The region is remarkably diverse, encompassing political systems ranging from open democracies and monarchies to socialist states.

It also has a long history of close relations and security alliances with Western powers, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

Against this complex backdrop, ASEAN’s open-door approach to trade, covering a market of more than 680 million people with an estimated aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) exceeding USD 3 trillion in 2026, presents a significant opportunity for BRICS economies to expand their investment presence.

Singapore offers a particularly illustrative example.

The country has skilfully navigated the inflow of economic integration and large-scale capital from major BRICS economies without abandoning its traditional strategic partnerships with the United States and the United Kingdom.

Markets as a bridge across geopolitical divides

The expansion of BRICS investment can be examined through Jagdish Bhagwati’s thinking on international trade.

Philosophically, Bhagwati argues that the “horse must come before the cart”: economic growth generated through private-sector productivity and free markets serves as the “horse” that pulls the “cart” of social welfare and poverty alleviation.

From this perspective, China, India, and Russia in Southeast Asia have focused on breaking down rigid protectionist barriers, enabling greater market creativity and facilitating the expansion of private corporations.

Through deeper integration among private corporations across emerging markets, potential friction arising from ideological differences or geopolitical proximity to the Western bloc can be pragmatically moderated through mutually beneficial economic interdependence.

BRICS investment and Southeast Asian growth

BRICS investment and market expansion have measurable implications for regional GDP.

According to the IMF’s 2026 World Economic Outlook, India is projected to grow by 7.0%, positioning it as a major driver of research expansion and technological innovation in the region.

China, growing at 4.4%, remains a major upstream supplier in regional supply chains.

Vietnam is recording an average growth rate of 5.6%, while Indonesia maintains a steady growth rate of 4.9%, reinforcing their positions as major destinations for manufacturing relocation.

Malaysia is growing steadily at 4.0% as an exporter of technological equipment, while Thailand, at 1.6%, continues to integrate its logistics sector.

Singapore, growing at 3.5%, is further consolidating its role as a global financial centre capable of efficiently balancing, absorbing, and mediating capital flows among China, the United States, and ASEAN.

What BRICS could mean for Indonesia?

For Indonesia specifically, its demographic base of approximately 288 million people and projected GDP of around USD 1.54 trillion in 2026 give its domestic market considerable bargaining power to explore private-sector partnerships with individual BRICS members.

With Brazil, Indonesia’s private sector could pursue technology transfers in bioethanol energy and tropical agriculture.

With Russia, domestic corporations have strategic opportunities for technology transfer in cybersecurity, aerospace, and future energy security.

Partnership with India could focus on strengthening the production base for pharmaceutical raw materials and software development, effectively expanding existing cooperation in the automotive, textile, and palm oil industries.

China, meanwhile, remains a central partner for Indonesia’s private sector in accelerating the downstream processing of critical minerals and developing the battery ecosystem.

South Africa offers another important opportunity, both as a partner in mining technology and as an export hub through which Indonesian manufactured products could reach markets across the African continent.

This diversification of cross-continental partnerships provides a strong foundation for the expansion of Indonesia’s private industries.

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From raw materials to advanced manufacturing

The greatest expectation surrounding deeper BRICS economic engagement with ASEAN is that it could accelerate structural transformation, shifting the region away from dependence on raw-material exports towards a high-value manufacturing economy.

Vietnam has demonstrated this potential by leveraging substantial investment and its proximity to Chinese supply chains to emerge as an advanced manufacturing centre within the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem.

Malaysia has similarly attracted significant capital to develop its global semiconductor ecosystem.

This momentum requires countries such as Indonesia to play an active role as facilitators by providing investment-friendly regulations while positioning the private sector as the principal engine of innovation.

With strong technology-transfer requirements embedded in BRICS sectoral agreements, such investment could help create a more dynamic and resilient economy while contributing directly to improvements in welfare at the grassroots level.

***

Adri Arlan Sinaga is a doctoral student in International Relations at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Beijing. His research focuses on foreign policy, global security, and the geopolitical dynamics of ASEAN and BRICS. Contact email: de202458004@uibe.edu.cn.

References

ASEAN Secretariat. (2025). ASEAN Statistical Highlights 2025.

Badan Pusat Statistik. (2026). Statistik Indonesia 2026.

Bhagwati, J. (2002). Free trade today. Princeton University Press.

Bhagwati, J. (2004). In defense of globalization. Oxford University Press.

Bhagwati, J., & Panagariya, A. (2013). Why growth matters: How economic growth in India reduced poverty and the lessons for other developing countries. PublicAffairs.

Gilpin, R. (2001). Global political economy: Understanding the international economic order. Princeton University Press.

International Monetary Fund. (2026). World economic outlook.

Indian Ministry Trade and Commerce. (2026). India-ASEAN bilateral trade report.

(QOB)

At a Ramadan food bazaar in Bintulu in 2025, the idea was relatively simple.

At the end of each trading day, food that might otherwise have been discarded was separated into two streams.

Edible surplus could be redistributed, while unavoidable food waste could be collected for composting or biogas rather than sent for conventional disposal.

Thirty-four food-stall operators participated. Over the initiative, more than 500 kilograms of food were diverted from landfill.

More than 300 kilograms of edible surplus were redistributed to the community, while more than 200 kilograms of unavoidable food waste were separated for resource recovery.

There was nothing technologically remarkable about any of this.

Food donation is not new. Composting is not new. Waste segregation is certainly not new.

What was more interesting was everything that had to happen around those familiar solutions.

Stall operators had to participate. Food had to be separated correctly. Collection had to be organised. Different types of waste needed different destinations. Local authorities, community organisations and researchers had to coordinate their roles.

The experience illustrated something easy to overlook in discussions of the circular economy: Knowing what should happen to waste is very different from building a system that allows it to happen routinely.

That distinction has increasingly shaped our work in Bintulu.

The distance between awareness and action

Waste-reduction programmes often begin with awareness, for good reason. People cannot change practices they do not recognise as a problem.

But awareness has limits.

A household may know that plastic should be recycled and still throw it in the general waste if there is nowhere convenient to send it.

A restaurant may understand that food scraps can be composted but lack the space or staff routines to separate them.

An organisation may proudly say that it recycles without knowing how much material actually leaves its premises or where it goes.

The challenge is often not discovering another solution. It is connecting people to solutions that already exist.

This is particularly relevant in places such as Bintulu.

Southeast Asia’s conversations about sustainability, smart cities and the circular economy naturally gravitate towards major metropolitan centres. Yet much of the region’s economic and social life takes place outside them.

Bintulu is an industrial centre in Sarawak (Borneo) where hotels, industries, schools, government agencies, food businesses, community organisations and households generate different waste streams, while the systems needed to recover those materials are still developing.

It therefore offers a useful place to ask a practical question: What does a local circular economy look like before it becomes a neat policy diagram?

The answer, from our experience so far, is rather untidy.

It involves meetings, compost bins, school competitions, recyclers, mobile applications, hotel kitchens, community organisations and quite a lot of trial and error.

Getting people into the same room

One starting point was Towards Zero Food Waste in Bintulu, a collaboration among Universiti Putra Malaysia Sarawak, Tokyo University of Agriculture, and local stakeholders, funded by the Bintulu Development Authority (BDA).

In February 2025, the programme brought together approximately 300 participants representing around 120 organisations, including businesses, hotels, schools, government agencies, community organisations and other groups.

The attendance figure itself is not the interesting part. What mattered was that people who normally encounter different parts of the same problem were in the same conversation.

A hotel sees kitchen waste.

A recycler sees materials with different market values.

A school sees an educational opportunity.

A local authority sees collection, cleanliness and disposal.

Researchers see data, behaviour and potential interventions.

Community organisations see what people will realistically do.

Bringing those perspectives together does not solve the problem, but it helps reveal where the system breaks down.

This is vital because environmental programmes can easily become trapped at the awareness stage. A seminar can be successful by conventional measures: The room is full, photographs are taken, participants fill in evaluation forms, and everyone agrees that waste should be reduced.

Then Monday morning arrives, and old routines have a habit of returning.

The real question, then, is what happens to the waste.

The Ramadan bazaar initiative became one attempt to move beyond that point by linking awareness directly with a practical pathway for food recovery.

Giving waste somewhere else to go

The distinction between edible and unavoidable food waste sounds obvious, but it changes the question being asked.

The first question is no longer, ‘How do we dispose of this food waste?’ but, ‘Does this need to become waste at all?

Where food remained suitable for consumption, redistribution came first. Only the unavoidable fraction moved towards composting or other forms of recovery.

It also became clear that individual behaviour was only part of the problem.

Institutions often have greater scope to change material flows because they control kitchens, storage areas, staff responsibilities and relatively consistent waste streams.

Following the broader food-waste programme, composting activities were introduced or explored with hotels and other institutions in Bintulu.

The difficult questions were not about whether composting works. They were much more ordinary.

Where will scraps be separated? Who is responsible? What happens when trained staff are off duty? How much space is needed? Which materials can enter the system? Who will use the compost?

These mundane questions often determine whether an environmental intervention survives after its launch. Circular economies are built as much through routines as through technologies.

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When recycling happens, can we see it?

A different problem emerged around recyclable materials.

Many organisations already carried out some form of recycling, but the process was fragmented.

Materials accumulated until someone contacted a recycler. Different recyclers accepted different materials. Records varied considerably. Organisations could participate in recycling without having a clear picture of what had been recovered.

This was one of the problems behind the development of KitarNow.

Developed by Universiti Putra Malaysia Sarawak in cooperation with Tokyo University of Agriculture, with funding through the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity and support from local partners, the platform allows organisations to list recyclable materials, while recycling companies can identify available materials.

Transactions can then be recorded by material type and weight.

However, the technology should not be romanticised. KitarNow does not recycle anything. People do.

Recyclers still need vehicles. Someone still must separate cardboard from general waste. Markets still determine whether particular materials are worth collecting.

What the application adds is a coordination and information layer.

As of May 2026, 43 organisations were registered on the platform, including five recycling companies. It had recorded 8,401.73 kilograms of recyclable material, of which 8,199.64 kilograms were recorded as recycled.

For us, the useful change was partly conceptual.

Instead of saying, “We conducted a recycling campaign”, it becomes possible to ask: What material entered the system? What was recovered? What remains uncollected? Which materials repeatedly struggle to find a destination?

That shift from activity to material flow changes how a programme can be understood.

It also exposes weaknesses.

If glass or textiles remain difficult to recover, an app cannot manufacture a market for them. If recyclers do not participate, digital listings simply become digital piles of uncollected material.

Digitalisation can reduce friction between actors. It cannot remove the physical economics of waste.

That may be one of the more useful lessons from KitarNow: technology works best when it is introduced after the coordination problem is understood, not before.

An unexpected role for schools

Schools became one of the strongest early sources of recyclable material recorded through KitarNow.

This developed alongside the Towards Zero Waste in Bintulu: Youth Environmental Empowerment 2026 programme and the Bintulu Zero Waste Schools Challenge.

The programme combined environmental education with practical recycling and sustainability communication.

Rather than judging participation solely by attendance or enthusiasm, the recycling component could also be linked to actual quantities recorded through KitarNow and supported by recycling records.

Across the wider challenge, nearly five tonnes of recyclable material were recorded in less than two months. The tonnage was useful, but schools were interesting for another reason.

Schools are institutions, but they are also networks.

Students take messages home. Teachers organise collective action. Parents become involved indirectly. A recycling activity can become visible to hundreds of people at once.

But school competitions have an obvious weakness.

Competitions end.

The harder question is what happens once the certificates are distributed and the winners announced.

Temporary mobilisation is relatively easy. Institutional memory is much harder. Which brings the problem back to continuity.

Digital systems still need physical places

In June 2026, SisaSMART@Bintulu was established as a community facility supporting waste separation, recycling, composting, training and environmental education.

Its purpose is straightforward: to provide a physical place where sustainable waste practices can be carried out rather than only discussed.

The arrangement also illustrates the institutional side of the circular economy.

Bintulu Development Authority provides support and coordination. Sarawak Federation of Women’s Institute (PPWS) Bintulu-Tatau contributes to day-to-day operation and community mobilisation. Universiti Putra Malaysia Sarawak provides technical guidance and training support.

No single organisation is expected to do everything.

That sounds obvious, but environmental projects are often designed as though a single institution could conduct research, mobilise communities, develop technology, collect waste, train participants, operate facilities, and monitor outcomes indefinitely.

In practice, few institutions can do all of these things well.

A more realistic approach is to identify which organisation is best placed to perform which function.

SisaSMART@Bintulu is still new, and it would be premature to claim that it has changed community behaviour or significantly altered Bintulu’s waste flows.

Its importance at this stage is more modest: It provides continuity.

Campaigns, competitions and workshops have an expiry date, but a physical facility can still be there the following week.

Infrastructure does not always mean sophisticated machinery or an expensive processing plant. Sometimes it is simply a reliable place, a responsible operator and a recognised process through which people can participate.

The connections matter more than the projects

Viewed separately, none of these initiatives is particularly unusual.

There is an awareness programme, food redistribution, composting, a recycling application, a school programme and a community facility.

The more interesting development is what happens when they begin to connect.

The stakeholder programme brings organisations into the conversation. The Ramadan initiative provides a practical pathway for food recovery. Organisational composting creates another destination for unavoidable organic waste.

Schools broaden participation. KitarNow records part of the recyclable material flow and connects organisations with recyclers. SisaSMART provides a physical community node where some of these activities can continue.

None is sufficient on its own.

An awareness campaign without an action pathway produces informed frustration.

A composting system without source separation receives contaminated waste.

A recycling application without recyclers becomes a database of unresolved listings.

A community facility without an operator becomes an empty building.

A local authority working alone cannot reasonably manage every part of the circular economy.

The emerging lesson from Bintulu is therefore less about the projects themselves than about the spaces between them.

Those spaces are where local circular economies either begin to function or fall apart.

What Bintulu has not solved

Bintulu is not a zero-waste town, and these initiatives should not be presented as evidence that it is becoming one.

The quantities recorded through KitarNow represent participating organisations, not the total recyclable waste generated in Bintulu.

Food diverted through individual programmes should not be confused with citywide reductions. Short-term participation does not demonstrate long-term behavioural change.

There are also practical constraints.

Some recyclable materials remain economically unattractive to collect. Recyclers have limited capacity. Community facilities require people and resources to operate them.

Organisations may participate enthusiastically during campaigns and gradually return to older routines. Digital platforms depend on users continuing to provide reliable information.

And almost every environmental programme eventually encounters the same uncomfortable question: who pays when project funding ends?

These are not reasons to dismiss local initiatives.

They are reasons to evaluate them realistically.

Circular-economy diagrams often make material loops appear almost effortless. Draw an arrow from “waste” to “resource”, and the loop appears complete.

In practice, every arrow requires an organisation, an incentive, a person, a vehicle, a facility, a buyer or some combination of them.

What may travel beyond Bintulu?

Bintulu’s experience is still developing, and it would be unwise to package it as a model for Southeast Asia.

Local conditions differ too much. Waste markets vary. Local authorities have different capacities. Formal and informal recycling systems differ across the region. What works in Sarawak cannot simply be copied elsewhere.

But some principles may travel better than individual projects.

One is to begin with the material pathway rather than the technology.

Where does the waste originate? Who currently handles it? Where could it realistically go? What prevents that from happening?

Only then does it make sense to decide whether the missing piece is awareness, collection, infrastructure, financing, data or technology.

A second is that awareness should be linked with an action pathway.

If people are asked to separate something, there needs to be an answer when they ask where it should go tomorrow morning.

A third is to measure participation increasingly through what happens to materials rather than through attendance alone.

A hall containing 300 people may be an excellent beginning. It is not, by itself, an environmental outcome.

Different institutions also need different jobs.

Universities can contribute research and technical guidance. Local authorities can coordinate and provide institutional support. Community organisations can sustain local participation. Businesses can change their operational practices. Recyclers understand material markets. Schools can mobilise students and families.

