COVID-19 and Southeast Asia

Firstly, community-led, bottom-up approaches in response to various problems resulting from COVID-19 in Southeast Asia need to be identified. Much of the literature focusing on Southeast Asia's response to COVID-19 concentrates on state-led initiatives as well as the authoritarian nature of Southeast Asian regimes. While these are important issues and need to be addressed, such approaches tend to neglect other equally important movements and mischaracterise the region as homogeneous and wholly dominated by authoritarian controls. As Padawangi (forthcoming), Wan et al. (2020), and others show, there have been various bottom-up initiatives in the region to support communities and slow the spread of COVID-19. Such cases allow us to imagine an alternative system driven by empowered communities. And it is also of considerable importance that analyses of everyday strategies of collective care and resistance adopt an intersectional sensitivity to how the uneven impacts of the outbreak, as well as unequal opportunities to access mutual support, have been conditioned by existing structures of oppression (Browne et al., 2020; Eaves and Al-Hindi, 2020; Leonard, 2020; Manzo and Minello, 2020; Moreno-Tabarez, 2020). 

Secondly, movements of people in and out of the region need to be addressed. Although the significant impacts of the outbreak on international tourism can be readily observed (Foo et al., 2020), the relationships between COVID-19 and international students (Haugen and Lehmann, 2020), tourists (Iaquinto, 2020), and other privileged forms of mobility in and through Southeast Asia are not yet sufficiently known. Analysis should account for the expansion of infrastructure and transportation networks, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, that exemplify the patterns of extended urbanisation for which Southeast Asia has long been known (Connolly et al., 2020). Keil (forthcoming) argues that COVID-19 has transformed from a 'disease of luxury' for the most mobile and most privileged to a 'disease of misery' targeting the most vulnerable groups of society. We see that South Asian migrant worker dormitories have become a COVID-19 hotbed in Singapore, followed by 'othering' by the state. Migrant workers from Southeast Asia have also been severely affected by COVID-19 including ones from Myanmar working in China and Filipino domestic workers in the Middle East and North America, but to what extent and how they are affected by the pandemic have not been discussed much.  

Thirdly, in many regions, emerging analyses and commentaries in the social sciences have swiftly responded to the lessons many governments’ COVID-19 responses hold for the societal implications of digital and technological infrastructures and forms of visualisation. For instance, the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition software (Datta, 2020), rapid geographical modelling (Brunsdon, 2020), ‘smart city’ data capture (James et al., 2020; Sonn and Lee, 2020), urban robotic infrastructures (Chen et al., 2020), and web mapping platforms (Cinnamon, 2020) have influenced policy outcomes and bear significance for data privacy, surveillance, and the future delivery of education, healthcare, policing, and other social services. Additionally, digitally mediated representations of the outbreak, including mappings of transmission and mortality (Brice, 2020) and online ‘dashboards’ (Everts, 2020), have shaped individual and collective actions, emotional responses, and imaginings of COVID-19’s spatial and temporal attributes. Despite the initial success of Singapore’s data-driven approach, the influence of which has reached well beyond the region (Kouřil et al., 2020), much remains to be said about how such digital and technological approaches have taken hold within Southeast Asia and what possible futures this might foretell.

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