New Southeast Asia Terror Fears Amid Old Jemaah Islamiyah Links
Plus biggest China-Cambodia drills; geopolitical divergences; major maritime deal; coming cyber move; renewed port chatter; ASEAN sector wars and much more.
Note to Readers: We usually ensure we are varying our WonkDive country or functional focus each week to account for a diverse region. But this weekend’s police station attack in Malaysia just as we were finishing up some security-related consultations in the country meant a Malaysia focus this week as well for that section.
Greetings to new readers and welcome all to the latest edition of the weekly ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief! If you haven’t already, you can upgrade to a paid subscription for $5 a month/$50 a year below to receive full posts by inserting your email address and then selecting an annual or monthly option. You can visit this page for more on pricing for institutions, groups as well as discounts. For current paid subscribers, please make sure you’re hitting the “view entire message” prompt if it comes up at the end of a post to see the full version.
For this iteration of ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief, we are looking at:
Assessing the geopolitical significance of a recent attack that has sparked speculation on rising terror fears in Southeast Asia;
Mapping of regional developments, such as “biggest” China-Cambodia drills and ongoing ASEAN Myanmar diplomacy;
Charting evolving geopolitical, geoeconomic and security trends such as geopolitical perception divergences and a major maritime deal;
Tracking and analysis of industry developments and quantitative indicators including a coming cyber deal; ASEAN sector wars; renewed port chatter and more;
And much more! ICYMI, check out our review of a new edited volume on Southeast Asia outlooks on the Indo-Pacific.
This Week’s WonkCount: 1871 words (~ 9 minutes)
Biggest China-Cambodia Drills; ASEAN Myanmar Diplomacy & More
Geopolitical Divergences; Defense Resourcing & the Conflict-Climate Nexus
“[T]he understanding of the term “geopolitics” and of geopolitical rivalry diverged significantly among the executives interviewed,” observes a new report released by the World Economic Forum. The findings reinforce the notion that growing anxieties about geopolitics is the product of perceptions regarding diverse trends in the Indo-Pacific and globally including U.S.-China rivalry, the growing use of sanctions, rising populism in the West, global economic fragmentation and the lack of availability of critical raw materials (link).
Associations With “Geopolitics” By Companies with International Operations
“The Singaporean system faces five key challenges,” notes a new report released by the RAND Corporation on defense resourcing processes in U.S. allied and partner countries which includes France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and Sweden. The report is part of a seven-volume series on the subject of defense resource planning. Challenges cited in the report in Singapore’s system include those related to transparency and organizational culture. The report also notes strengths including resourcing certainty as well as civilian-dominance in civil-military ties (link).
Model Process Flow Between Capability Gap Identification and Procurement in Singapore’s Defense Ministry
“Conflict has exacerbated…Myanmar’s vulnerability to climate change and environmental degradation,” concludes a factsheet on climate, peace and security produced by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The factsheet notes that Myanmar continues to be home to one of the highest concentrations of people vulnerable to climate change impacts, with 40 percent of the population residing in low-lying and coastal regions. It examines various dimensions of risk, including food insecurity, internally displaced persons, disaster recovery as well as the exploitation of extractive activities and vulnerable populations (link).
Select Key Statistics on Climate, Peace and Security in Myanmar
New Southeast Asia Terror Fears Amid Old Jemaah Islamiyah Links
What’s Behind It
A suspected member of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militant group killed two constables in a pre-dawn attack on May 17 at a police station in Ulu Tiram in the southern Malaysian state of Johor1. Malaysian officials have said they believe the suspect was acting alone even if there are indirect links to JI, an Islamic extremist group with past links to Al-Qaeda2. One defense source captured the narrative to ASEAN Wonk at play as being a tension between “the old and the new” — old images of JI as a group dating back to the 2000s on the one hand, and new realities of how the group is functioning today on the other hand, with concerns more around its decentralized and non-violent activities and looser connections between individuals and subgroupings3.
The incident is just the latest example of an individual incident raising anxieties of wider terror revival in Southeast Asia. Part of this anxiety is rooted in JI’s role in past deadly attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 2000s and foiled plots in countries like Malaysia and Singapore, some of which were linked to Malaysian JI leader Noordin Mohammad Top. Yet the JI of today is far from the JI of decades past, and the militancy landscape has itself also changed. Security forces have since decimated JI’s original leadership and have had success in contending with a subsequent wave of subsequent Islamic State-linked threats. Nonetheless, JI has continued to exert its influence through various pathways including ideological proliferation, inter-group connectivity and strategic societal activities. JI members have also featured in recent arrests made, with a case in point being the pre-election militant crackdown in Indonesia late last year (see snapshot graphic above on select recent developments)4. Additionally, Southeast Asian states have made inroads but also still struggled to varying degrees to manage the enabling environment and root causes that lead to militancy, including political and economic grievances, both in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and Malaysia or twin insurgencies by parts of Muslim minorities in southern Thailand and southern Philippines.
Select Recent Southeast Asia Militancy-Related Developments
Why It Matters
Such incidents are important reminders that militancy is still very much a part of the threat mix in Southeast Asia’s security landscape, even if links to particular groups need to be approached with caution. Militancy is a challenging threat to contend with because its cyclical pattern of ebbs and flows can lead to it being sidelined during ebbs as countries prioritize rising state-based threats or progressively worsening issues like climate change. At the same time, connections to particular groups need to be approached with caution, since “links” can range across a full spectrum from loose personal relationships to outright tactical mimicry and operational coordination. For example, in this case, officials have been cautious in distinguishing between direct and indirect links the suspect may have had to JI or other militant groups5. Additionally, longtime watchers of Southeast Asia’s regional security landscape will know that attacking police stations is not just a JI-specific tendency. In the early 2000s, another radical Islamic group attacked a police station in Malaysia’s state of Kedah in what was seen as an attempt to steal firearms. Beyond Malaysia, an early spark in the recent revival of a decades-old local southern Thailand insurgency, which has shown no signs so far of direct international connections to al-Qaeda, was the 2004 raiding of a Thai army aummunition depot which saw rifles and ammunition taken.
Details so far also raise the critical question of how we may see the key contours around the incident evolve over time. A closer look at some of these areas provides at least a sense of what we might expect (see table below, along with more on future prospects in the “Where It’s Headed” section. Paid subscribers can read on thereafter to the remaining sections of our weekly ASEAN Wonk BulletBrief).
Key Components, Datapoints and Indicators in Malaysia Police Station Attack
