Madhuresh Kumar
How do you imagine a regional future that honours people’s dignity when states fail to do so?Alternative regionalism is not an abstract ideal; it is already unfolding in fragments across Southeast Asia. MASSA (Movement for Alternatives and Solidarity in Southeast Asia) emerged as an attempt to move beyond state-centred regionalism and to build a people’s regional integration grounded in the alternative practices already nurtured by communities in the region. Madhuresh Kumar shares lessons and reflections from his participation at the sixth MASSA Conference in Cambodia two weeks ago. He writes: “If another region is possible, it will not emerge from the top down. It will be woven from below through care, resistance, culture, memory, and the unwavering demand to live with dignity.”
Introduction
“We need to get rid of these boundaries – not because we don’t want to be Filipino, or Indonesian, or whatever identity – but because we want to reach out across these borders and overcome the limitations and the boundaries created by Western colonialism. Those borders are also the source of the underdevelopment and misery of Southeast Asian people”, Ed Tadem, Convener of the Program on Alternative Development at University of Philippines, said at the 6th MASSA (Movement for Alternatives and Solidarity on Southeast Asia) Conference’s opening.
It set the tone immediately: the crises of Southeast Asia cannot be met with the imaginations that created them.
Across the region, civic space is shrinking, authoritarianism is deepening, and ordinary people are pushed into ever more precarious lives. Myanmar’s coup continues to send thousands fleeing; Thailand grapples with cycles of crackdown; Cambodia has closed off dissent; Laos and Vietnam remain tightly controlled; and electoral democracies like Indonesia and the Philippines face erosion from within and cycles of protests against corruption and growing inequality. At the same time, climate disasters – typhoons, floods, droughts – cross borders as if to remind us that the region’s ecological survival is inseparable.
Yet woven through this bleakness is a quiet insistence on solidarity. Young activists send each other food during protests; queer networks share safety strategies; farmers learn seed practices across countries; and artists circulate songs of dissent that travel faster than repression. A different Southeast Asia already exists in glimpses, carried in acts of collective care, resistance, solidarity, and imagination.
It was this undercurrent that surfaced in Siem Reap, in the backdrop of the majestic Angkor Wat complex, where nearly eighty participants from people’s movements, communities, and civil society organisations gathered for the Conference. They were not there merely to analyse the region’s problems; they came because something deeper is at stake; how to imagine a regional future that honours people’s dignity when states fail to do so.
It was out of this same impulse that MASSA came into being in 2022 but the process started in 2018 where the idea of people’s alternative regionalism or regional integration came out of the two conferences on the alternatives. Movements across the region recognised that engaging ASEAN or attending parallel civil society forums was no longer enough; the depth of the crises demanded something more rooted, more ambitious. MASSA emerged as an attempt to move beyond state-centred regionalism and to build, instead, a people’s regional integration grounded in the alternative practices already nurtured by Southeast Asian communities. It is a long-term vision, one that cannot be realised overnight, but it carries the patient commitment of movements that know real transformation begins from the ground up.
Imagining Alternative Regionalism
If the political map of Southeast Asia once promised stability, today it reveals its limits. ASEAN, the region’s flagship institution, remains bound by a doctrine of non-interference that often functions as non-responsiveness. It facilitates investment, trade, and elite diplomacy, but remains structurally incapable of addressing democratic breakdowns, refugee crises, or cross-border conflicts. When people flee Myanmar, or when repression intensifies in Cambodia or Vietnam or border disputes flare up between Thailand-Cambodia, ASEAN’s silence is not neutrality, it is abandonment of principles of Multilateralism.
Yet a deeper reason compels us to rethink regionalism: the region’s lived realities have long preceded the borders that states now defend. Benedict Anderson described nations as imagined communities, identities that feel natural only because we rehearse them. If that is true of nations, it is equally true of regions. Southeast Asia was never simply a tidy collection of 11 states; it has always been a cultural and ecological continuum shaped by rivers, migrations, colonial ruptures, and shared struggles. James Scott’s idea of Zomia reminds us of this. The highlands stretching across Northeast India, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and four provinces of China form a region not because states designed it, but because communities there have historically lived, moved, and organised in ways that evade state control.
