Digital rights in Southeast Asia

About the project

  • Title: Digital Rights in Southeast Asia: Conceptual Framework and Movement Building
  • Nature of project: Book chapter
  • Year: 2019
  • Commissioned by: SHAPE-SEA
  • Download: Fulltext here; A PPT of the gist here

Abstract of the paper

This chapter builds a conceptual framework for digital rights by drawing from digital rights advocates in Southeast Asia, and provides a snapshot of the digital rights movement in the region through the advocates’ areas of work, challenges faced, and recommendations for advancing the movement. The conceptual framework proposes four spheres of digital rights, as follows: 1) conventional rights translated to digital spaces, 2) data-centred rights, 3) rights to access to digital spaces and services, and 4) rights to participate in the governance of the digital or the Internet. Empirical observation of the digital rights movement in Southeast Asia reveals that most work has been done on conventional rights translated to digital spaces. The lack of technical capacity is a major gap in addressing digital rights violations that require a deeper understanding of how the technology functions.

  • I wrote a blog post when it was published, it lists some of the avenues that the research has been presented at: link
  • Here's another presentation on it that I did, presented in April 2020 for the Digital Youth Conference 2020 organised by International Youth United: link to presentation