This book examines how contemporary geopolitical rivalry reshapes the conditions under which civil society operates in Southeast Asia. Moving beyond state-centric studies of diplomacy and security, the book focuses on how global power competition affects NGOs, activists, advocacy networks, and grassroots organisations in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines.

The book adopts a comparative qualitative approach, combining regional analysis, country case studies, interpretive insights, and engagement with existing scholarship. It introduces the concept of conditional civic space to explain how civil society increasingly operates in environments that remain formally open but are substantively constrained. Readers will be particularly interested in discussions of securitisation, surveillance, foreign funding, donor politics, legitimacy struggles, and how civil society organisations adapt to growing uncertainty. These topics are highly relevant to current debates on democracy, authoritarianism, development, and China–U.S. rivalry.

The book offers a clear thematic structure that moves from theory to regional context and then to comparative case analysis. It draws together the four country cases to identify broader regional trends, patterns of civic constraint, and the ways civil society actors respond to changing political, material, and normative pressures. Written in an accessible but scholarly style, the book is suitable for classroom use as well as policy and practitioner audiences.

Khoo Ying Hooi is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Human Rights at the Universiti Malaya (UM). Her research explores human rights, democracy, and civil society in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Malaysia and Timor-Leste. Her broader interests include Southeast Asian geopolitics, civic space, institutional contestations, academic freedom, and human rights education. She is the author of The Bersih Movement and Democratisation in Malaysia (SIRD/ISEAS/Lexington Books, 2020) and Seeds of Dissent (Gerakbudaya, 2015), and has co-edited several volumes including Social and Political Deglobalisation: Covid-19, Conflict and Uncertainties in Malaysia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Marginalisation and Human Rights in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2022), and Rethinking Human Rights and Peace in the Post-Independence Timor-Leste through Local Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).