Crises today merely expose what has always been true. Climate shocks cross borders without hesitation. Migrant workers sustain economies far from home yet remain criminalised at borders. Fisherfolk on one side of the Mekong depend on decisions made hundreds of kilometres upstream. Indigenous communities hold knowledge systems that predate modern states altogether. And in every country, the same patterns of resource extraction, land dispossession, crony capitalism, political corruption, and authoritarian consolidation recur with uncanny similarity.
In short, the region is already deeply interconnected, just not in ways recognised by official institutions. This is where alternative regionalism enters the picture. Instead of treating regional integration as a diplomatic project, it looks at the region through the lives of those who carry its burdens: women in informal economies, migrants crossing borders under threat, communities displaced by conflict, farmers defending land, queer networks carving out safety, and young people imagining futures beyond the ones imposed on them.
Much of Southeast Asia’s political life unfolds in spaces where people have long resisted being fully absorbed into state power – not only through open confrontation, but through mobility, autonomy, ecological knowledge, and social practices that make control difficult. Seen this way, state-led regionalism may appear paralysed, but a people’s regionalism is already emerging through forms of life that refuse to be governed in the usual ways: food sovereignty, indigenous stewardship, feminist organising, mutual aid, cross-border digital solidarity, and cultural exchange. These are not simply reactions to repression; they are the building blocks of another regional imagination.
To imagine alternative regionalism, then, is not wishful thinking. It is recognising the region that already exists beneath the borders drawn on maps. It is rooted not in treaties but in relationships, not in sovereignty claims but in shared vulnerability and shared hope. The MASSA Conference gathered precisely because this recognition is gaining strength. The task now is not to argue for an alternative, but to understand how people are already bringing it into being.
Collective Care, Resistance, and Survival
If the crises of Southeast Asia expose the limits of state power, the ways people care for each other reveal the region’s deeper democratic life. This came through most vividly in the session led by Yuli Rustinawati of ASEAN SOGIE caucus where participants spoke not in policy terms but in the language of survival.
One Thai activist described how mental health struggles have become entwined with political repression: “Some of us have attempted suicide… we had to learn how to talk someone back from the edge.” For her collective, care is not a retreat from activism; it is what allows activists to stay alive while confronting a system designed to exhaust them. Another participant spoke of how, in her Cambodian village, love is rarely verbalised but expressed through small acts; food left aside, a gesture of worry, the unspoken commitment to each other’s well-being. These stories might seem ordinary, but they are precisely the kind of everyday practices James Scott recognised as the groundwork of resistance.
Care, in this sense, becomes political not because it is dramatic but because it is continuous. It is woven into the lives of farmers who rebuild each other’s homes after evictions or typhoons; migrant workers who pool money to help someone in distress; queer communities who create safe spaces where states refuse to protect them; CSOs who run programmes to support rights defenders and so on. It is sustained by women who step forward in protests to shield others, by neighbours who look after mentally unwell members of the community so they are not discarded into institutions, and by young organisers who hold each other afloat in the face of burnout.
What emerged across these testimonies was a shared ethic: people refuse to let one another fall through the cracks. In movements across the region, care isn’t an accessory to struggle; it is the infrastructure that keeps struggle possible. It is also the basis of trust, without which cross-border solidarities cannot grow.
This became clear in the stories participants shared about how they learned from each other’s movements: strategies for safety, digital organising, trauma support, legal defence, and the subtle ways communities resist control even under repressive regimes. These practices do not feature in ASEAN communiqués, yet they form the informal circuits through which the region’s democratic imagination travels.
In this sense, collective care functions as the region’s first form of alternative regionalism. It is organic, unplanned, and rooted in lived experience. It proceeds not through agreements between governments but through relationships between people who know that their survival is interdependent. If official regionalism has failed to protect people, these everyday solidarities show how people protect each other despite it.
Culture as the Region’s Shared Political Language
If care reveals the emotional infrastructure of alternative regionalism, culture exposes its imaginative depth. Nowhere was this clearer than the special cultural panel of the Messenger Band (MB) local musicians in Cambodia and Asian Music for People’s Peace and Progress (AMP3) full of songs and reflections of the community artists, moderated by Norm Somphors, of the Messenger Band.