The system becomes stronger when those roles complement one another rather than trying to make every organisation responsible for everything.

And digital tools should solve actual coordination problems.

There is little value in digitising a process simply because digitalisation sounds modern. Technology becomes useful when it removes a specific friction that people already experience.

When Monday morning arrives

The food-stall operator separating leftovers at a Ramadan bazaar is a long way from the diagrams of circular economies that appear in policy documents.

But in some ways, that small act is where the circular economy actually begins.

A material that previously had one destination is given another.

For that to happen consistently, however, a chain has to exist around it.

Someone has to separate the material. Someone has to collect it. Someone has to use it. Someone has to coordinate the process. And increasingly, someone needs to know whether it happened at all.

Bintulu’s waste problem has not been solved. What has begun to change is the architecture around parts of that problem.

Food businesses have experimented with redistribution and segregation. Organisations are adopting composting. Schools have participated in measurable recycling.

Recyclers and waste-generating organisations can connect through a digital platform. A community organisation now helps operate a physical place where recycling and composting can continue beyond a one-day campaign.

These remain small interventions compared with the total waste generated by a town.

But perhaps that is precisely why they are worth examining.

The circular economy is often discussed in terms of national strategies, advanced technologies, and major infrastructure investments. Those things matter.

At the local level, however, it also has to work when the campaign is over, the banners have come down, and Monday morning arrives.

That requires something less glamorous but just as important: Connecting people, information, infrastructure and institutions well enough that yesterday’s waste has somewhere else to go.

Disclosure: This article has not been previously published. The author leads the Bintulu initiatives discussed in this article, including Towards Zero Food Waste in Bintulu and KitarNow.

Sources and further reading

Bintulu Development Authority. 2025. “Bintulu’s ‘Towards Zero Food Waste’ Initiative Diverts Over 500kg from Landfills.” 7 April 2025.

Unit Komunikasi Awam Sarawak (UKAS). 2026. “Agenda Sifar Sisa Bintulu Diperkasa Melalui Kolaborasi BDA-UPMS.”

Universiti Putra Malaysia Sarawak. 2025. “KitarNow: Digitising Recycling for an Inclusive Circular Economy in Bintulu.”

Universiti Putra Malaysia Sarawak. 2026. “SisaSMART@Bintulu Dilancarkan Sebagai Pusat Komuniti untuk Pengurusan Sisa, Kompos dan Kitar Semula.” 18 June 2026.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). 2024. Food Waste Index Report 2024. Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). 2024. Circular Economy: From Indicators and Data to Policy-Making. Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme.

(QOB)

Among his most prominent policies are the Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) program and the development of Koperasi Desa/Kelurahan Merah Putih (Kopdes Merah Putih).

Both policies respond to genuine structural problems. MBG seeks to improve nutrition and human capital, while Kopdes Merah Putih aims to strengthen village economies, improve market access, and increase community participation in economic development.

Their political appeal is therefore understandable. Yet the ultimate test of these policies will not be the attractiveness of their objectives, the size of their budgets, or the number of facilities established. It will be their implementation.

A government can announce an ambitious program, allocate substantial resources, and establish impressive targets, but public policy succeeds only when citizens experience tangible improvements in their everyday lives.

For the Prabowo administration, the central question is consequently not whether its flagship programs are popular, but whether the state possesses the administrative, technological, and institutional capacity to deliver them effectively.

Makan Bergizi Gratis (Free Nutritious Meals, MBG)

MBG represents the clearest test of this implementation challenge. The program is unprecedented in scale and seeks to reach millions of Indonesian children and other priority beneficiaries.

Its objectives are highly consequential: improving nutrition, reducing food insecurity, strengthening human capital, and potentially stimulating local agricultural production. However, the number of meals distributed should not become the primary measure of success.

A program can achieve extensive coverage while still producing poor outcomes if meals fail to meet nutritional standards, food-safety controls are inadequate, procurement is inefficient, or the most vulnerable communities remain underserved.

The government therefore needs to shift from a coverage-driven model to an outcome-driven approach in which nutritional improvement, food safety, targeting accuracy, fiscal efficiency, and local economic impact become central performance indicators.

Implementation must be judged by whether children are healthier and whether public expenditure generates measurable nutritional and social value.

Proposed Reform: Digital Food Subsidy

A further improvement would be to expand MBG’s conceptual scope beyond the physical distribution of free meals.

A child may receive a nutritious meal at school while the child’s household continues to struggle to afford rice, eggs, vegetables, milk, and other essential food products.

This suggests the need for a complementary policy: a Digital Food Subsidy for People Affected by Food Crises.

Rather than requiring the state to distribute every subsidised food item physically, eligible households could receive targeted purchasing power via their National Identity Number (NIK) or a government-issued Food Card.

Eligibility could be determined by household income, vulnerability, family composition, regional food price conditions, and exposure to food insecurity.

This would shift the government’s role from simply delivering food to ensuring vulnerable citizens have the purchasing power to obtain it.

The proposed digital subsidy could operate through an integrated national food-security platform connecting citizens, government databases, banks, and the country’s diverse food-retail ecosystem.

Accredited malls, supermarkets, minimarkets, utility stores, traditional markets, village shops, cooperatives, and small food stores could participate.

A citizen would present a Food Card or use an approved NIK-based identification mechanism when purchasing eligible food products.

The transaction would be checked against the government’s central eligibility system, which would determine whether the individual or household qualifies for a subsidy, the applicable subsidy rate, and the remaining balance or entitlement.

Once eligibility is confirmed, the citizen would pay the non-subsidised portion, while the government subsidy would be settled through the banking system to the participating retailer.

The retailer could also receive a modest, transparent transaction incentive for providing the public service. In this model, the subsidy follows the vulnerable citizen rather than being tied to a particular government shop.

The system's effectiveness would depend on digital interoperability. Larger retailers such as Indomaret, Alfamart, supermarkets, and malls already operate sophisticated point-of-sale and inventory management systems.

Their systems could be connected to the government’s Food Subsidy Central System through standardised interfaces and secure interoperability mechanisms.

The greater challenge concerns small food stores and informal retailers that lack digital inventory systems. Excluding these businesses would create an urban and corporate bias in food assistance.

The government should therefore provide a simple Mobile Point-of-Sale system that can operate through a smartphone or government-supported device.

A small shopkeeper could use it to register eligible products, verify a customer’s subsidy status, record purchases, update inventory, and transmit transactions to the central system.

This would enable even a neighbourhood food store to participate in national food-security policy.

The proposed architecture could connect the entire food-retail ecosystem, from large malls and modern minimarkets to Kopdes Merah Putih, utility stores, traditional markets, and small village shops.

The systems do not need to be identical; they need to be interoperable. The government should therefore act as a digital platform provider rather than attempting to replace every retailer’s technology.

This would create a form of digital public infrastructure through which government financing could interact with existing market infrastructure.

The state would determine eligibility, define eligible food products, finance the subsidy, establish standards, and monitor transactions, while private and cooperative retailers would provide the actual retail service.

Such a system could also make food policy more responsive to crises. Food insecurity is not static.

A household can suddenly become vulnerable following unemployment, natural disasters, inflation, supply chain disruptions, or regional food shortages.

The government should therefore develop dynamic eligibility mechanisms rather than relying exclusively on rigid annual beneficiary lists.

When a food crisis occurs in a particular region, the government could temporarily increase subsidy levels, expand eligible food categories, or activate additional beneficiaries.

When conditions improve, the government could reduce the additional assistance.

This would make the digital subsidy a counter-cyclical instrument that can respond rapidly to changing food-security conditions.

However, digitalisation must not become digital exclusion.

Physical Food Cards, assisted transactions, offline functionality, and government-supported devices should remain available for citizens with limited digital literacy, internet access, or smartphone ownership.

Kopdes Merah Putih (Red and White Rural Cooperatives, KMP)

The second major implementation challenge concerns Kopdes Merah Putih and the role of modern minimarkets.

The government has an important objective in strengthening village economies, but protecting village cooperatives from competition does not automatically make them competitive.

Established retailers such as Indomaret and Alfamart possess sophisticated procurement systems, logistics networks, inventory management, pricing strategies, digital payment systems, and professional retail expertise.

Asking newly established village cooperatives to compete with these networks without equivalent capabilities risks creating outlets that are physically present but commercially unsustainable.

The policy debate should therefore move from the question of how to restrict minimarkets toward the more constructive question of how to make village cooperatives competitive enough that consumers voluntarily choose them.

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Proposed Reform: Indomaret and Alfamart as Partners Rather Than Enemies

One promising answer is a public-private partnership model involving the government, village cooperatives, and established retail companies.

Rather than treating Indomaret, Alfamart, and similar firms exclusively as competitors, the government could treat their operational capabilities as assets that can be mobilised for public purposes.

Under a “Government Space–Cooperative Ownership–Private Management” model, the government or village administration could provide suitable premises, infrastructure, and targeted subsidies.

At the same time, Kopdes Merah Putih retains local ownership and community participation.

A qualified private retailer could then provide professional management, procurement, logistics, inventory technology, staff training, and operational standards. The government would not need to recreate capabilities already in the private sector; it could contract for them while maintaining public oversight.

This partnership should not become a permanent subsidy to private corporations. Government support should be performance-based, transparent, and competitively procured.

Contracts could require participating retailers to demonstrate affordable prices, local employment, local procurement, customer satisfaction, efficient inventory management, and measurable benefits to cooperative members.

Private firms should compete for contracts rather than receiving automatic access to public infrastructure. Indomaret and Alfamart could participate, but so could regional retailers, logistics companies, technology firms, and qualified cooperative federations.

The purpose should not be to create a government-supported private monopoly but to establish a competitive rural retail ecosystem in which public resources produce measurable public value.

The digital food subsidy could make this partnership even more powerful.

A Kopdes Merah Putih outlet, an Indomaret, an Alfamart, a supermarket, or a small village shop participating in the PPP ecosystem could simultaneously become an accredited food-subsidy merchant.

Large retailers could integrate their existing POS and inventory systems with the government’s central platform, while smaller businesses could receive the government’s mobile POS.

The citizen would use an NIK or Food Card, the government would verify eligibility, and the banking system would settle the subsidy electronically.

This would create a unified architecture in which public infrastructure, private operational capacity, cooperative ownership, and digital government reinforce one another.

The government would not have to build a separate physical distribution system for every welfare program.

Rice, vegetables, eggs, processed foods, and other locally produced goods could therefore enter professional retail networks. The digital system could further reveal where food demand is concentrated and which products are most frequently purchased.

This would create a feedback loop linking government purchasing power, consumer demand, retailers, and local producers.

MBG could generate predictable institutional demand for nutritious food, while digital subsidies could generate household-level purchasing power.

Together, these mechanisms could form a more comprehensive food-security architecture.

The ultimate objective should therefore be an implementation state rather than simply a program-expanding state.

MBG should guarantee nutritious meals for priority beneficiaries; digital food subsidies should protect vulnerable households from food crises; local procurement should strengthen farmers and producers; and Kopdes Merah Putih should connect communities to competitive markets.

The government should provide infrastructure, regulation, targeted subsidies, digital public infrastructure, and oversight.

Private companies should contribute logistics, technology, procurement, and professional management.

Cooperatives should provide local ownership, community participation, and integration with village economies. Each actor performs the function for which it is best positioned.

Overall Evaluation Summary

The government should publish measurable indicators covering nutritional outcomes, food safety, subsidy utilization, beneficiary targeting, food prices, retailer participation, local procurement, cooperative profitability, and the value generated by public-private partnerships.

Citizens should be able to see not simply how much money the government spends, but what that expenditure achieves.

The next stage of the Prabowo presidency should therefore focus less on announcing ambitious programs and more on perfecting their implementation.

A child who receives a safe and nutritious meal is evidence that MBG works.

A vulnerable household that can use its NIK or Food Card to purchase essential food at an accredited shop and receive a timely subsidy is evidence that digital food-security policy works.

A farmer who gains reliable market access, a cooperative that becomes commercially sustainable, and a village retail outlet that combines public infrastructure with professional private management are evidence that economic reform works.

These are the outcomes that should determine policy success.

The real measure of President Prabowo’s most popular policies will be whether they convert public resources and political promises into healthier children, food-secure households, competitive village economies, and measurable improvements in the everyday lives of Indonesian citizens.

Muhammad Younus is a researcher in Government Affairs and Administration at Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His research interests include digital government, e-government, smart cities, public administration, digital transformation, and public policy.

Halimah Abdul Manaf is a researcher at the School of Government, College of Law, Government and International Studies, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia. Her research interests include government, public administration, governance, public policy, and institutional studies.

Estefanie R. Cortez is a researcher at the College of Political Science and Public Administration, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines. Her academic interests include political science, public administration, governance, public policy, and government institutions.

Joanne Valesca Mangindaan is a researcher in the Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Sam Ratulangi University, Indonesia. Her research interests include business administration, public administration, organizational studies, governance, and management.

Dian Suluh Kusuma Dewi is a researcher in the Department of Government Science at Universitas Muhammadiyah Ponorogo, Indonesia. Her research interests include government science, public administration, governance, public policy, and local government.

(QOB/ELS)

Some emerge gradually through new strategic arrangements that are initially treated as exceptional and then slowly become part of the normal security landscape.

AUKUS is one such case.

When Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States announced the security partnership in 2021, ASEAN members immediately recognised and responded to its potential implications.

Indonesia expressed concern about an arms race and power projection in the region, while Malaysia warned that the arrangement could contribute to further nuclear proliferation.

Other members adopted more cautious or supportive positions, reflecting the divergent strategic calculations that have long existed in Southeast Asia.

Five years later, however, the question ASEAN should be asking is no longer simply whether AUKUS threatens regional stability.

It is whether ASEAN has done enough to ensure that the emergence of AUKUS does not gradually reshape the regional order on terms that weaken the norms ASEAN has spent decades constructing.

Whether or not ASEAN can continue to claim itself as the prominent architect of the region, despite AUKUS’s existence. This distinction is important.

AUKUS itself does not necessarily violate the Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ). The treaty prohibits nuclear weapons, while AUKUS concerns nuclear-powered submarines.

Yet the agreement has introduced a strategic reality that ASEAN has not fully addressed: nuclear technology is becoming increasingly embedded in military competition in the Indo-Pacific.

That reality is unlikely to disappear. ASEAN’s limited engagement with it could have consequences far beyond the original AUKUS agreement.

For decades, ASEAN had sought to construct Southeast Asia as a security community based on consultation, consensus, restraint and peaceful coexistence.

The ASEAN Way emerged from a region deeply shaped by colonialism, ideological conflict, interstate tensions and great-power intervention.

ZOPFAN and SEANWFZ were expressions of the same aspiration: Southeast Asia should not become a battlefield for the strategic ambitions of larger powers.

AUKUS does not automatically invalidate that vision. But it tests whether ASEAN’s norms can remain meaningful as the strategic environment changes.

This is where ASEAN’s response becomes increasingly important.

ASEAN members have never been united in their assessment of AUKUS. Indonesia and Malaysia have expressed serious concerns about its implications for proliferation and an arms race.

Singapore and Vietnam, by contrast, have viewed stronger security cooperation among the United States and its partners more positively, particularly in the context of China’s growing strategic weight.

Such differences are not unusual. ASEAN was never created to eliminate differences among its members.

The problem is what happens when those differences are not followed by sustained collective engagement.

ASEAN has continued to reaffirm its commitment to SEANWFZ, but reaffirmation alone is insufficient when the strategic environment surrounding the norm is changing.

The organisation has yet to develop a sufficiently substantive regional conversation about how its nuclear-free principles should be understood in an era of nuclear-powered military technology, dual-use capabilities and intensifying great-power competition.

This creates a dangerous gap between ASEAN’s normative commitments and its strategic reality.

