region. Drawing from post-structuralism and visual discourse analysis as the theoretical and methodological basis of the research, the article considers a case of a long-form online comic’s engagement withthe refugee crisis,with particular attention to the criticisms about Aung San Suu Kyi and the bloody military campaign against the Rohingya minorities in Myanmar. By specifically looking into the text-image discourses and inter-textual components of the comics, this article attempts to demonstrate that the ability of comics to “speak” politics is still dependent on international news sources and wider debates, which shape the ways in which the comic artists are able to frame their work. In this case, the use of comics as a story-telling platform, however, also suggests the agency of refugees to be portrayed as political-security actors. Although the article generally focuses on the case of the Rohingya refugee crisis, it also draws attention to the contention that scholars of Southeast Asian visual politics can most profitably engage with other regional issues by turning their attention to the dynamic role of comics as an alternative medium and source of data towards the analysis of threat construction and political-security discourse about Southeast Asia.