Southeast Asia

ASEAN Peoples Speak!

In 2025, ASEAN peoples demonstrated remarkable resilience and adaptability in the face of rapid global change. Governments, communities, and regional institutions continued to invest in cooperation, innovation, and rights-based development, reinforcing a shared commitment to long-term stability and growth.

This progress unfolded alongside a convergence of complex challenges that tested national capacities and regional solidarity. Foreign aid declined, civic spaces came under strain, trade tensions intensified, and economic pressures mounted. Earthquakes flattened towns while wars in Myanmar dragged on. As a result, cross-border displacement highlighted both the pressures on receiving countries and the importance of protecting human rights beyond national borders. And beneath promises of digital transformation, cyber-scam compounds expanded, fueling transnational crime and modern forms of slavery.

Together, these intersecting dynamics reinforced a critical insight: challenges across ASEAN’s political-security, economic, and socio-cultural pillars are deeply interconnected. Sustainable growth in the region cannot be achieved through isolated responses but through coordinated action and shared responsibility grounded in human dignity.

It is this insight that ASEAN Peoples Speak! Season 5 seeks to capture.

Produced by the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism in partnership with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom Asia Office, the podcast’s fifth season moves away from official rhetoric and policy abstractions. Instead, it centers on how regional and global decisions, tariff hikes, aid reductions, diplomatic paralysis, shape lives on the ground, often undermining the very development goals ASEAN claims to pursue.

The season advances a clear argument: human rights are not separate from development; they are its infrastructure. Trade cannot deliver prosperity without labor protections. Disaster response cannot rebuild societies without transparent and coordinated cooperation. Economic growth cannot last when communities are displaced, exploited, or excluded.

And critically, human rights protection is not the responsibility of any single state. It is a regional concern and a regional obligation.

Episode 1: Aid Cuts and Civic Space

The season opens with a quiet but destabilizing shift: the reduction of U.S. foreign aid to Southeast Asia.

For civil society organizations, the effects are immediate and structural. Democracy programs are scaled back. Health and education initiatives struggle to survive. As civic space shrinks, so does the ability of communities to participate meaningfully in political and social development.

Atty. Sheila Formento of the Alternative Law Groups explains that aid cuts weaken the ecosystem that allows rights to be defended. Yet Formento also points to resilience. Drawing lessons from the pandemic, she recalls how organizations adapted through digital tools and new partnerships. The current funding crisis, she argues, may force ASEAN societies to internalize human rights as a domestic and regional development priority, no longer sustained primarily by external donors, but owned from within.

Episode 2: The Human Side of ASEAN’s Trade Battles

From civic space, the season moves to the factory floor.

As U.S. tariff hikes take effect in 2025, ASEAN economies, deeply embedded in global supply chains, negotiate with the US to reduce tariffs, with fear of losing foreign investments in their countries. Sonny Africa, executive director of the IBON Foundation, argues that trade policy without human rights safeguards undermines economic development itself.

When labor protections are weak, the burden of adjustment falls on workers and small enterprises. Africa calls for greater investment in domestic industrialization, grounded in labor rights and social protection, to ensure that economic growth does not come at the expense of labor exploitation and long-term stability.

Episode 3. War Without End? Myanmar’s Civil War and ASEAN’s Dilemma

Nowhere is the link between human rights and regional stability clearer than in Myanmar.

Years into the civil war, violence continues. Civilians remain displaced. Humanitarian access is restricted. ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus has delivered little relief, raising questions about the bloc’s political credibility and capacity to support peace-driven development.

This episode examines ASEAN’s struggle to find a viable response. Debbie Stothard, founder of ALTSEAN-Burma, points to ASEAN’s internal divisions as a key constraint. Without a unified human rights–centered approach, she argues, the region risks prolonged instability that undermines regional integration, democratic norms, and long-term development.

Episode 4. Migration, Statelessness, and Refugee Rights

Beyond conflict zones, millions across Southeast Asia live without legal recognition.

Stateless persons and refugees are excluded from education, healthcare, and formal employment, locking entire communities out of social and economic development. Their invisibility is not accidental; it is produced by policy gaps and regional inaction.

In conversation with activist Nicole Fong, the episode explores the experiences of Rohingya communities in Malaysia and other undocumented populations across ASEAN. Fong stresses that development cannot be inclusive while legal exclusion persists. She highlights the need for ASEAN-wide cooperation on migration and refugee protection while acknowledging the growing role of national human rights commissions in filling institutional gaps.

Episode 5. Earthquakes, Aid, and Rights

When a major earthquake struck Myanmar in 2025, it revealed how disaster response without a state level involvement can deepen inequality.

Aid delivery determines not only who survives, but who recovers and who is left behind. Thunpicha “Thun” Greigarn of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute examines ASEAN’s disaster risk management through a rights-based lens, asking who receives aid first and why.

In conflict-affected areas of Myanmar, delayed and fragmented responses compounded suffering. Greigarn argues that without coordination, transparency, and accountability, disaster response can undermine rescue efforts, generate further abuses, and weaken long-term recovery, key pillars of development.

Episode 6. Scam Factories and Slavery 2.0

The season’s sixth episode investigates cyber-scam compounds spreading across Southeast Asia.

Trafficked workers, lured by false job offers, are forced to operate online scams under coercion and violence. “This is slavery adapted to the digital economy,” says human rights advocate Abigail Mae Guevara.

Weak labor protections and fragmented regional enforcement allow these operations to flourish. Guevara argues that combating scam factories requires cross-border cooperation rooted in awareness-raising and migrant rights without which economic modernization becomes a vehicle for exploitation rather than progress.

Episode 7. Business, Environment, and Human Rights in ASEAN

The season concludes by examining the intersection of business, environmental sustainability, and human rights.

From extractive industries to global supply chains, economic growth in ASEAN has often marginalized communities and degraded ecosystems. Dr. Unang Mulkhan, an expert in human rights due diligence, identifies a recurring failure: the lack of meaningful community consultation.

While several countries have adopted national action plans on responsible business conduct, weak cross-border coordination undermines enforcement. Dr. Mulkhan argues that environmental protection, economic growth, and human rights are mutually reinforcing and that ignoring one weakens the others.

A Shared Responsibility

ASEAN Peoples Speak! does not promise easy solutions. What it offers is a consistent message: human rights are the backbone of development.

Political stability, social inclusion, and economic resilience cannot be achieved in isolation from rights protection. Trade, aid, disaster response, migration policy, and business practices all shape whether development benefits people or leaves them behind.

As Southeast Asia navigates an increasingly volatile global landscape, this season suggests that ASEAN’s future will not be determined solely by summits or strategies but by whether the region chooses to protect human dignity as the foundation of its development path on the ground, and together.

*Hnin Wint Naing is the regional communication officer at the Asia Office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.