Norms do not maintain their influence simply because they remain written in treaties and diplomatic declarations. They require continuous political reinforcement.

When new strategic practices emerge, and regional institutions do not actively engage with them, what was once considered exceptional can gradually become normalised.

That is the longer-term concern surrounding AUKUS.

The issue is not that AUKUS will suddenly destroy SEANWFZ. Rather, ASEAN risks allowing the strategic environment to evolve faster than its own regional norms.

This matters because the Indo-Pacific of 2026 is not the Indo-Pacific of 2021.

Great-power competition has continued to intensify. Military modernisation has accelerated. Strategic partnerships have expanded.

Southeast Asian states are increasingly navigating a regional environment in which deterrence and military balancing play a larger role.

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In such an environment, ASEAN cannot afford to remain primarily reactive.

If ASEAN waits until emerging security practices have become established before deciding how they relate to its regional norms, its ability to influence those practices will be significantly weaker.

This is also where the meaning of ASEAN centrality must be reconsidered.

Centrality cannot simply mean that ASEAN remains the convenor of regional meetings or the institutional hub through which major powers engage Southeast Asia.

If ASEAN wants to remain a regional architect, it must also shape the principles through which emerging security challenges are understood.

AUKUS therefore presents ASEAN with an opportunity, not to reject the partnership, but to engage with the strategic realities it represents.

ASEAN should revisit the political meaning of SEANWFZ in light of emerging nuclear technologies.

It should strengthen consultations among member states so that national differences do not become permanent regional divisions.

And it should engage Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom more directly on safeguards, transparency and the implications of nuclear-powered military capabilities for Southeast Asian security.

Most importantly, ASEAN needs to move from reacting to strategic developments toward anticipating them.

Because the future consequences of AUKUS will not be determined solely by the 2021 agreement, they will also be shaped by what regional actors do in the years that follow.

If ASEAN’s concerns remain confined to diplomatic statements while new strategic practices become increasingly normalised, today’s ambiguity could become tomorrow’s precedent.

And once a precedent becomes embedded in the regional security architecture, reversing it becomes far more difficult.

This is how normative erosion occurs, not necessarily through a single dramatic violation, but through gradual accommodation, ambiguity and inaction.

AUKUS, therefore, should not only be understood as a challenge to ASEAN’s security environment.

It should be understood as a test of ASEAN’s capacity to shape that environment.

ASEAN may not be able to stop great powers from competing.

But it can decide whether Southeast Asia’s regional order will simply adapt to that competition, or whether the region will continue to shape the rules by which that competition is conducted.

The choice may not be urgent today. But the longer ASEAN waits to make it, the fewer choices it may have tomorrow.

Fitra Shaumi Az Zahra is an international relations researcher and foreign policy analyst whose work focuses on Southeast Asian security, ASEAN regionalism, and strategic culture. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Universitas Airlangga and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Social and Political Sciences, specialising in Strategic Studies, at the Indonesian International Islamic University. Her work bridges academic research and public discourse, with her analysis and commentary published across Indonesian media.

References:

On AUKUS development:

Anwar, L.A. (2023) ‘Menjaga Keterbukaan Komunikasi tentang Kapal Selam AUKUS’, Kompas.id, 31 December. (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

De Castro, R.C. (2021) ‘Philippines enhances ties with AUKUS’, Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), 13 December. (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

Dziedzic, S. (2022) ‘Indonesia criticises submarine loophole in nuclear non-proliferation treaty that underpins AUKUS deal’, ABC News, 29 July. (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

House of Commons Defence Committee (2026) AUKUS: Eighth Report of Session 2024–26. London: House of Commons. (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

Hurst, D. (2023) ‘Singapore backs AUKUS and says Australia could play “bigger role” in regional security’, The Guardian, 1 May. (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

Li, M. (2022) ‘ASEAN’s responses to AUKUS: implications for strategic realignments in the Indo-Pacific’, China International Strategy Review, 4(2), pp. 268–287. DOI: 10.1007/s42533-022-00121-2.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Malaysia (n.d.) Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Malaysia – Portal. (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

On SEA Security community & Norm development:

Acharya, A. (2001) Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order. London: Routledge.

Finnemore, M. and Sikkink, K. (1998) ‘International norm dynamics and political change’, International Organization, 52(4), pp. 887–917.

On ZOPFAN & SEANWFZ

ASEAN (n.d.) ‘Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ)’. ASEAN. Available at: (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

(QOB)

On 29 June this year, Singapore’s Online Safety Commission opened for business, giving victims of online harms a dedicated route to relief and putting Singapore among the small handful of countries with a government agency built specifically for the job.

The first phase covers five of the most severe harms: online harassment, doxxing, online stalking, intimate image abuse, and image-based child abuse, and six online service providers have been prescribed additional obligations.

It follows the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act, passed in November 2025.

It is a real milestone, and it arrived considerably faster than most of us working on these questions three years ago expected.

It is also, for the moment, an institution operating without a way to tell anyone whether it works.

That is not a criticism of the Commission, which is six weeks old.

It is a description of the entire region.

I have a particular vantage point on this.

In 2023, I was appointed to the #TechHacks: Digital Well-Being Youth Panel, convened by the National Youth Council and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth under Forward Singapore, as part of a new attempt to give young people a seat at the policymaking table rather than a slot on a feedback form.

Before that, I spent four years on the other side of the counter, in trust and safety and content policy operations at Meta, Tinder and Amazon, where user reports landed in queues I helped run.

The panel wanted to know whether Singapore’s new safeguards were reaching young people at all, so we commissioned Milieu Insight to conduct a nationally representative survey of 1,000 Singaporeans aged 16 to 34, comprising 26 questions, balanced by age, gender, and race, fielded from 9 to 19 May 2024.

Confidence survives right up to the point of contact.

What came back describes a cliff.

Sixty-seven per cent of respondents knew redress mechanisms existed on social media services. Sixty per cent were satisfied with how easy it was to find information about them. Fifty-four per cent were satisfied with their availability.

Then, among the 301 respondents who had actually used one after being harmed, 16 per cent found it effective.

Approval holds up beautifully in the abstract and collapses the moment anyone touches the system.

That is not apathy, and it is not ignorance either.

Among those who knew the mechanisms existed and chose not to use them, 43 per cent said they were not sufficiently invested in the matter, 42 per cent had little or no confidence in the reporting mechanism, and 37 per cent thought the mechanisms were simply insufficient.

Two of the three leading reasons are verdicts on the system rather than statements about the user, and the Government’s own published response to the youth panels records the underlying finding plainly enough: young people often perceive redress mechanisms as ineffective because there is frequently no feedback or update after a report is made.

Behaviour follows the verdict, and here is where the numbers stop being abstract.

Thirty-six per cent of respondents had personally been a victim of online harm at least once.

Of those, 39 per cent reported it to the platform, and 61 per cent simply blocked or deleted the person who did it.

The most common response to being harmed online in Singapore is to make the other party vanish from view and carry on, which is a private workaround that leaves no record, generates no data, and tells the platform and the regulator precisely nothing.

A further 58 per cent of all respondents had watched harm happen to someone else, so the lesson that reporting is not worth the trouble travels well beyond the people who tested it.

The block button, not the reporting flow, is what redress actually looks like from where most young Singaporeans sit.

None of that surprised the panel.

We had spent months in consultations, and we broadly expected the numbers to land where they did.

What surprised me was the shape of what we were measuring: an architecture that is almost entirely reactive, dependent on a harmed person filing a report into a system that most of them have already concluded will not respond.

The proactive half detecting and preventing harm before it reaches anyone- barely registers in the framework at all, and the survey is a fairly direct account of what happens when you build a reactive system that the people it was built for do not trust.

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Who pays for the gap?

The moment from those twelve months I still think about came from a fellow panel member who lives with a disability.

Online harm, he pointed out, is never distributed evenly; it falls hardest on people who are already vulnerable offline, because the same characteristics that make someone a target in a room make them a target in a comment thread.

The point is not novel; the UN makes it about children generally, but it lands differently when the person making it is describing his own inbox.

If the median young Singaporean, the one with no particular reason to be singled out, already finds redress unreliable, then for those in marginalised groups the same broken mechanism is not merely inconvenient.

It is a second harm layered on the first, and it compounds.

That reframed the survey for me.

A 16 per cent effectiveness rating is a policy problem for the general population and something closer to an equity failure for everyone else, and it is invisible in every metric currently collected, because the people it fails hardest are precisely the ones least likely to file the report that would generate a data point.

Why the queue does not answer

The policy literature tends to explain unanswered complaints as a matter of scale: too much content, too few reviewers, imperfect automation.

That is true, and it is not the whole story.

The structural reason, which is obvious from inside the industry and rarely stated outside it, is that trust and safety sits on the wrong side of the ledger.

Platforms understand its importance and say so sincerely; they also treat it as a cost centre, a function that consumes money rather than generates it.

Functions on that side of the ledger get optimised for cost per case, not for whether the person on the other end came away whole.

Proactive investment and the work that stops harm before anyone has to report it are the first things to be trimmed, because their return is a harm that never happened and therefore never appears in anyone’s numbers.

This is not a story about bad intentions.

It is a story about incentives, and incentives do not shift because a regulator asks nicely.

They shift when something a company cares about becomes contingent on the outcome.

Right now, in every ASEAN market, nothing is.

Transparency reporting measures the wrong thing.

It would be wrong to cast Singapore as the laggard here; it is the regional leader by a distance.

IMDA’s Code of Practice for Online Safety, issued in July 2023, requires designated social media services; Facebook, HardwareZone, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube, to give users clear information about their safety measures and to file annual online safety reports, which IMDA publishes, and IMDA now layers its own Online Safety Assessment Report on top, grading how comprehensive and effective those measures are.

Very little else in ASEAN comes close.

But look at what that machinery captures, and at what happened when we asked for more.

Our third recommendation was that Singapore adopt an accountability-based approach that would keep platforms answerable for how they handle online harms, a consensus position across the panel, and not, whatever else it was, an aggressive one.

We were explicit that ownership here is shared: government has to legislate and enforce, industry has to invest ahead of the harm rather than behind it, and young people themselves have to keep feeding back, researching and building from the ground up rather than waiting to be consulted.

The Government supported the intent and responded by describing the Code of Practice, under which designated services submit annual reports on the measures, systems, and processes they have implemented, and by pointing to the Online Safety Commission, which is still being drafted.

It also conceded that while the services had baseline user safety measures in place, there were areas for improvement, among them responding more quickly to user reports.

That exchange is the argument of this article in miniature.

Reports about measures, systems and processes are, by construction, platform accounts of platform behaviour.

They are a description of what a company has built, not a record of what happened to the people who used it.

The limits of self-description surface in the regulator’s own findings: in its 2025 assessment, IMDA disclosed that it had detected four cases of child sexual exploitation and abuse material on Instagram, originating from or targeting Singapore users, that were not proactively detected and removed until IMDA flagged them.

The regulator was finding what the platform’s systems had missed, which is exactly the distance between reported process and delivered outcome, and no annual report organised around measures will ever close it.

If I have one regret from the panel’s year, it is that our sharpest asks for transparency about which data both government and industry should put into the open, and in what form, were the ones that thinned out most on the way to the final recommendations.

They were the hardest to specify, and the easiest to soften, and softening them is why an accountability recommendation could be answered with a description of a reporting regime already in place.

That is a fair outcome for a first attempt, and the Prime Minister’s undertaking that youth recommendations would be seriously considered was honoured in substance.

It is still the piece I would go back and fight for.

The same omission, three ways

Widen the lens and the omission repeats in different costumes.

Malaysia’s Online Safety Act 2025, in operation since 1 January 2026, is on paper the most demanding instrument in the region on responsiveness: licensed providers must mitigate exposure to harmful content, publish user safety guidelines, maintain reporting and user-assistance mechanisms and prepare an Online Safety Plan, with reports acknowledged within roughly an hour, initially assessed within twelve, and harmful content removed within about a day, and fines of up to RM1 million for missing those clocks.

Nothing in the framework requires anyone to publish how often the clocks are actually met.

Indonesia has gone another way entirely.

Ministerial Regulation No. 9 of 2026, made under PP TUNAS and phased in from 28 March this year, keeps under-16s off platforms assessed as high-risk, permits 13- to 15-year-olds to access medium-risk services with parental consent, and requires electronic system providers to filter harmful content and to offer an accessible reporting mechanism.

The heavy lifting falls to age assurance and parents, and Indonesian commentators have already posed the obvious question: why does the work of fixing these systems fall to children and their families rather than to the companies that designed them?

Vietnam’s Decree 147, in force since December 2024, does mandate reporting, but the reports flow inward.

Platforms above the traffic threshold file annual and ad hoc returns to the ministry and remove flagged content within 24 hours of notification.

The state learns what it wants to know; the user learns nothing.

Three approaches, one shared blind spot. In each case, somebody holds information about how the system performs: the platform, the ministry, occasionally the regulator. In none of them does the person who was harmed ever find out whether people like them get anywhere.

What would close the gap?

1. Publish outcome data, not just measures.

Regulators should require and then publish a short, standard set of figures per platform and harm category: complaint volumes, resolution rates, median times to first response and to resolution, and appeal outcomes.

Ofcom’s transparency regime, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Australia’s periodic transparency notices have already established that this is administrable rather than theoretical.

The objection from industry will be that resolution rates invite gaming and compare systems that are not comparable, and there is something in it, but IMDA already grades these six services against one another in public, so the comparison is being made regardless, just based on what platforms say about themselves rather than what users experience.

Publish the denominators alongside the rates, let platforms annotate their own figures, and the gaming problem becomes a footnote rather than a reason to know nothing.

2. Measure user confidence independently, and keep measuring it.

Platform-supplied data will never tell a government whether people trust the system; only asking them will.

The panel recommended an annual survey on the state of online harms among young Singaporeans, designed to complement existing instruments such as MDDI’s Online Safety Poll rather than duplicate them.

The Government recognised the value of consistent data and said it would study further whether such a survey is feasible and complementary.

Two years on, with a new Commission now taking real cases, that study should conclude.

An equivalent instrument at ASEAN level would be worth more still, for the straightforward reason that nothing of the sort exists anywhere in the region.

3. Keep young people in the process, not in the consultation.

A panel convened once and dissolved after twelve months produces a snapshot; standing roles inside the bodies that write and review these codes produce a signal that keeps arriving.

Singapore has made a start: a youth representative from the panels now sits on the Media Literacy Council, and the Government has said it will continue to look for other meaningful platforms for youth participation.

The case for extending that pattern is not sentimental, and it is well established in the participation literature: continuous involvement builds ownership that one-off consultation does not.

The gap our survey found was invisible to policymakers precisely because it lives in the behaviour of people who never file a report, and you cannot commission that finding out of a system whose only input is reports.

The last piece

None of this should be read as an argument that Southeast Asia is doing too little.

Between Singapore’s new Commission, Malaysia’s statutory duties and Indonesia’s age framework, the region has built more online safety architecture in three years than in the previous fifteen, and the direction of travel is right.

The argument is narrower and more awkward: we are building the architecture without instrumentation.

We can state, to the hour, how quickly a platform in Malaysia must respond.

We cannot state, in any ASEAN market, what share of complaints ends in a resolution the complainant accepted, which is the only number that would tell us whether any of it is working.

Two years after our fieldwork, that survey remains, as far as I can establish, the only nationally representative reading of youth confidence in online redress anywhere in the region.

That is not a boast about the panel; it is an indictment of how little anyone is looking.

A regime that publishes what platforms do but never what users get is asking the public to take its effectiveness on trust, and among the young people it was built to protect, that trust has already been spent.