Leonard Reyes from Manila spoke about writing songs on crowded jeepney routes; melodies shaped by the frustrations and humour of commuters trying to survive daily corruption. His music is not simply commentary; it is shared memory, a way of telling people that their struggles are not theirs alone.
From Cambodia, Chrek Sopha of the Messenger Band explained why music remains one of her strongest weapons: “It calms, entertains, but it also pushes people to take action. We sing about every day’s problems, hardships and of hope in struggle.” Resonating with listeners even if they initially resist the message. They all work in garment factories themselves and their songs carry messages that can slip past formal censorship, reaching audiences who may never hear a political speech but will hum a tune that stays with them.
In Laos, Chanthanva Syhakhang uses reggae-inspired rhythms to raise people’s issues in a context where expressions are restricted. “If I were more famous, I would probably be in jail,” he said, reminding the room that in some countries, even the act of singing becomes a risk.
And then came the unmistakable clarity of Sang Sok Serey, whose rap gives voice to Cambodian women long silenced by oppressive cultural expectations. When government ministries attempted to censor her work under the guise of ‘educating’ her, she set the collaboration aside. She released her music independently, supported by her community rather than the state. Her song Her Voice travelled across the region as a quiet but insistent demand for dignity.
These artistic practices do more than resist repression; they weave Southeast Asia into a cultural commons that predates and exceeds political boundaries. In these songs and performances, one hears echoes from across the region; shared rhythms, borrowed phrases, familiar aspirations. Culture moves where formal regionalism cannot. It crosses borders without paperwork, creating affinities that feel natural even when diplomacy fails. In the words of Leonard, the song, a village in the making, is inspired by the fact that the alternative regionalism is a large village in the making where people care for each other. In fact, this itself is a product of the regional weaving work, a project of the Asian Music for People’s Peace and Progress (AMP3) and was launched in 2019.
This is where Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities becomes useful once again: nations were imagined into being; regions can be too. But unlike state-led regionalism built through negotiation and protocol, cultural regionalism emerges from below – through habit, sound, taste, fabric, movement, and the emotional registers that bind people despite difference. In this sense, what MASSA and its allies nurture resembles Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias: transformative possibilities rooted in existing practices. Artists across Southeast Asia are already sketching the outlines of such a region, creating a sense of belonging shaped not by governments but by shared affect, making alternative regionalism tangible as a lived possibility rather than a formal policy design.
Three Field Encounters: Alternative Regionalism from the Margins
If the Assembly’s discussions offered a conceptual scaffolding, the field visits organised by Social Action for Community Development (SACD), Focus on the Global South, and Gender and Development for Cambodia (GADC), revealed what alternative regionalism looks like in practice. The participants organised in to three very different sites: a community fighting for food sovereignty, a village resisting dispossession on the Tonle Sap floodplain, and a queer safe-space in Siem Reap. Seen together, they form a map of the region’s democratic future, rooted not in institutions but in the lives of people who stand at the sharpest edges of inequality.
Trapang Svay – Land, Seeds, and the Politics of Survival
In Trapang Svay, participants met communities that have spent nearly two decades resisting capture of their farmland from a Buddhist religious nun, since 2005. Their area in Angkor Thom is known for many land conflicts, including government programmes of preservation and tourism around the ancient temples, which is under the Apsara authority.
Yet this story is not only about resistance and loss. It is also about the renewal of community knowledge. Farmers here save native seed varieties, refuse chemically intensive agriculture, and cultivate food collectively and meet the legal fees together. They also organise Seeds Festival, as an assertion of their sovereignty and right to the land and a refusal to surrender their future to companies, markets, or ministries.
In a region where agricultural land is rapidly disappearing into concessions, plantations, and speculative ventures, Trapang Svay stands as a reminder that the fight for land is the fight for democracy. A regionalism that does not begin with those who cultivate and protect the soil would be regionalism without roots.
Phnom Krom & the 78 Dam Communities – Belonging in a Militarised Landscape
The visit to Phnom Krom offered another layer to this understanding. Here, families live on the shifting floodplain of the Tonle Sap, cultivating rice in the dry months and fishing when the waters return. Their relationship to the land is ecological rather than administrative; the lake’s rise and retreat determine their rhythms far more than any map.
