Organizer: New York Southeast Asia Network (NYSEAN)

Type/Location: Hybrid / New York, NY

Road infrastructure through protected forest. Photo: Kevin Woods

Description:

This conference brings together scholars and practitioners to examine the politics of the environmental crisis across Southeast Asia—a region where socio-ecological ruptures are not aberrations but products of longstanding structures of extraction and governance failure. Panelists trace the roots of these crises and assess how extractive industries, increasingly legitimized through the language of green transitions and climate finance, reproduce entrenched patterns of dispossession and injustice. From nickel mining and biofuel expansion to sand dredging and flood aid corruption, the panels situate contemporary crises within deeper histories of resource conflict and structural inequality.

The conference foregrounds questions of resistance and accountability: what are communities, activists, and civil society organizations doing to contest new forms of ecological crisis? And what political conditions are necessary to advance climate action while achieving social and environmental justice? Beyond critical analysis, we seek insights into the strategies—legal, political, and grassroots—that have worked or might work to address Southeast Asia’s intertwined ecological and democratic crises.