***

Disclosure. The author was a member of the #TechHacks: Digital Well-Being Youth Panel (November 2023 – November 2024), convened by the National Youth Council and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth under Forward Singapore, and is named as a panel member in the Government’s published response to the youth panels. He joined MCCY as a Senior Manager in grants governance in May 2024, midway through the panel term, and left the public service in June 2025. He previously held trust and safety and content policy roles at Meta, Tinder and Amazon. His current employer delivers programmes in partnership with the National Youth Council. The survey discussed here was commissioned through the National Youth Council by the panel of which the author was a member and fielded by Milieu Insight, which has approved its use here; the full deck is available from the author on request. No part of this article draws on non-public information from any current or former employer. The views expressed are the author’s own. This article has not been published elsewhere.

References

On Singapore’s Online Safety Commission and the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act 2025:

Lee, L.Y. (2025) ‘Singapore Parliament passes online harms Bill after more than eight hours of debate’, The Straits Times, 5 November. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Ministry of Law and Ministry of Digital Development and Information (2026) ‘The Online Safety Commission begins operations on 29 June 2026’. Singapore: MinLaw, 28 June. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

On the #TechHacks: Digital Well-Being Youth Panel and its findings:

Ang, S. (2024) ‘Youths to get a say in policymaking, with 2-3 panels to be set up this year’, The Straits Times. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Milieu Insight (2024) #TechHacks Digital Well-Being Youth Panel Survey. Commissioned via the National Youth Council, Singapore. Fieldwork 9–19 May 2024, n = 1,000, aged 16–34, nationally representative by age, gender and race. Deck available from the author on request.

Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth and National Youth Council (2025) Youth Panels: Government’s Response to Recommendations. Singapore: MCCY and NYC. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Raguraman, A. (2024) ‘Youth’s policy recommendations will be seriously considered: PM Wong’, The Straits Times, 24 August. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Shafeeq, S. (2025) ‘Govt to implement youth proposals on financial resilience, S-E Asian opportunities, among others’, The Straits Times. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

On Singapore’s platform regulation and transparency framework:

Infocomm Media Development Authority (2023) Code of Practice for Online Safety – Social Media Services. Singapore: IMDA, in effect 18 July 2023. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Infocomm Media Development Authority (2026) Online Safety Assessment Report 2025: Designated Social Media Services. Singapore: IMDA. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

On regional regulation — Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam:

Aminanto, M.E. and Pitaloka, D. (2026) ‘Indonesia’s age-restriction policy for social media access needs more than just a decree’, GovInsider, 17 March. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Buchanan, K. (2026) ‘Indonesia: Regulation introduces age restrictions for social media platforms’, Global Legal Monitor. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 12 March. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Rahmat Lim & Partners (2026) ‘Online safety in Malaysia: what you should know about the Online Safety Act 2025 and its subsidiary legislation’, 23 January. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Tilleke & Gibbins (2025) ‘A closer look at Vietnam’s Decree 147 on internet services and online information’, 20 February. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

On transparency and outcome measurement in comparable jurisdictions:

eSafety Commissioner (2025) Basic Online Safety Expectations: Transparency Report on Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and Sexual Extortion — Periodic Notices, August 2025. Canberra: Australian Government. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Ofcom (2024) Ofcom’s Approach to Implementing the Online Safety Act. London: Ofcom, 17 October. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Turillazzi, A., Taddeo, M., Floridi, L. and Casolari, F. (2023) ‘The digital services act: an analysis of its ethical, legal, and social implications’, Law, Innovation and Technology, 15(1), pp. 83–106. DOI: 10.1080/17579961.2023.2184136. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

On youth participation and online harms to children:

Lansdown, G. (2018) Conceptual Framework for Measuring Outcomes of Adolescent Participation. New York: UNICEF. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

United Nations (n.d.) ‘Child and youth safety online’, Global Issues. (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

(QOB)

Now, the plumes of smoke left by forest and land fires are beginning to recede, although a faint smell still lingers. Yet the memory remains.

About a week earlier, a circular from the local government instructing schools to adjust students’ learning arrangements due to the haze appeared in parents’ communication channels and was also circulated in the media.

Face-to-face classes at schools were moved online.

Thirty years ago, I experienced the same conditions when I was at primary school. It is hard to believe that, in 2026, schoolchildren in Pontianak are still affected by forest and land fires and haze.

If feeding schoolchildren is indeed so urgent, what is the point if the children who will eat the meals are themselves unwell because their breathing has been impaired?

Should the government not also give greater priority to this annual problem of forest and land fires and haze? It could, for example, be more flexible in its budgeting or even give the issue greater priority during the remainder of the Prabowo-Gibran administration.

Ironically, Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) currently has an annual disaster mitigation and prevention budget of only 17-19 billion.

By mid-August, BNPB had to grapple not only with forest and land fires and haze but also with three major earthquakes in NTT, North Sumatra, and Central Sulawesi.

In August alone, the Pontianak Post daily published three opinion pieces on forest and land fires and haze.

The first, published on 3 August 2026 and entitled Karhutla: Bencana Tahunan yang Tak Pernah Tuntas (Forest and Land Fires: The Annual Disaster That Never Ends), invited us to contemplate the disaster from a religious perspective and to reflect on humanity’s role as a steward of God’s creation.

Two weeks later, on 12 and 13 August 2026, respectively, two more articles addressed the same problem from different perspectives.

The article Merdeka dari Asap (Freedom from Haze) examined how education has been affected by recurring haze, while Kita Belum Belajar dari Api (We Have Not Yet Learnt from Fire) captured the author’s anxiety over fires on peatland that should have been anticipated and learnt from.

One thread runs through the authors’ various concerns: every year, the people of West Kalimantan still celebrate Indonesia’s independence with great fanfare, only to be greeted by an equally festive haze.

My article will join the ‘festivities’ of West Kalimantan’s haze month by focusing on stronger cross-border cooperation between West Kalimantan and Sarawak in responding to forest and land fires and haze.

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There are two reasons why this topic is important and deserves attention: (1) both regions are burning and experiencing the effects of haze; and (2) the spirit of the ASEAN Community provides a forum for cross-sectoral cooperation and more effective regional integration.

First, haze and deteriorating air quality are not confined to West Kalimantan. Several cities in Sarawak have experienced the same conditions, forcing schools to close.

Moreover, in late July 2026, the West Kalimantan Provincial Government had just successfully hosted the Malaysia-Indonesia Socio-Economic Cooperation Forum (Sosek Malindo) in Pontianak.

A trace of haze was already visible at the time, but who could have imagined that, several weeks after the series of meetings, the land fires and their smoke would spread further?

Several media outlets, politicians and officials in Sarawak and Malaysia blamed poor air quality in their areas on haze exported from Indonesia. Yet local Sarawak media reports must also be considered: fire hotspots and land fires were present there as well.

There were approximately 22 hotspots, with around 100 hectares of land burnt. This was certainly not comparable to the 1,483 hotspots recorded within 24 hours on 10 August 2026, or the total of 28,680.47 hectares burnt in West Kalimantan since January 2026.

Second, since 2003, forest and land fires and haze have been an important issue at the Southeast Asian level.

ASEAN member states have agreed to a treaty on transboundary haze, although in practice ASEAN repeatedly runs up against the principle of non-interference because the issue is often treated as a state’s domestic matter.

Other member states cannot intervene in the internal affairs of another ASEAN member state. Yet again, the haze shows that it knows no national borders and cares nothing for niceties about state sovereignty.

Haze moves with the wind.

This also means that states need to reconsider the concept of borders in dealing with haze. Encouraging stronger cross-border cooperation would certainly be far more effective than closing themselves off and becoming defensive.

Instead of each side busily making accusations while the other defends itself, should we not seek a solution together? Do we not always extol the rhetoric of kindred nations, also bound by ties of kinship in Kalimantan?

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Working Together for a Haze-Free Kalimantan

In line with Martinez’s (1994) typology of integrated border regions, this transboundary haze problem can provide momentum for strengthening relations between the two bordering regions.

Through the issue of forest and land fires and haze, the two subnational actors - the West Kalimantan Provincial Government and the Sarawak State Government - share the same interest: an environment free from damage.

If this common interest is aligned with each side’s perceptions of the other, cooperation is highly possible, according to constructivist thinkers in International Relations.

Moreover, West Kalimantan and Sarawak already have cooperation frameworks, ranging from Sosek Malindo and the Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA) to bilateral relations between the West Kalimantan Provincial Government and the Sarawak Government.

The close ties forged over the past five years during the tenure of Mr Azizul Zekri, Malaysia’s Consul in Pontianak, demonstrate that relations between the two nation-states at the subnational level are very good.

His active role in opening relations between the two countries and regions deserves to be continued. He concluded his assignment by attending Sosek Malindo 2026 in Pontianak at the end of July.

His initiatives, which also helped reopen air routes connecting West Kalimantan with Kuala Lumpur and Kuching, offer another example of how relations between West Kalimantan and Sarawak - and Malaysia more broadly - need not be limited to mutual accusations over haze.

This creates the possibility of pursuing more serious cooperation between local governments through paradiplomacy. It should not be limited to exchanging visits; West Kalimantan and Sarawak should also be able to solve problems together.

The local governments in West Kalimantan and Sarawak could begin by sitting down together to continue construtive discussions, building on the most recent Sosek Malindo.

They could exchange ideas and the best solutions used in each region. They could talk in order to listen to one another and share experiences.

The arrangements set out in the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution could also be more fully utilised and implemented at the local level.

Through paradiplomacy, the two sides could also establish a joint early warning system.

Another distinctive initiative would be public education on each side’s best practices through books, posters and collaborative videos in the various languages spoken in West Kalimantan and Sarawak.

The governments of both regions could also involve communities and highly active online influencers, so that public outreach can reach more people.

The solution must not be limited to the present; it must address how the two neighbouring regions can drastically reduce land fires and haze from year to year.

It is important not only to implement prevention measures as the dry season approaches, but also to make long-term investments.

Furthermore, in studies of border education, some researchers’ proposals have already moved towards designing curricula that accommodate the daily lives of border communities whose interactions cross boundaries.

Such curricula should not be limited to a national curriculum focused only on knowing one’s own country.

Transboundary haze could provide an entry point for both local governments to introduce West Kalimantan to students in Sarawak and vice versa, using a more constructive narrative.

Another example is the need to connect the local wisdom of farmers who clear agricultural land through controlled burning with formal education.

Although legislation and local regulations are already in place in West Kalimantan, this distinctive practice needs further study, particularly the customary procedures through which local communities understand nature before clearing agricultural land by burning it.

This local knowledge must be documented through research so that it is not only passed down orally from generation to generation but also becomes learning material that helps students understand how their ancestors learned from nature.

Academics at universities can act, too, alongside governments.

International collaboration between universities in West Kalimantan and Sarawak has long existed, including through the Borneo Studies Network (BSN).

This can be valuable capital for supporting bilateral relations between the two regions, particularly by maximising the potential of research and innovation to tackle forest and land fires and haze.

One such institution is Universitas Tanjungpura (UNTAN), which has now made tropical research one of its focus areas and should therefore become more involved by fully leveraging the research potential across its nine faculties.

The strategic position of the Rector of Universitas Tanjungpura, who previously served as Chair of the Indonesian Rectors Forum for the 2025-2026 term, could also serve as a bridge to attract opportunities for university collaboration at the national level and even beyond Southeast Asia, to conduct research and seek interdisciplinary, research-based solutions.

This message is also a form of self-criticism for us, as academics at universities, so that we can help keep West Kalimantan and Sarawak free from forest and land fires and haze.

Synergy between researchers and policymakers is crucial to mainstreaming research-based policy, rather than policy based on speeches, the wishes of a particular leader during a given term, or even virality.

Indonesia and Malaysia, particularly West Kalimantan and Sarawak, also have a history of other forms of cross-border cooperation, such as the Heart of Borneo initiative.

Moreover, at the border, people of different nationalities proudly embrace those on the other side as family.

These institutional and emotional bonds between West Kalimantan and Sarawak are valuable assets for resolving the problems they face together.

These harmonious relations could also accelerate development in western Kalimantan and balance development in Nusantara, in eastern Kalimantan.

This means that all parties share the same spirit of protecting and developing Kalimantan as a common home for people from different groups across three countries.

This positive example could be one practical expression of the ASEAN Community spirit.

Its success could then demonstrate to other Southeast Asian member states that West Kalimantan and Sarawak can resolve their long-running haze problem together.

***

Adityo Darmawan Sudagung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Universitas Tanjungpura. Since October 2021, he has been pursuing his PhD in Development Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, with a focus on border studies, Southeast Asian studies, and belonging, following the completion of his bachelor’s degree (2013) and master’s degree (2015) in International Relations from Universitas Padjadjaran. In 2023, Sudagung was honoured by Indonesia’s National Agency of Border Management as the first winner of a writing contest. His research interests revolve around International Relations from a people-centred perspective with an interdisciplinary approach. His latest publication (2025) is entitled “Education and teacher careers at the Indonesia-Malaysia border: an ethnography study”.

#WestKalimantan #Sarawak #HazeCrisis #TransboundaryHaze #ForestFires #Indonesia #Malaysia #Borneo #ASEAN #Paradiplomacy #BorderCooperation #Kalimantan #Peatland #AirPollution #Environment

Disclaimer: The Bahasa Indonesia version of this opinion was published earlier in the Pontianak Post on Saturday (22/08) under the title "Mengakhiri Drama Karhutla dan Kabut Asap di Kalimantan Barat dan Sarawak"; the online article can be viewed here. The English version was drafted by The Southeast Asia Desk, with ChatGPT and Grammarly.

(QOB)

🌩️ The New Era of Instability – Regional Conflicts and Global Shocks

In 2025, ASEAN was shocked when war erupted between Thailand and Cambodia. It was the first interstate conflict in the region since ASEAN was established in 1967. More recently, regional stability has come under further strain following the outbreak of war in early 2026 between the United States, Israel, and Iran.

ASEAN, often regarded as one of the most established regional organisations in the post-1998 era and known for its relatively steady economic growth, has sought to maintain this status quo. Its core objective has been to achieve shared prosperity and stability while deepening connectivity among member states to foster mutual understanding and common interests.

By effectively ‘alienating’ Myanmar after the coup and failing to prevent an interstate conflict among its members, ASEAN has also moved to admit its eleventh member, Timor-Leste, in an effort to strengthen the regional architecture and stabilise the region amid growing uncertainty.

This step remains premature in some respects, but it is nonetheless a move that deserves recognition.

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⚖️ ASEAN's Internal Response and the Great-Power Dilemma

Another key source of pressure on regional stability comes from the actions of major powers. Both China and the United States exert strong influence in Southeast Asia. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is reshaping regional economic landscapes and, in many respects, its engagement with ASEAN societies is more visible than that of the United States, especially at the level of everyday economic and infrastructural needs.

The two powers compete most directly in terms of military presence and security arrangements. China holds a strong position in the South China Sea through its robust military deployment, while the United States remains influential in the broader Indo-Pacific, particularly through its alliances and presence in Australia and the Northeast Asian region.

To foster a more balanced and stable regional order, ASEAN requires an additional counterweight that can compete with China’s influence in people-to-people contact and economic development, thereby reducing over-dependence on a single external partner.

Australia is well-placed to serve as such a balancing power, helping to ensure that great-power competition in Southeast Asia remains more constructive than destabilising.

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🇦🇺🤝 Australia's Hard-Power Role – Securing the Regional Status Quo

ASEAN–Australia relations have entered a new, more progressive phase. Since their first dialogue in 1974, the partnership has become increasingly substantive. In 2023, ASEAN and Australia signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and it was followed by the establishment of the Australia–ASEAN Centre, signaling Australia’s growing seriousness in deepening ties with ASEAN. Under the Albanese administration, Canberra’s policy appears more focused on consolidating Australia’s role as a key regional partner with Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040.

Two broad sectors are central to Australia’s position in the region: the political-military (hard power) and the socio-economic (soft power) domains.

In the hard-power realm, Australia has pursued closer security cooperation with several ASEAN member states, such as Indonesia, through agreements like the Jakarta Treaty on mutual defence and non-interference. That concrete step could be crucial for security in the region, at least ensuring that conflict in the southern part of ASEAN will not likely occur with that treaty. It will probably be followed with other examples, like with East Timor, Malaysia, and the Philippines in the future.