Yet their lives are marked by repeated displacement; first during the Khmer Rouge period, then during the 1987 conflict with Vietnam, and again in the decades that followed. When they attempted to reclaim their original land in 2014, the military blocked them, citing “security concerns,” even as parts of the same land were sold to private interests. Houses were destroyed; families rebuilt. Each act of reconstruction was met with further intimidation.
What sustains the community is collective resolve. Women stand at the frontlines during confrontations, forming protective circles. Neighbours rebuild homes together. They continue to cultivate rice, maintain the check dam, and organise petitions even when authorities refuse responsibility.
Their struggle complicates every tidy idea of citizenship, legality, or sovereignty. They have lived and laboured on this land for generations yet remain “illegal” in the eyes of the state. In their determination, we glimpse what Gandhi called a moral compass: when in doubt, choose the path that protects the poorest and most vulnerable. If alternative regionalism means anything, it must begin here with people who refuse to be erased from their own histories.
APTBY LGBTQ Centre – Safety, Dignity, and the Right to Exist
The third field visit, to APTBY (A place to be yourself), only LGBTQ safe-space in Siem Reap, operated by Beautiful Life Organisation, revealed a different dimension of marginality. While some countries in Southeast Asia recognise queer rights on paper, many do not; and even where legal protections exist, stigma, surveillance, and violence persist.
Inside the centre, participants saw what solidarity looks like when the right to exist is constantly under threat. APTBY provides HIV services, mental health support, crisis shelter, and community programmes for transgender and queer youth who often face family rejection, workplace discrimination, and police harassment. For many, this small centre is the only place where they can speak freely, dress as they wish, or simply exhale.
In a region where patriarchal norms and religious conservatism often shape public policy, such spaces are radical by their very existence. They model a kind of regionalism grounded not in state alignment but in shared vulnerability. Queer networks across Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines already support one another informally; not through treaties, but through trust, lived experience, and the exchange of safety strategies.
Across these three sites, the outline of an alternative regionalism becomes clearer. It is not forged in ministries or summit halls but in places where people defend land, protect water, nurture seeds, resist displacement, care for each other’s bodies, and build dignity from the ground up. These communities belong to different countries, yet their struggles mirror each other so closely that borders become incidental to the real story. If the region is to be reimagined, it will not be from above. It will begin in places like Trapang Svay, Phnom Krom, and APTBY, where the margins are not the edges of the region but its moral centre.
Knowledge as a Regional Commons: The Promise of the People’s University
If the field visits showed what alternative regionalism looks like on the ground, the idea of MASSA’s People’s University offered a glimpse of its long-term institutional imagination. In a region where state power, corporate capital, and elite academies dominate the production of knowledge, the decision to build a people-centred university on 15 hectares of land in West Java is quietly revolutionary.
This land, gifted by Serikat Petani Pasundan (Peasant Union of Pasundan, SPP), carries its own history of resistance. It was reclaimed through years of struggle against a Dutch rubber company, resisting land grabs, cultivated collectively, and held as a symbol of peasant autonomy. To entrust this land to a MASSA shows the confidence in the project: it asserts that knowledge does not belong to ministries or markets, but to those who have fought hardest to protect the commons.
The university MASSA envisions is not a traditional institution with faculties, certification, or professionalised expertise. Its foundation is the everyday knowledge held in movements; seed-saving traditions, indigenous forest management, feminist organising, queer care networks, labour struggles, land rights campaigns, youth resistance, community media, and the cultural practices that bind societies together. These are not footnotes to political life; they are the intellectual architecture of how people survive repression and imagine alternatives.
Over the past six years, MASSA has documented nearly eighty such alternative practices across Southeast Asia from community fisheries in Timor-Leste to solidarity economies in the Philippines, cooperative farms in Indonesia, and cross-border migrant support networks. This archive is already one of the most comprehensive mappings of grassroots innovation in the region. The People’s University will turn this dispersed knowledge into a living commons, a space where communities can learn from one another without having their experiences reduced or extracted.
At the Assembly in Siem Reap, the idea drew energy because it offered something the region has lacked: an institution that belongs to the people, not the state. A place where activists from Myanmar can sit safely alongside Thai youth organisers; where Cambodian land defenders can share strategies with Indonesian farmers; where queer collectives, women workers, and indigenous leaders can teach from their own experience without translation into the language of policy.
