III. Armed conflict and peace processes in South East Asia

Chapter:

4. Armed conflict and peace processes in Asia and Oceania

Source:

SIPRI Yearbook 2020

Author(s):

Ian Davis

South East Asia—comprising the states of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Viet Nam—is mainly tropical and includes a wide range of ethnicities and religions. The many coastal communities in the island-studded region are highly vulnerable to the growing threats from climate change, with sea-level rises predicted to displace millions of people.¹ Another non-traditional security threat in 2019 was the rapid spread of African swine fever across the region, which threatened food security and the livelihoods of millions of households reliant on pig farming.² Some of Asia’s most organized Islamist extremist groups are active in the region, most notably in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.³ This section focuses on the four countries in the region with subnational armed conflicts: one high-intensity armed conflict (i.e. more than 1000 deaths) in Myanmar and two low-intensity armed conflicts in Indonesia and Thailand (i.e. less than 1000 deaths). In the Philippines, when fatalities from the ‘war on drugs’ are added to those from the subnational armed conflict, the number of conflict-related deaths rises to nearly 1700, making it also a high-intensity armed conflict.