In terms of peace and stability, ASEAN needs Australia as one of the crucial external powers helping to maintain the regional status quo. Australia’s geographical proximity and long-term engagement enhance ASEAN’s bargaining position vis-à-vis other major powers. ASEAN has learned from the case of Timor-Leste, where Australia’s involvement in the peace and referendum processes, despite tensions with Indonesia at the time, eventually evolved into a relationship that both sides now wish to strengthen and move forward from.

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🌏 Australia's Soft-Power Strategy – Connectivity, Trade, and a Balanced Future

On the socio-economic side, Australia has placed greater emphasis on enhancing people-to-people contact between Australian and ASEAN citizens, as well as indirectly supporting connectivity among ASEAN societies themselves.

Australia’s soft-power strategy can be seen in at least three areas: ASEAN-Australia connectivity, cooperation in the technology sector, and the promotion of ASEAN–Australia trade.

In the realm of soft power, Australia has prioritised cooperation with ASEAN on connectivity, including the energy sector and the green economic transition. By signing a partnership with the ASEAN Centre for Energy in 2024, it also unlocked an A$6.9 million Energy Cooperation Package during the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in March 2024. This approach offers an alternative to China’s BRI model, which often focuses on extractive industries and large-scale infrastructure.

Another promising area is the digital sector. Both Australia and ASEAN are positioned between the digital influence of China and the United States, as well as the European Union’s growing prominence in digital rights and regulation. The ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement is expected to be signed in 2026, according to a study by Boston Consulting Group, and it may open opportunities for partnership or serve as a model similar to the cooperation between Australia and the ASEAN Centre for Energy.

In trade, Australia and ASEAN have formalised their cooperation through the ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand Free Trade Area (AANZFTA), which entered into force in 2010. This agreement now requires further reinforcement through updated commitments and complementary bilateral arrangements, such as the Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement concluded in 2026.

Given these increasingly substantial initiatives, ASEAN should welcome Australia’s engagement as a way to strengthen the bargaining power of its member states and reinforce intra-ASEAN solidarity.

Stability has been a central asset of the region since the adoption of the ASEAN Charter, an asset that was seriously shaken by the Thailand–Cambodia conflict. With Australia’s constructive and balanced approach, a new environment may emerge in which ASEAN can pursue regional development and integration with greater confidence, while maintaining peace and stability amid intensifying great-power competition.

(JUN/ELS)

Many CIOs are discovering a difficult truth: the metrics that matter to AI teams rarely translate well to executives. Model accuracy, prompt volume, and automation percentages show progress, but they don’t tell CFOs, CEOs, and directors how AI will increase revenue, drive agility, reduce risk, or improve resilience.

With AI-related investment projected to surpass US$110 billion by 2028, the stakes have never been higher. Boards are becoming more hands-on in oversight, and regulators are turning their attention toward model risk, data governance, and safe deployment. To meet this moment, CIOs need to lead with a new value language, one that anchors AI programs in growth, profitability, risk reduction, and workforce capability.

For technical teams to justify AI investments, they need to speak the board’s language to earn credibility, get funding, and align teams for enterprise AI. CIOs must act now to shift ROI from activity-based to outcome-driven metrics, prioritising business performance over AI model development.

Distilling the Real Value of AI for the Board

For years, AI ROI has focused on efficiency gains, such as support tickets closed, shorter sales cycles, and server consolidation. It’s increasingly automating workflows and reshaping customer experience, revenue streams, and the way compliance and talent are managed.

However, as we transition from basic tools to Agentic AI and a fully AI-augmented workforce capable of completing complex, high-performance tasks, ROI needs to be measured by its value to the business, just as we judge humans. What these systems deliver and what they cost are now central concerns for the board.

Yet reporting on enterprise AI programs still relies on metrics that do not demonstrate spreadsheet value. As boards fund outcomes, not activities, they increasingly want to see:

• Growth: Higher conversion, improved retention, new revenue streams.

• Profit: Lower cost-to-serve, shorter cycle times, improved working capital.

• Risk: Reduced loss expectancy, fewer incidents, stronger controls.

• Capability: Faster upskilling and a more productive, AI-augmented workforce.

Amid the rapid AI implementations in SEA, too many AI dashboards remain filled with model statistics rather than business impact. This makes programmes look like experiments rather than strategic investments. Fragmentation adds to the problem, with non-specific data, unclear ownership, and inconsistent governance leaving organisations stuck in experimentation mode.

The Balanced AI Value Scorecard

A practical step to measure AI ROI clearly is to use the Balanced AI Value Scorecard model, which is easily understood by the board and leverages existing data in a format relevant to decision-making.

The Balanced AI Value Scorecard connects directly to the P&L by measuring:

1. Growth KPIs: Conversion lift, retention gains, cross-sell rate, lead-to-order cycle inform the board that AI drives revenue, not just automation.

2. Efficiency: What does it cost to achieve a specific KPI? Measuring costs per order, per contact, and per claim, and which other business metrics help the board understand the cost of performance relative to the investment. Understanding this allows them to see how efficiencies are impacting the bottom line and where improvement is needed

3. Risk: Understanding data exposure incidents, model misuse, audit exceptions, and loss expectancy is essential for CISOs and boards to reduce the downside and associated costs.

4. Capability: As AI continues to expand the workforce and understanding its capabilities today, and what will be required tomorrow, is essential to forecasting.

Different use cases may dictate variations on the above, but CIOs should focus on three to five metrics to avoid confusion.

The Outcome-First ROI Method

To shift from proof of concept to proof of performance, CIOs can employ a disciplined five-step ROI method designed for enterprise environments:

1. Start with a Value Thesis - Define the anticipated business impact in one sentence: “If we deploy [AI capability] in [workflow], we will improve [metric] by X%, unlocking $Y of value in Z months.” Conversely, consider what would have happened without AI, to avoid inflated results.

2. Establish Baselines - Build 3–6 months of operational baseline data, segmented by channel, issue type, and customer cohort. Use both direct (e.g., AHT, CSAT) and indirect indicators (agent satisfaction, turnover).

3. Prove It with Tests - Run A/B or holdout experiments: AI-assisted vs. non-assisted. Measure not just performance, but the reasons for AI-to-human handoffs and early failure modes.

4. Convert KPIs into Board-Ready Dollars - Use simple formulas CFOs trust. Only count capturable savings, such as avoided hires or reduced rework, not theoretical efficiencies.

5. Govern and Scale With Evidence - Scale only when uplift persists outside of pilots, guardrails are in place, and a capture plan ensures savings flow to the P&L. This repeatable method builds credibility and keeps AI investments grounded in financial reality.

With a scorecard that speaks their language and a disciplined ROI framework, CIOs can elevate AI from isolated initiatives to enterprise-wide transformation.

(JUN/QOB)

How do we come to recognize the face of a country?

Perhaps through the expressions of its political leaders, its major public policies, its cuisine, or the amount of attention it receives in international news.

Yet national identity is also communicated through something far more ordinary: the images of cities and landmarks reproduced in postcards, advertisements, films, travel photographs, and even the magnets attached to our refrigerators.

A refrigerator in a Southeast Asian home may display Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, Bangkok’s Grand Palace, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers, Jakarta’s National Monument, or the old streets of Hanoi.

These images appear simple, but they perform an important representational function. They transform selected urban spaces into visual shorthand for entire countries.

Singapore’s skyline comes to represent Singapore. The Petronas Twin Towers stand in for Malaysia. The Grand Palace evokes Thailand, while Merlion Park, Marina Bay, and Changi Airport help reproduce an image of Singapore as orderly, connected, and technologically advanced.

Through repetition, these associations become naturalized. We often accept them without asking what these landmarks represent, whose identities they include or exclude, and how urban images shape understandings of the nation itself.

This question is especially important in Southeast Asia, where cities have become central to economic transformation, national development, tourism, diplomacy, and cultural representation.

The region’s major cities are not merely administrative capitals or population centers. They are increasingly important sites through which Southeast Asian states interact with global markets, institutions, corporations, media industries, and transnational communities.

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Bringing Cities into International Relations

International Relations scholarship has traditionally treated sovereign states as the principal units of world politics. Cities have often appeared only as the locations where governments, organizations, and businesses operate.

Simon Curtis argues, however, that International Relations scholars have been slow to appreciate the rise of global cities: cities whose influence, networks, and economic activities extend across national boundaries. Reconsidering the historical relationship between cities and states can therefore help illuminate changes in the international system's organization (Curtis, 2010).

This perspective is particularly relevant to Southeast Asia. Singapore is simultaneously a city-state, a global financial center, a logistical hub, and a diplomatic actor. Jakarta functions not only as Indonesia’s political and economic center but also as the institutional center of ASEAN. Bangkok is embedded in regional tourism, manufacturing, aviation, healthcare, and creative industries. Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi similarly connect national economies to wider circuits of finance, production, migration, technology, and culture.

These cities provide the physical and institutional infrastructure through which globalization operates.

Global capital does not circulate in an entirely placeless environment. It moves through ports, airports, financial districts, industrial estates, data centers, transportation networks, corporate offices, and residential enclaves. Globalization, therefore, materializes in particular urban sites.

Saskia Sassen similarly cautions against treating the global economy as an abstract system sustained solely by transnational corporations and communication technologies. She argues that analyses of economic globalization must consider the places and labor processes through which the global economy is produced and managed (Sassen, 2005).

Cities are crucial because they concentrate financial services, information, specialized labor, corporate headquarters, transportation facilities, and political institutions. They generate what might be described as urban centrality: the capacity to coordinate activities and connect different geographical scales.

In Southeast Asia, this centrality is unevenly distributed. Singapore has become a command center for regional finance and corporate management. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur operate as major transport and service hubs. Jakarta and Manila command enormous domestic markets, while Ho Chi Minh City has become deeply integrated into global manufacturing and investment networks.

These cities remain embedded in their respective national economies, but their global connections may increasingly distinguish them from surrounding regions. A financial professional in Singapore, a technology entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, or a corporate executive in Jakarta may participate in networks that connect them more intensively to other global cities than to rural and peripheral areas within their own countries.

Sassen describes global cities as terrains in which multiple processes of globalization take concrete form (Sassen, 1991, 2005). From this perspective, globalization in Southeast Asia is not only a relationship between ASEAN member states and the wider international economy. It is also produced through networks connecting Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City with cities such as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Dubai, London, and New York.

Cities as Emerging Diplomatic Actors

The international importance of cities extends beyond economic activity. Large cities and metropolitan governments are increasingly involved in diplomacy, environmental cooperation, investment promotion, cultural exchange, and transnational policy networks.

Pigman observes that urban governments increasingly conduct activities traditionally associated with diplomacy, including establishing representative offices, joining international networks, and arranging meetings between mayors and foreign counterparts (Pigman, 2010). Cities are particularly active in policy areas where national responses are limited or where problems require cooperation among local authorities.

Southeast Asian cities face many such problems. Flooding, air pollution, traffic congestion, waste management, housing shortages, climate vulnerability, and public-health emergencies are simultaneously local and transnational. Jakarta’s experiences with land subsidence and flooding, Bangkok’s exposure to rising sea levels, Singapore’s experiments with urban sustainability, and Manila’s disaster-management challenges are relevant to cities across and beyond the region.

City networks can allow urban governments to exchange knowledge without waiting for comprehensive agreements between national governments. Participation in international climate and urban-governance networks also enables mayors and municipal authorities to increase their international visibility.

Nevertheless, the growing international role of cities does not necessarily mean that they will replace states. Curtis argues that changes in cities and states should be understood as part of the same process of rescaling relations among local, national, regional, and global spaces (Curtis, 2010).

This is particularly evident in Southeast Asia, where central governments continue to exercise substantial control over urban development, infrastructure, investment, and diplomatic relations. The construction of new capitals and administrative centers—including Indonesia’s Nusantara, Malaysia’s Putrajaya, and Myanmar’s Naypyidaw—demonstrates that states remain deeply involved in producing urban space.

The relationship is therefore not simply one of competition between cities and states. Cities can reinforce national development strategies, represent countries internationally, and provide governments with platforms for attracting investment. At the same time, their growing economic importance may generate tensions concerning authority, inequality, resources, and political representation.

The Uneven Geography of Southeast Asian Globalization

The rise of global cities also raises questions about inequality within and between cities.

Global-city development is highly selective. Investment tends to concentrate in business districts, high-end residential areas, transport corridors, tourist zones, and technology clusters. Meanwhile, informal settlements, peripheral municipalities, rural communities, and less-connected regions may receive fewer benefits.

The result is an uneven urban geography. A city may simultaneously contain internationally connected financial districts and communities without secure housing, adequate sanitation, or reliable public transportation. The same skyline that communicates prosperity may obscure the labor and displacement that made its construction possible.

This contradiction is visible across Southeast Asia. Singapore’s carefully managed urban environment differs markedly from the fragmented metropolitan expansion of Jakarta or Manila. Bangkok combines globally oriented commercial districts with substantial spatial inequality. Kuala Lumpur’s iconic skyline exists alongside wider debates about mobility, affordability, and migrant labor. Ho Chi Minh City’s integration into global investment networks has transformed its physical landscape, but it has also intensified pressures on land, housing, and existing communities.

The global-city framework must therefore be applied carefully. Southeast Asian cities should not be measured solely by how closely they resemble London, New York, or Tokyo. Their trajectories are shaped by colonial histories, postcolonial state-building, authoritarian and democratic politics, informality, migration, regional inequality, and differing relationships between urban authorities and central governments.

The concept of “late development,” associated with Alexander Gerschenkron, may offer a useful analogy for understanding cities seeking to accelerate their global integration (Gerschenkron, 1962). Yet a city does not become global merely by constructing skyscrapers, convention centers, airports, luxury developments, or artificial waterfronts.

Such projects may create the appearance of globality without necessarily producing inclusive economic transformation. Indeed, competition for global-city status can encourage governments to imitate the visual forms of already established cities. Urban development then risks becoming a race to reproduce familiar symbols of modernity: glass towers, monumental bridges, integrated transit systems, waterfront business districts, shopping complexes, and spectacular cultural facilities.

Southeast Asia is filled with cities attempting to reposition themselves within regional and global networks. Alongside the established prominence of Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila, cities such as Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Surabaya, Bandung, Johor Bahru, Penang, Da Nang, Cebu, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane are cultivating new identities as centers of technology, manufacturing, tourism, education, culture, and logistics.

The critical question is not simply whether these cities will become global. It is what form of globality they are pursuing, who benefits from it, and how their global ambitions transform relations with surrounding regions.

Southeast Asian Urban Phantasmagorias

Infrastructure and economic connectivity are only part of the competition among cities. Urban reputation has also become an increasingly valuable resource.

Cities seek to attract investment, visitors, skilled workers, international students, cultural events, and corporate offices. Their success depends partly on how they are imagined. Architecture, branding, film, television, advertising, and social media help produce these urban imaginaries.

The concept of urban phantasmagoria helps explain this process. An urban phantasmagoria can be understood as an assemblage of recurring images, narratives, technologies, and imagined experiences through which a city becomes visible and desirable. It is rooted in material reality but is also amplified through fiction, media, and spectacle (Duarte et al., 2014; Mennel, 2008).

Southeast Asian cities have increasingly been represented through such phantasmagorias. Singapore is frequently portrayed as a futuristic city of architectural spectacle, technological efficiency, and controlled greenery. Bangkok appears alternately as a city of temples, street food, nightlife, congestion, luxury, and danger. Kuala Lumpur is represented through its towers and multicultural urbanism. Jakarta is depicted as a megacity of political power, relentless traffic, social inequality, and creative energy.