In the vision emerging from MASSA, education is not about producing experts; it is about strengthening relationships across struggles. It is about weaving a shared understanding of the region’s political, ecological, and cultural life free from the narrow lens of security, investment, or competitiveness through which states view regional cooperation.
This university, if it takes shape as imagined, will be perhaps one of the first institutions in Southeast Asia built entirely from below. Its significance lies less in its physical structure than in what it represents: a commitment to treat people’s knowledge as the region’s most valuable resource. It offers a way to deepen solidarity, preserve memory, and sustain the political imagination required to confront the authoritarian, ecological, and economic crises that define the present.
In a region where official regionalism remains distant and indifferent, the People’s University gestures toward a different horizon, one where knowledge is shared, community-owned, and anchored in the lives of the most vulnerable.
Weaving the Region: Lessons from the Assembly
By the end of the Assembly, a set of lessons emerged – threads that connected discussions, field visits, and personal testimonies into a coherent regional picture. They pointed toward a simple truth: Southeast Asia already contains the foundations of an alternative regionalism; the task is to weave them together with intention.
The first lesson is that democracy in Southeast Asia can no longer be imagined within the boundaries of the nation-state. Crises, whether political, economic, or ecological, move across borders freely, and people’s lives move with them. Migrant workers sustain economies far from home, refugees flee repression into neighbouring countries, and climate disasters touch multiple nations at once. A regional future built solely on state sovereignty is already out of step with the realities of everyday life.
The second lesson is that the region’s most enduring solidarities come from below, not above. Where ASEAN remains limited by its non-interference doctrine, communities have built their own forms of cooperation, informal yet resilient. Farmers exchange seeds and strategies; queer networks share safety pathways; artists collaborate across borders; youth collectives coordinate online; and land defenders teach one another how to navigate legal systems stacked against them. These networks may be invisible to formal diplomacy, but they are the living tissue of the region.
The third lesson is that culture and care are not peripheral but central to how people imagine political futures. The songs, food, fabric, rituals, and shared everyday practices circulating across Southeast Asia do what official regionalism cannot: they create a sense of connection rooted in feeling and memory. Care networks, meanwhile, keep movements alive under pressure, offering emotional and material solidarity where states fail.
The fourth lesson is that the margins are the region’s moral and political centre. The struggles of Trapang Svay’s farmers, the resilience of Phnom Krom’s floodplain community, and the dignity nurtured in the APTBY LGBTQ safe-space show that the real work of regional democracy is happening far from capitals. These sites reveal how land, identity, labour, ecology, and survival are already cross-border issues. They also embody what Gandhi’s talisman insists: when imagining the future, we must start with those who have the least, not the most.
The fifth lesson is that knowledge must be reclaimed as a commons, not a commodity. The People’s University is not only a training centre; it is an attempt to anchor the region’s shared struggles in an institution built from below. It treats people’s lived knowledge as the basis for regional learning, something no formal university or government platform currently does.
Together, these lessons suggest a shift away from regionalism as a state project and toward regionalism as a people’s practice. They offer a vision grounded in everyday resistance, cultural memory, ecological interconnectedness, and cross-border solidarities that emerge not through treaties but through shared vulnerability and shared hope.
What the Assembly made visible is that alternative regionalism is not an abstract ideal; it is already unfolding in fragments across the region, and MASSA thrives in the cracks of the ASEAN empire. It is not trying to invent it, but to recognise it, nurture it, and weave it into a more coherent and democratic whole. If another region is possible, it will not emerge from the top down. It will be woven from below through care, resistance, culture, memory, and the unwavering demand to live with dignity.
Madhuresh Kumar is a member of the Facilitation Team of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and attended the MASSA Conference as a GTA representative from 11–13 November 2025, hosted by Gender and Development for Cambodia in Siem Reap. Thanks to Ryan Martinez, Leonardo Reyes, Angging Aban, Ed Tadem, Sokunthy Ros, Anwar Sastro, Erni Katrini and others for their feedback on an earlier draft of the article.
All photographs in the article, unless otherwise indicated, are by the author.