These representations do not merely describe cities. They shape expectations about them. A traveler may arrive in Bangkok already imagining neon-lit streets and temples. A businessperson may approach Singapore through its reputation for efficiency and connectivity. Jakarta may be understood through images of congestion and urban crisis before its diversity and cultural life are encountered.

Cinema plays an important role in creating and circulating these images. Films and television series transform urban landscapes into globally consumable settings. Singapore’s skyline in Crazy Rich Asians, Bangkok’s recurring presence in international thrillers and comedies, and the use of Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Philippine cities in regional productions all influence how audiences imagine Southeast Asian urban life.

Local film industries also produce competing interpretations. They can challenge externally imposed images by presenting cities through the experiences of residents, workers, migrants, women, young people, and marginalized communities. Cinema can therefore reinforce the marketed image of the global city, but it can also expose its contradictions.

Urban phantasmagorias are now produced not only by filmmakers and tourism agencies but also by ordinary users of digital platforms. Instagram posts, TikTok videos, YouTube travel content, food reviews, and location-based applications continuously reproduce selected versions of urban space. A café, night market, railway station, mural, or skyline can become a recognizable symbol through repeated digital circulation.

This changes the geography of urban reputation. A city no longer requires a centuries-old monument to become internationally visible. It may gain recognition through its food scene, music, creative industries, start-up ecosystem, environmental initiatives, or digitally mediated lifestyle.

For emerging Southeast Asian cities, this presents both an opportunity and a danger. Urban imagery can help secondary cities gain visibility without possessing the financial power of established global centers. Yet the pursuit of visibility may also reduce complex cities to marketable surfaces.

Beyond the Iconic Skyline

The study of global cities should therefore move beyond rankings, skyscrapers, financial flows, and airport connectivity. It must also examine representation, imagination, and the politics of visibility.

Which parts of a city are selected to represent it? Whose lives appear in its promotional images? Which communities are removed, hidden, or romanticized? Does the global image of a city reflect the experiences of its residents, or primarily the expectations of investors, tourists, and mobile elites?

These questions are particularly important in Southeast Asia because the region’s urban transformation is occurring alongside rapid economic change, climate vulnerability, mass migration, and persistent inequality.

The future Southeast Asian global city may not resemble the conventional model of New York, London, or Tokyo. It may be more polycentric, regionally networked, digitally mediated, climatically vulnerable, and dependent on complex formal and informal economies. Its globality may emerge not only through financial command functions but also through manufacturing, logistics, cultural production, migration networks, tourism, education, and regional diplomacy.

International Relations scholars should therefore examine cities not only as containers of national politics but as actors, infrastructures, representations, and contested social spaces. Urban studies scholars, meanwhile, can benefit from situating Southeast Asian cities within changing systems of regional and global power.

The refrigerator magnet remains an appropriate metaphor. It shows how easily a single landmark can come to represent a city and how a city can come to represent an entire nation. Yet the polished image on the magnet reveals only a fraction of urban reality.

Behind Marina Bay Sands, the Petronas Twin Towers, Monas, Bangkok’s temples, or Manila’s historic districts are histories of labor, migration, political authority, displacement, aspiration, and inequality. These histories must be brought into the analysis if we are to understand what Southeast Asian cities are becoming.

In the future, our refrigerators may hold magnets from Da Nang, Surabaya, Cebu, Johor Bahru, Phnom Penh, or Makassar alongside those from Singapore and Bangkok. Their presence would signal more than the expansion of tourism. It would reflect the emergence of new urban centers seeking a place within Southeast Asia’s increasingly dense networks of capital, culture, mobility, and imagination.

The central question, therefore, is not simply which Southeast Asian cities will become global cities.

It is what kinds of urban futures their global ambitions will produce, and whether the images through which they present themselves can accommodate the people, inequalities, and contested histories that exist beyond the skyline.

(QOB/ELS)

The 2026 World Cup is more than global entertainment; it is a high-stakes lesson in brand strategy that we too often overlook.

Everyone has their own World Cup story.

In Indonesia, despite the historical absence of a national team, the tournament remains a massive cultural tentpole. It is a shared language where brands often invest heavy budgets to win attention during this quadrennial event.

Yet, as strategic marketers, we must look past the current noise, beyond geopolitical nuances or debates over tournament expansion, to focus on the underlying strategic signal.

The clearest signal lies in a powerful contrast of models. Consider Japan’s “Samurai Blue.” Prior to 1998, Japan had barely registered on the World Cup stage. Today, propelled by its ambitious “2050 Vision” and decades of systemic investment, the team has become a consistent presence at the tournament.

Contrast this with Brazil. Since their 2002 victory, the celebrated spirit of Jogo Bonito has struggled to translate into consistent success. Brazil’s story is a reminder that even the richest football culture and generational talent are fragile without disciplined systems.

In an Indonesian context, many brands fall into a similar trap of leaning heavily on momentary cultural relevance or viral noise, while neglecting deeper business infrastructure required for long-term relevance.

So, what actionable points can we draw from these signals?

Vision Over Hype: The Systemic Foundation

Reject the “one-season wonder.” In Indonesia today, we are witnessing a vicious cycle of social commerce inflation.

Brands surge on the back of a viral TikTok trend or a massive Double-Day mega-sale, only to vanish entirely when the promo budget dries up or the cultural winds shift.

They represent the corporate equivalent of a team that mortgages its future for a single tournament. Brands must build a systemic foundation that survives the volatile trend cycle.

Just as Japan’s long-term football vision guarantees a perpetual presence in the arena, marketers must shift their metrics from momentary digital relevance to structural endurance.

Own Your Philosophy: The Identity Imperative

Brands must build their own game rather than simply inherit the market leader’s playbook. They must fiercely own their identity to successfully translate culture into commerce.

In today’s rush toward Artificial Intelligence, technology is not the philosophy, but merely the enabler.

A robust brand identity dictates how AI is deployed to amplify its unique voice, preventing the brand from dissolving into a sea of automated, commoditized sameness.

Engineering Inevitability

Instead of playing within the rules, design a game you can actually win. In crowded markets, brands often compete harder within the same rules, such as outspending rivals for incremental attention or fighting for marginal preference in saturated categories.

Mechanism Design offers a different approach. Instead of asking, "Given the current market rules, how do we play better?", the more strategic question is: "Given the outcome we demand, how must we rewrite the rules of engagement?"

It is about finding the whitespace of the unwritten rules that shape competition, and in football terms, it is not about winning a single match, but building the system that sustains victories over the long game.

The same principle applies to brands: create structures that make your advantage increasingly inevitable, rather than endlessly competing in battles designed by others.

Durable advantage comes not from playing the existing game harder, but from designing a game that competitors struggle to play. The visionary brand acts as the architect of the game. We cannot simply buy more media to shout louder.

Consider a challenger brand facing a legacy giant. Mechanism Design offers a more strategic alternative to reshape the payoff matrix.

Build a proprietary utility or engineer a system that embeds your product into the fragmented retail ecosystem, making your product the default choice from modern trade down to the neighborhood warung. The most effective challengers do not just play the existing game better; they design a game their competitors are simply not built to play.

Modern football has evolved into a discipline where success is no longer left to intuition alone. Today, teams operate with sophisticated data, advanced analytics, and highly structured playbooks that codify what it takes to succeed at the highest level.

In many ways, the "How" of performance is already solved, and the same is increasingly true for business.

Do we want to simply win the short game, chasing the next viral cultural moment to become a "one-season wonder", or do we possess the discipline to build a legacy of compounding consistency and advantage over time? The choice is ours.

(JUN/QOB)

Youth attention in Indonesia was never the platform or the feed. It was 79.7% of urban Gen Alpha, 3 hours and 8 minutes a day, looking for something to watch, share, and talk about.

It starts earlier than most planners want to admit, with almost a quarter of internet users comprising this connected generation.

This ban targets the pipe, but not the thirst. Marketers who treat the move as the whole story are making the same mistake. What breaks first is the industry’s overconfidence in platform-declared identity.

The Scale of the Habit Is Exactly Why This Matters

Close to 80% of Indonesian children actively use online platforms.

Attention will migrate and fragment. Some of it will go dark, into WhatsApp threads, into Telegram groups, and into Discord servers that no media plan has ever mapped.

Brands that figure out how to seed that space through shareable audio bites, WhatsApp stickers, forwarding-friendly content will have an advantage that does not show up in any CPM report.

Some of it will go premium. OTT platforms are already growing at 40% year-on year in this market, with half of all viewers being youth. Some will go physical, into retail media networks like Alfamart and Indomaret aisles, school-zone OOH, and local hangouts.

And some, more than most planners account for, may stay home. For Indonesian youths who live in parent-led households, decision-making is shared.

This will mean that the person who wants the product and the person who buys it are often in the same room.

The Lazy Answer Is Wrong

The industry’s instinct will be to target mothers harder. It is understandable but lazy.

Indonesian households do not work like individual feeds. They are shared decision environments, shaped by Halal values, Hijrah journeys, and family structures that have no Western equivalent.

The buyer and the viewer are often watching the same screen. The brief that speaks only to one of them leaves money on the table.

The Data Shows Where to Go

Indonesian youth's time is distributed. According to CCS Indonesia, Video and entertainment account for 36%, social media for 29%, messaging for 12%, and mobile games for 14%. Critically, half of all OTT viewers in Indonesia are under 34, and OTT consumption is growing at approximately 40% year-on-year.

What needs to change

First, rebalance budgets away from direct social dependency and into a total video model. TV, CTV, OTT, gaming, contextual, dark social, and retail media are not backup channels but primary placements where youth attention can be reached with more trust, more context, and less identity distortion.

Second, stop treating platform demographics as ground truth. Pressure-test every youth or family plan against signal quality, not just cheap CPMs. If your targeting logic depends entirely on self-declared platform identity, it is already fragile, and the ban simply accelerates the reckoning.

Third, brief creative for two audiences simultaneously. The young viewer who wants the product, and the parent buyer who needs the reassurance. Build content that travels through private chats, through family screens, through owned IP that does not depend on any single platform’s terms of service.

Renting reach from social feeds was always a fragile strategy. The ban is just the moment that fragility became impossible to ignore.

Brands that treat it as a targeting inconvenience will spend the next year chasing a ghost, while those that treat it as a signal and focus on where attention is moving, how households make decisions, and which media environments still earn trust, will be the ones building durable reach in 2026 and beyond.

Need More Angle?

• APJII Profil Internet Indonesia 2025, March 2026

• Dentsu APAC Consumer Mindset Report

• Dentsu Consumer Connection Survey, Indonesia, 2025

• The Trade Desk Future of TV: Indonesia, March 2022

(BRZ/QOB)

In Singapore’s highly interconnected digital economy, third-party relationships have become both a strategic enabler and a critical source of cyber risk.

As organisations deepen reliance on external vendors, cloud providers, and supply chain partners, the traditional boundaries of enterprise security are rapidly dissolving.

What was once considered peripheral risk is now central to business resilience, with attackers increasingly targeting trusted relationships as the most efficient path to disruption.

This trend underscores a critical reality. Attackers are increasingly exploiting trust relationships rather than attempting direct breaches of enterprise systems.

This signals the need to move beyond reactive controls and compliance-driven assurance towards a more operational understanding of how modern attacks unfold across interconnected ecosystems.

Persistent Exposure Despite High TPRM Maturity

Singapore sets the benchmark for advanced third-party risk management programs, often referred to as TPRM.

Six in ten organisations in Singapore say they have formalised and refined programmes in place. This proportion is the highest in Asia-Pacific and among the strongest globally.

Despite strong frameworks and sustained public-private collaboration, more than 56% of organisations experienced multiple third-party breaches.

The challenge is no longer establishing TPRM programmes, but ensuring they remain effective in dynamic, real-world conditions where vendor ecosystems are continuously expanding.

As third-party networks expand, organisations expect greater complexity, with 67% expecting their supplier and partner ecosystems to grow by 6%-15%. This expansion increases the number of external entities that connect to core systems or handle sensitive data.

Remediation is also emerging as a key capability gap.

Around 42% of organisations rely on external partners to support remediation efforts, including addressing identified vulnerabilities and managing vendor transitions where risks cannot be mitigated.

This reflects a growing recognition that risk management must extend beyond identification to include timely and coordinated response.

Ultimately, many organisations are impacted not because of failures in their internal controls, but because risk visibility and assurance stop at the enterprise boundary.

Geopolitical Pressure and Hybrid Threats

Cyber risk is also being shaped by an increasingly complex geopolitical environment.

Ongoing conflicts, including tensions in the Middle East, are contributing to a rise in cyber activity as both state and non-state actors leverage digital attacks for strategic and economic gain.

At the same time, the rapid adoption of AI is reshaping the cyber threat landscape, with AI-enabled attacks and deepfakes becoming increasingly frequent and convincing.

These capabilities lower the barrier to entry for attackers, enabling scalable, targeted deception in which exploiting trust is often faster and more effective than breaching technical controls or exposing the limitations of static assurance models.

From Assurance to Proactive Readiness

Addressing these challenges requires a shift from periodic assurance to continuous, proactive risk management.

The most resilient organisations recognise that cyber defence is no longer confined to internal systems but a shared responsibility across the supply chain.

A more resilient model of cyber defence is emerging, one that is grounded in continuous visibility, shared accountability, and active trust.

(BRZ/QOB/ELS)

In 2025 and 2026, headline acts such as NCT Dream’s Dream Show 4 tour concluding in Bangkok and Southeast Asia in early 2026, SM Town Live’s anniversary finale in Thailand, and the massive BTS World Tour ‘Arirang’ set to hit Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Jakarta this December, are recalibrating how people plan travel and time off.

For Gen Z and millennials, the draw is no longer just the landmarks, as fans are letting performances dictate their destinations.

International artists, regional stars, and devoted fan communities are converging across the region. A weekend getaway to see a dream act now holds more emotional value than souvenirs or even the destination itself.

Fans are no longer asking, “Where should I go?” They are asking, “Who am I seeing next?”

Southeast Asia Leads the Concert-cation Boom

1. Global tours are routing through SEA like never before

Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur have become essential stops for the world’s biggest tours.

Promoters, governments, and tourism boards are turning infrastructure into economic strategy, from stadium upgrades to streamlined licensing and cross‑border marketing.

These come as the 2026 calendar is stacked with dates that can anchor travel plans including BTS’ tour in Asia, with the longest run of four nights in Singapore while Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta also featured as key stops.

2. Tourism boards and private sectors are co-investing in culture

Governments and destination marketers are actively investing in events and partnerships that position live music as a tourism driver. Singapore’s Tourism Board has partnered with travel platforms and event organisers to promote concerts and experiences, many of which feature Singapore-only stops, generating millions in tourism spend and hotel bookings.

Malaysia’s Concert and Event in Malaysia Incentives (CEMI) programme provides rebates and operational support for large‑scale concerts, creating an ecosystem that encourages local spending and international participation.

3. Accessible, premium, and safe experiences

Visa-friendly travel, low-cost carriers, and intra-SEA connectivity make it easy for fans to follow their favourite artists, while the region offers affordable luxury through premium venues, themed accommodations, curated pop-ups, and exclusive merchandise. Enhanced safety measures and fan-centric services ensure trust and encourage repeat visits.

Singapore: The Gateway to Fandom

If the social explosion around Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour or Coldplay’s APAC dates has not already made it obvious, the show is the destination. Fans travel and book flights to cities across continents because that is where the event is happening. Singapore’s structural advantage is clear: geographically central, well‑connected, and artist‑preferred, it is the gateway into Asia‑Pacific.

Hotels capitalised too. Around Taylor Swift’s shows, room rates surged 20–30% yet occupancy remained strong, showing that these fans were assigning once‑in‑a‑lifetime value to the experience.

Brands that recognise this emotional investment, like Marina Bay Sands with curated Swiftie packages, are setting the baseline expectation.

Malaysia: Concerts as Catalysts for Travel

In Malaysia, concerts have evolved from a “nice-to-have” to a travel anchor. For Gen Zs and millennials with disposable income, live music events have become the reason to plan overdue trips, reconnect with friends, and feed social media storytelling.

Concerts in Malaysia are booming: 450 events in 2025, up from 104 in 2022, featuring global acts from Coldplay to Siti Nurhaliza.

Institutional support, including streamlined approvals (GPP 6.0) and financial incentives (CEMI), shows that Malaysia is actively building a scalable, trusted, and economically meaningful concert ecosystem.

Outbound travel is equally revealing. Malaysian fans increasingly travel to Singapore, Bangkok, or Jakarta to catch concerts, with 66% having planned a vacation around a concert at least once, according to Trip.com.

The next phase in Malaysia is orchestration: transforming standalone concerts into integrated travel experiences that extend into city exploration, F&B, and culture. By designing around fandom, Malaysia can turn concerts from one-night events into repeatable travel drivers.

What Brands Should Do Next?

Concert-cations are more than a trend. They are changing the way people travel.

Brands that want to succeed need to move from simply participating to creating experiences that matter.

1. Design around fandom, not just the concert (Travel, Hospitality, Ticketing, Tourism Boards)

   Brands in Travel, Hospitality, and Ticketing, as well as Tourism Boards will need to consider multi-city travel packages that combine shows with hotels, dining, and local experiences. Offering early access, priority stays, or exclusive merchandise helps fans feel recognised and valued. Hotels, airlines, and travel platforms can use concerts to extend trips, increasing both length of stay and overall spend.

2. Build spaces that encourage connection and sharing (Retail, F&B, Lifestyle, Tech)

   In the Retail, F&B, Lifestyle space, branded fan experiences such as photo studios, get-ready rooms, merch lounges, and content hubs give fans places to meet, create, and share. These physical spaces make the online fan community tangible. Fashion, beauty, cafés, and experiential retail brands can collaborate to deliver immersive pop-ups that appeal to Gen Z and millennials.

3. Make the experience flexible, safe, and regional

   Concert-goers need safe travel options that fit their schedules. Short stays, late checkouts, and curated flight times make it easier to follow tours. Verified transport, multilingual support, and night-time safety measures build trust. Multi-city passes or cross-border itineraries let superfans chase tours across Southeast Asia, giving transport companies, ride-hailing apps, insurers, and security providers opportunities to add value.

Final Thoughts

Cities and brands that orchestrate the full journey, from travel and stay to fan spaces and shareable moments, will be the winners in this new era of travel.

The concert is the destination and the surrounding experience is the currency.

(JUN/QOB)

These shocks do not remain abstract macroeconomic variables; they directly shape the daily realities of citizens.

In such conditions, the most vulnerable groups including persons with disabilities are often the first to be affected and the last to be considered in policy responses.

Global turbulence is frequently discussed in macroeconomic language: growth projections, fiscal stability, supply chains, and energy resilience.

Yet a more fundamental question is rarely asked: how do these crises affect those who already live with limited access to education, employment, healthcare, and public services? This question is not peripheral it is central to understanding whether development is truly just.

In policy practice, persons with disabilities are too often reduced to statistical categories, mentioned in passing without meaningful policy implications.

However, disability is not a marginal phenomenon. It represents a significant demographic and social reality that must be placed at the core of development planning.

Global Scale and the Indonesian Portrait

Globally, disability is far from a minor issue. The World Health Organization (WHO), in its Global Report on Health Equity for Persons with Disabilities (2023), estimates that approximately 1.3 billion people, nearly 16 percent of the world’s population, live with some form of disability.

This figure underscores that disability is not an exception but a structural component of global society.

In Indonesia, the Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), through the 2020 Population Census Long Form and its 2022 follow-up publications, reports that around 22–23 million Indonesians live with disabilities, with a significant proportion within productive age groups.

Yet this substantial population is not proportionally reflected in educational attainment, labor force participation, or representation in public decision-making spaces.

Various socio-economic indicators reveal persistent structural inequality.

Persons with disabilities face not only limited access but also systemic barriers embedded in economic and social systems that were never fully designed to accommodate human diversity.

Layered Crises and Structural Vulnerability

International data indicate that global turbulence exacerbates the vulnerability of persons with disabilities in multiple dimensions. The World Bank (2023) reports that persons with disabilities are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty.

Meanwhile, the International Labour Organization (2022) finds that labor force participation rates among persons with disabilities are 20–30 percent lower than those of non-disabled populations across many countries, including Indonesia.

Climate crises and disasters further intensify risks. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) (2022) notes that persons with disabilities face mortality risks two to four times higher during disasters due to non-inclusive evacuation systems and limited accessible infrastructure.

Simultaneously, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2021) highlights that more than 60 percent of digital public services in developing countries fail to meet accessibility standards, meaning digital transformation may inadvertently generate new forms of exclusion.

These facts demonstrate that disability is not a matter of charity; it is a measure of development justice.

The marginalization of persons with disabilities reflects systemic design failures. A just society must expand participation opportunities for all its citizens.

In line with Amartya Sen’s capability approach (1999), development should be assessed by the real freedoms people have to lead lives they value.

Strategic Pillars for Inclusive and Just Disability Policy

In times of global crisis, the resilience of a society is reflected in how it protects and empowers its most vulnerable members. Disability inclusion must therefore shift from symbolic recognition to systemic transformation.

• First, disability perspectives must be integrated at the earliest stages of policy design. Development agendas that ignore accessibility risk create new exclusions.

• Second, inclusive employment must become a cornerstone of future economic resilience. Skills development, accessible workplaces, and inclusive entrepreneurship are not social programs; they are economic imperatives.

• Third, social protection systems must be adaptive and sustainable, tailored to the real needs of persons with disabilities as instruments of empowerment rather than dependency.

• Fourth, universal design principles should become binding standards in both physical infrastructure and digital services. Accessibility is not an add-on; it is a prerequisite for equitable participation.

• Fifth, meaningful participation of persons with disabilities in policymaking must be guaranteed. Their lived experiences constitute irreplaceable sources of insight for effective governance.

Toward a Sustainable Disability Future

A sustainable future for persons with disabilities requires a shift in perspective from compassion to justice, from symbolic inclusion to structural reform.

Disability inclusion is not an auxiliary agenda; it is a foundation of social resilience amid global uncertainty.

True sustainability is not measured solely by economic growth or infrastructure strength, but by a nation’s ability to uphold the dignity of every human being.

A society that includes all its citizens is better equipped to withstand shocks and recover with dignity.

In this sense, building an inclusive disability framework is inseparable from Indonesia’s long-term aspiration toward its centennial vision in 2045.

(JUN/QOB)

AI is no longer the bright-eyed new intern who drafts captions and draws cats with laser eyes.

In Malaysia, it now sits quietly behind some of the most consequential brand decisions on pricing, product recommendations, refunds, content moderation, and everyday service touchpoints.

But Malaysian consumers are not rejecting AI outright. As its influence grows, the biggest question for brands is whether people trust how it is being used.

Malaysia’s AI Context Raises the Bar for Brands

Malaysia’s approach to AI has been deliberate rather than reactive, with a clear emphasis on ethical, inclusive, and accountable deployment.

The establishment of the National AI Office in 2024 signalled a coordinated national effort to balance innovation with public trust, supported by governance and ethics guidelines that prioritise fairness, transparency, and human-centric design.

This matters because when responsible AI becomes a baseline at a national level, consumers naturally expect the same discipline from brands.

AI use is no longer judged only by efficiency or novelty, but by whether it aligns with Malaysian values around trust, responsibility and accountability.

The Trust Gap in AI-Powered Brand Experiences

Consumers in the B2C category, in particular, may not consciously think about algorithms or models, but they are quick to sense when something feels artificial or misaligned.

This often shows up when:

• Responses feel overly scripted or emotionally disconnected

• Personalisation feels too precise, poorly timed, or unexplained

• Automation replaces judgment in moments that require empathy

High-involvement categories make this especially clear. Telco brands, for example, operate at the intersection of data, daily usage, and long-term commitment.

The same pattern plays out across B2C sectors, including banking, retail, platforms, and FMCG, where consumers want speed, convenience, and relevance, but not at the expense of transparency, empathy, fairness, or authenticity.

Consumers Push Back When AI Gets It Wrong

AI fails when it signals that efficiency matters more than care, or optimisation matters more than understanding.

In Malaysia’s culturally nuanced and highly social media-driven environment, these missteps travel fast.

The lesson applies particularly so for B2C brands, such as banks, retailers, telcos, platforms, and FMCG that are experimenting with AI-led engagement, with some examples of network disruptions in Malaysia witnessing firsthand how poorly handled interactions spread faster than apologies, with these experiences circulated widely online.

Where AI Needs Boundaries to Earn Malaysian Trust

AI gives brands in Malaysia an opportunity to move beyond personalisation as a marketing tactic and toward participation as a strategy to strengthen relevance, trust, and long-term loyalty.

• Design AI for real Malaysian needs

AI should help consumers understand trade-offs and make better decisions, not simply faster ones. This means reflecting local realities, such as price sensitivity, shared family usage, multi-line accounts, and seasonal behaviour.

In categories like telco, utilities, or subscriptions, AI can move beyond pushing “best” plans and instead help households understand trade-offs by comparing data sharing across family lines, highlighting bill volatility, or flagging when a cheaper option better fits actual usage.

• Turn community behaviour into brand value

Malaysian consumers trust peer opinions, social proof, and shared experiences. AI can be used responsibly to surface reviews, tips, and consumer insights that reflect real use cases, shifting the brand to be the best curator of its community.

In retail or e-commerce, this could mean highlighting reviews from similar household profiles, usage patterns, or locations, rather than generic five-star ratings.

In FMCG, AI can elevate real use cases of how families adapt products for different occasions, or how value packs are stretched across weeks.

• Make personalisation feel collaborative, not extractive

AI-driven personalisation should evolve based on feedback, choice, and consent. Allowing consumers to influence recommendations, pause personalisation, or adjust preferences signals respect.

In banking or retail, this can be as simple as allowing users to adjust recommendation signals, pause personalisation during certain periods, or explicitly state preferences rather than having them inferred.

• Humanise digital care, not just automate it

AI can streamline support, but brands should design clear handoffs to human assistance for emotional, complex, or high-stakes situations.

For example, during service disruptions or billing disputes, Malaysian consumers often want acknowledgment before resolution.

Yet, many encounter chatbots that close tickets automatically once a script is completed, or continue pushing add-ons while the core issue remains unresolved.

A more effective approach is designing AI to support human care by flagging frustration signals, escalating repeated complaints, and handing over full context to a human agent who can respond with empathy, language preference, and situational awareness.

• Use AI to reflect culture, not flatten it

Malaysia’s linguistic diversity, social norms, and cultural sensitivities require more than global templates. For AI to reflect culture rather than flatten it, Malaysian brands need to hard-code context into their systems.

This means setting clear cultural guardrails around when AI should promote, soften its tone, or stay silent altogether; training AI on locally approved language styles; defaulting to a customer’s demonstrated language preference without repeated prompts; and requiring human review for AI generated communications during high-risk moments such as service disruptions, crises, or sensitive national periods.

Just as importantly, brands should design escalation triggers that account for cultural and emotional context, and track signals like complaint recurrence, social backlash, and opt-outs to detect misalignment early.

When these controls are in place, AI stops sounding like a system optimised for efficiency and starts behaving like a brand that understands Malaysians.

The Real Test of AI Is Still Human

The brands that succeed will be those that balance automation with accountability, and efficiency with cultural understanding, using AI to support genuine connection rather than replace it.

(JUN/QOB)

In 2026, Southeast Asia will experience a rare cultural convergence.

While the two occasions are rooted in different traditions, Southeast Asia has long been defined by participation beyond one’s own culture or religion.

In highly urbanised markets with strong institutional support for multiculturalism, public holidays and extended breaks create shared moments for family gatherings, retail activity and seasonal promotions.

In more community-driven markets, cross-cultural participation is deeply personal, shaped by social norms, mutual respect, and long-standing traditions of visiting, sharing meals, and giving.

As a result, this overlapping festive period will become more than a calendar coincidence. It is a moment that reveals how differently, yet intentionally, Southeast Asian consumers navigate meaning, money and modern life.

A New Season of Emotional Spending

Across the region, the convergence of spiritual observance and cultural celebration will reshape how consumers plan, prioritise and justify spending, with occasions tied to family, renewal and gratitude continuing to receive protected budgets.

In Singapore, both Ramadan and Lunar New Year traditionally drive strong retail performance.

Public holidays support family gatherings and social activities, while retailers actively ride festive demand through promotions and seasonal assortments.

Physical stores and e-commerce platforms typically see higher traffic, supported by a highly developed digital retail ecosystem.

However, in line with broader consumption patterns observed over the past year, Singaporean consumers are becoming more discerning. They are more likely to compare prices, seek value, and prioritise quality over quantity, even during festive periods.

In Malaysia, participation across cultures is deeply ingrained. Non-Muslims attend buka puasa, while Muslims visit during the Chinese New Year.

These shared rituals often surface in everyday media habits as well. Every Chinese New Year, Hong Kong kung fu classics become a familiar viewing ritual for Malaysians of all backgrounds.

In 2026, Dentsu Creative Malaysia tapped into this collective nostalgia for Mister Potato’s Chinese New Year campaign, “Bruise Lee”, creating an entertaining content series that leaned into the festive mood while speaking inclusively to a multi-ethnic audience.

Compressed Timelines and Intensified Competition

For brands, this once-in-a-generation overlap comes with opportunity and urgency.

Normally, Lunar New Year lifts begin weeks before the celebration, while Ramadan momentum builds gradually across the fasting month and into Eid.

In 2026, these cycles will run almost concurrently. This will create two peaks within one condensed timeline.

In Singapore, this will intensify competition across media, retail, and e-commerce channels, as brands vie for attention within a shorter timeframe. Consumers are likely to browse earlier, track promotions closely, and act decisively when value is clear. Some brands are already adjusting by initiating planning conversations earlier than usual, recognising that timing and readiness will matter as much as creative execution.

Across the region, this earlier start is increasingly supported by digital touchpoints such as email, apps, and social messaging, allowing brands to signal relevance and availability ahead of the busiest moments of the festive period.

In Malaysia, consumers will also plan earlier, but with a stronger emphasis on timing and appropriateness. They will browse, wait, and then purchase with intention. This leaves brands with little margin for error. Misaligned tone or poor timing will be noticed quickly and remembered.

Which Categories Will Feel the Impact Most

In both Singapore and Malaysia, food and beverage will remain the most resilient category, driven by gatherings, shared meals, and daily rituals. Fashion and beauty will polarise.

In Singapore, festive dressing may continue, but with greater emphasis on versatility and long-term value. In Malaysia, louder festive expressions are likely to soften, with increased demand for modest, reusable, and occasion-spanning designs.

Travel is expected to see a lift in both markets, supported by extended holidays and family reunions. At the same time, prolonged festive periods may disrupt manufacturing and logistics, creating supply challenges just as demand peaks.

Digital, social commerce and quick commerce will play a larger role across both markets, driven by convenience, speed and the ability to compare options easily during a busy season.

What Winning Brands Will Do Differently

Across Southeast Asia, brands that succeed during the overlap of Ramadan and Lunar New Year will recognise that this is not simply a busier festive period, but a more sensitive one.

Consumers are navigating two emotionally significant moments within a compressed timeframe, which raises expectations for relevance, respect, and cultural understanding.

In Singapore, success will be driven by precision and preparedness. Brands must ensure that digital platforms can handle increased traffic, activate search and media early, and use data to personalise outreach in a highly competitive, promotion-led environment.

In Malaysia, cultural fluency will matter most. Chinese New Year invites expression and reinterpretation, while Ramadan demands restraint and focus. Brands that apply a single creative tone across both risk undermining trust. Those who win will know when to celebrate visibly and when to step back.

Final Thought

The 2026 overlap of Ramadan and Lunar New Year is more than a scheduling anomaly. It is a test of how well brands understand Southeast Asia’s cultural complexity.

It calls for work that respects cultural depth, embraces diversity, and delivers genuine value at a time when emotions, expectations, and spending intentions are at their peak.

Festive seasons have always been competitive.

In 2026, the stakes will be even higher. Brands that rise to this moment will not only win the season, they will build deeper and longer-lasting trust in one of the world’s most culturally dynamic regions.

(JUN/QOB)

In Southeast Asia, that framing leaves out an important part of the picture. Technology here does not operate in isolation. It enters societies shaped by belief, cultural memory, and strong social norms. Trust is built over time through familiarity and consistency.

When AI becomes part of everyday life, its success depends not only on performance, but on whether people feel it behaves in ways they can understand and accept.

This is why conversations about responsible and human-centred AI tend to surface earlier, and with greater urgency, in this region, particularly in sectors that operate close to identity and meaning.

Why capability-led AI has clear limits

The global AI market continues to expand rapidly. In 2025, it is estimated at around USD 371 billion, spanning enterprise software, generative models, analytics, automation tools, and consumer-facing applications.

Forecasts suggest this could grow beyond USD 2 trillion over the next decade, according to MarketsandMarkets.

This pace of growth has encouraged a focus on acceleration. This pace of growth has encouraged a mindset that prioritises rapid deployment, with consequences often considered only after systems are already in use. That approach struggles in environments where trust is fragile.

In Southeast Asia, linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity exposes these weaknesses early, with opaque or misaligned AI systems often leading to disengagement, slower adoption, and higher long-term costs to credibility.

In these contexts, the question is not whether AI functions, but whether it can operate with legitimacy. Faith-tech makes this tension visible earlier than most sectors.

When technology operates close to belief

Faith-tech platforms operate close to everyday practice and belief. They support rituals, learning, and reflection that many people experience privately.

In these settings, users rely on the system as part of their daily lives, and trust is assumed from the start. This reliance changes the stakes. Accuracy alone is not enough.

Speed does not compensate for misjudgment.

As a result, a different design mindset becomes necessary. Instead of asking how much can be automated, the more responsible question becomes where automation should stop.

Human judgment is not an inefficiency to remove. It is what allows the system to exist at all.

Across Southeast Asia, this thinking is becoming more visible. Ethical guardrails are increasingly treated as design constraints rather than compliance checks added after deployment. This shift is driven less by regulation than by experience.

What restraint looks like in practice

I see these trade-offs most clearly in my work at Muslim Pro, a faith-tech mobile application serving a global Muslim audience across very different cultural contexts. Operating in this space makes one thing clear.

AI cannot be allowed to assume roles it was never meant to hold.

It is not a substitute for religious authority, nor should it be responsible for interpreting belief, and it must remain accountable to human judgment. In practice, this means AI is positioned as an assistant rather than a decision-maker.

Content creation remains human-led. Religious material is reviewed by qualified experts. Clear boundaries are set around what AI-generated output is acceptable and what is not. Oversight and moderation remain human responsibilities.

These decisions are not always the fastest. They are often more complex to implement. They also prevent errors that would be far more costly to undo. Over time, they preserve trust, which is the reason users continue to return.

Why training data matters more in Southeast Asia

Ethical debates around AI often focus on how systems are deployed. Far less attention is paid to how they are trained. This distinction matters, especially in Southeast Asia.

Many AI models today are trained on datasets that reflect dominant markets and languages. These datasets are often biased, incomplete, or flattened by design. They privilege scale over nuance and uniformity over difference. For a region like Southeast Asia, this creates real problems.

The societies here are not only diverse, they are layered.

Religious practice, social norms, and daily routines vary widely across borders and within the same faith community.

A Singaporean Muslim’s religious lifestyle differs from that of an Indonesian Muslim, shaped by different legal systems, cultural expectations, languages, and public expressions of faith.

When AI systems are trained without accounting for these differences, they risk producing outputs that feel generic or misplaced. Even when outputs are technically accurate, they can still feel disconnected from local realities, which undermines their credibility over time.

This is why responsible AI in Southeast Asia cannot stop at deployment guidelines. It must extend upstream into decisions about data selection, training processes, and whose experiences are represented in the model.

Training data is not neutral. It encodes assumptions about what is normal, visible and worth capturing.

For AI to earn trust in this region, it must be trained with an understanding that difference is not noise to be removed, but context that needs to be respected.

Rethinking how AI shapes behaviour

Another area where current AI deployment deserves scrutiny is the way engagement systems are designed to influence behaviour at scale.

In practice, it can narrow agency, especially when deployed without sufficient restraint. In environments shaped by shared values, this approach carries risk. AI should help people navigate complexity, not quietly steer them toward predetermined choices. A more disciplined model is possible.

AI can reduce friction without shaping decisions. It can make it easier for users to express themselves. It can help maintain respectful spaces by identifying harmful or inappropriate content.

Throughout this process, human oversight remains essential. The goal is not to maximise attention. It is to sustain environments people feel comfortable returning to over time.

A quieter contribution to the global AI debate

Much of the global discussion on ethical AI is shaped by technology hubs and policy centres far removed from the communities most affected by deployment decisions.

Southeast Asia offers a quieter, more grounded perspective. Here, progress is measured less by how quickly systems can be rolled out and more by whether they can be sustained.

Restraint is not viewed as hesitation. It is understood as a responsibility. Across sectors, similar lessons are emerging. Ethical design constraints need to be established early.

Human judgment must remain central where identity and meaning are involved. Access should widen without erasing context.

These lessons extend beyond faith-tech. They apply to finance, healthcare, education, and media, anywhere AI operates close to people’s lives.

(JUN/QOB)

Voter turnout was reportedly low and only held in areas controlled by the Junta, which amounts to less than a quarter of the entire landmass. Despite the limitation from Junta’s capabilities, it just might be successful in gaining the recognition it needs from various states, including its fellow Southeast Asian states.

The Philippine’s foreign secretary and ASEAN’s special envoy to Myanmar, Tess Lazaro publicly stated that ASEAN will not endorse the election results.

However, her and her neighbour’s actions suggest otherwise. Lazaro’s only publicized bilateral meetings were only with the Junta and engagements with the opposition were limited to multilateral meets.

Similar steps were taken by her predecessors and former ASEAN chairs, namely Malaysia and Laos.

The Junta always enjoyed deeper and formal engagements with the ASEAN chair, while meetings with the opposing National Unity Governments (NUG) and Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) were mostly sidelined.

While one might excuse this due to ASEAN chairs’ rotational nature coupled with diverse divisions within the opposition, a number of ASEAN Member States went out of their way indirectly to legitimize the Junta held elections.

Even before the elections began in Myanmar, Indonesia’s president Prabowo urged ASEAN to consider sending observers to ensure “transparency and accountability”.

Brunei, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia supported the elections, with the last 2 sending observers to the war-torn country, signaling willingness to legitimize the election results.

The civil war ending with the Junta on top will usher in better stability, thus bringing in better economic opportunities and credibility for ASEAN as a whole.

Additionally, a consolidated Myanmar under the Junta could also mean normalizing authoritarian/semi-authoritarian regimes in the region, which could serve various Southeast Asian countries in quelling their own domestic grievances.

Even if the Junta's election results are legitimized, the fighting will not stop as long as the NUG and the diverse EAOs, with their own interests, are not addressed.

With China hedging its bet between the Junta and EAOs, EAOs grew fairly powerful and to this day maintains strong positions in Myanmar’s border with China and India.

The influence and demands of these organizations cannot be underestimated, as seen from 2023’s operations 1027.

Although there are still some within ASEAN that refused to support the elections, such as Malaysia and Timor-Leste, this episode in the region revealed where Southeast Asian states' priorities truly lie.

Southeast Asian statesmen are always so quick to declare support for lasting peace in Myanmar through an all-inclusive process.

(JUN/QOB)

Last year, Indonesia experienced one of its worst cyberattacks in recent years, when a ransomware attack on the country’s national data centre took down hundreds of central and local state agencies.

The aviation sector was not spared, as the attack disrupted immigration services and affected operations at Indonesia’s major airports for days.

A week later, reports surfaced that Indonesia’s civil aviation authority also suffered a massive security breach, with a threat actor claiming to have accessed critical data related to the handling of air traffic in the country.

Warning: Cyber Turbulence Ahead

The aviation industry sits on a goldmine of personal data. These include passenger identities, payment information, travel itineraries, and loyalty program records, making it a prime target for bad actors seeking to exploit personal data for financial gain. Yet, many airlines and airports remain surprisingly vulnerable to cyber threats.

A major contributing factor is legacy infrastructure. While airplanes have evolved rapidly, backend IT systems have not.

Many still rely on ageing operational infrastructure that isn’t built to withstand modern threats. These legacy systems remain connected to live networks and third-party platforms for efficiency, which can open digital backdoors for bad actors.

The industry’s heavy reliance on third-party providers, from booking engines to customer service portals, also amplifies the risk. Weaker security controls anywhere in the supply chain can compromise the entire network.

Case in point: A cyberattack on Qantas Airways earlier this year, which exposed sensitive data from over 5.7 million customers, originated from a third-party platform used by its contact centre.

Groups like Scattered Spider, believed to be behind the Qantas breach, are masters of social engineering. They impersonate airline employees or IT contractors to trick help desks into granting them access to the airlines’ networks. Once inside, they can exfiltrate data and deploy ransomware across critical systems.

Flying Smarter with AI

As airlines confront a new era of digital threats, legacy security tools are no longer sufficient to combat the ever-evolving, highly sophisticated threat vectors.

AI-powered cybersecurity solutions are changing the game. For example, User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) solutions use machine learning and behavioural analytics to establish a baseline of normal user and entity activity.

By continuously monitoring and comparing real-time behaviour against this baseline, UEBA can detect anomalous activities and instantly escalate the case to the security team before damage is done. This ability to detect and respond faster can mean the difference between a contained incident and a major breach.

Navigating Cyber Turbulence with Confidence

Airlines must adopt a multi-pronged approach to fortify their cyber defences. Security tools aside, this begins with building a strong internal culture of security, where comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training for all employees is not just a policy but a shared responsibility.

A well-informed workforce is a powerful first line of defence, better equipped to protect organisational data and assets and identify vulnerabilities before they escalate into major breaches.

They need to ask critical questions about the vendor’s security controls, policies, and incident response capabilities to ensure that external vendors can keep their customers’ data secure.

These efforts should also be complemented by oversight from the public sector, which recognises the aviation industry as a critical national asset.

Indonesia has taken decisive steps to strengthen its aviation sector in recent years, establishing the Indonesian Aviation Sector Computer Security Incident Response Team (IAS-CSIRT).

This dedicated team reviews incident reports and activities, ensuring a swift, coordinated response to incidents in the aviation sector.

Charting a Safe Flight Path Ahead

Just one cyber incident alone can result in millions lost from flight delays, rebookings, customer churn, and legal costs. Beyond immediate operational disruption, reputational damage can erode hard-won customer trust for years.

(JUN/QOB)

The consequences are starkly visible:

• Shattered hospitals in Gaza,

• Communities trapped in conflict in Sudan, and

• Rohingya families struggling to survive in refugee camps and densely populated urban settings across Myanmar, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Amid these crises, the gap between needs and the world’s capacity to respond has never been wider—or more dangerous.

Even the replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria reflects this decline, with pledges falling far short as medicine supplies run low, health workers go unpaid, and preventable deaths continue to rise. Without renewed commitment, decades of hard-won progress are at risk of unraveling.

In this fractured global landscape, ASEAN—and Indonesia in particular—can play a vital role. As a bloc built on principles of cooperation, stability, and mutual support, ASEAN has the potential to help restore the belief that every human life holds equal value, regardless of where it is lived.

Gaza: When a Ceasefire Is Not Enough

Despite the current ceasefire, medical and humanitarian needs in Gaza remain overwhelming. Most hospitals have been destroyed or severely damaged. Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams continue to treat large numbers of casualties, complex surgical cases, and children suffering from profound psychological trauma.

Children like Omar, a five-year-old evacuated to a Doctors Without Borders reconstructive surgery hospital in Amman, illustrate the collapse of Gaza’s health system. Many pediatric patients arrive malnourished and deeply traumatized, requiring months of surgeries, rehabilitation, and psychological support.

Even as the ceasefire holds, violence continues: Palestinians have reportedly been shot near the “yellow line” while attempting to return to their homes. Israel also continues to impose restrictions that significantly obstruct the entry of medical supplies, fuel, shelter materials, and other essential goods. A ceasefire without unhindered humanitarian access offers only partial relief; civilians remain at extreme risk.

Daily living conditions are dire. Overcrowded displacement sites, lacking adequate access to clean water and sanitation, have fueled a surge in respiratory, gastrointestinal, and skin infections. This is a predictable and preventable public health emergency, one that risks worsening as winter approaches.

Sudan: The World’s Largest and Most Neglected Humanitarian Crisis

Sudan is currently facing the largest and most neglected humanitarian crisis in the world. Doctors Without Borders supports more than 30 health facilities across 10 states, yet the scale of suffering far exceeds global response capacity. Since April 2023, more than 1.7 million people have sought care at MSF-supported clinics—clear evidence of a collapsing health system.

In Darfur, violence, starvation, and forced displacement have reached horrific levels. In Tawila, 75 percent of newly arrived children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition, with 25 percent experiencing severe acute malnutrition. Many arrive after months of siege and hunger.

In Zamzam Camp, Doctors Without Borders teams have treated hundreds of people for gunshot wounds, fractures, and injuries resulting from attacks targeting specific ethnic groups. Civilians recount being “killed, blocked, and hunted” as they attempted to flee.

Hospitals are frequently targeted. Facilities supported by Doctors Without Borders, including Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman and Kas Hospital in Darfur, have been destroyed, looted, or besieged by armed groups. Legal protections for medical facilities—and for those seeking and providing care—have effectively collapsed.

The indirect impacts of the conflict are no less devastating. Over the past two years, Doctors Without Borders has treated 174,000 cases of malaria, 89,100 cases of diarrhea, and thousands of measles patients. These outbreaks are driven by mass displacement, lack of access to clean water, and the collapse of immunization services.

Rohingya: A Crisis Asia Can No Longer Ignore

Across Southeast Asia, the Rohingya crisis remains one of the most neglected humanitarian emergencies in the region. Nearly one million Rohingya people continue to survive in overcrowded and inadequate refugee camps in Bangladesh, while thousands more are displaced or in transit across Myanmar, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Funding cuts have drastically reduced essential services. Doctors Without Borders teams report rising cases of malnutrition, infectious diseases, anemia, and increasing mental health needs. Survivors of genocide now face worsening humanitarian conditions—not because of a lack of compassion from host communities, but due to declining international commitment.

In the absence of sustainable political solutions, countries in the region are left to shoulder the burden of a crisis that is increasingly ignored by the international community.

Why ASEAN’s Voice Matters Now

Amid a fragmented global order, ASEAN—and Indonesia in particular—can emerge as stable, constructive, and principled actors.

ASEAN member states have a long history of responding to displacement, hosting refugees, leading peacebuilding efforts, and supporting regional disaster response.

With diplomatic credibility that spans geopolitical divides, ASEAN occupies a unique position in an emerging multipolar world to advocate for humanitarian access—calling for unconditional and unhindered aid in Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and beyond.

ASEAN countries can reaffirm core humanitarian principles: that aid must be based solely on need and free from military or political interests. They can remind the world that no life is worth less simply because of where it is lived.

As 2025 draws to a close, the global humanitarian landscape is defined by record-high needs and record-low funding commitments.

ASEAN states must mobilize greater support wherever possible and, more importantly, use their credibility and political influence to pressure others to reverse this downward trend.

By speaking out firmly and collectively, the region can help restore human values through concrete action at a time when humanity itself appears to be fading.

Their survival depends on action now.