Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Southeast Asia

Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Southeast Asia is the civil-society research report authored by Dr Jun-E Tan as Research Consultant for EngageMedia and released on 15 December 2021, with a revised edition issued on 6 June 2023. The report maps the AI-governance landscape across Southeast Asia from the perspective of civil society in the region and supplies the analytical scaffolding that anchors EngageMedia's wider Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights in Southeast Asia research line.

Central question and method

The report's central research question is "how can civil society participate in AI governance or intervene in other ways to safeguard AI safety and security?" The methodology combines scholarly thinking, recent reports, and expert interviews with AI researchers and academics in the fields of governance, human rights, and technology in Southeast Asia, and the analytical frame is explicitly Global-South-positioned: where mainstream AI-governance discussions acknowledge AI application problems, the report argues, they generally overlook the structural obstacles affecting developing nations' ability to build their own data infrastructure and to participate in AI governance from positions of technical and economic strength.

The report's analytical scaffolding had been laid out in an earlier three-part article series on Coconet that Jun-E Tan and EngageMedia co-published from late 2019 to early 2020 — the introduction sketched the human-rights context for AI in Southeast Asia (digital authoritarianism, dataset representation gaps, AI-governance participation gaps); the second instalment treated economic, social, and cultural rights (developmental upside in education and healthcare, with countervailing risk from "undue bias in AI data and the system itself"); the third instalment treated civil and political rights (government surveillance, microtargeting of voter behaviour, AI-generated content fuelling disinformation campaigns). The 2021 report consolidated this scaffolding into a single substantive document and extended the analysis with the policymaking-and-advocacy recommendations that became its load-bearing contribution.

Central findings

The report's central substantive finding is that the AI-ethics principles and guidelines currently in circulation across Southeast Asian policy debate have limited substance in their content and a high possibility of being used mainly as window dressing while diverting civil-society and policy attention away from more structural solutions such as legal regulation. The finding sets up the report's principal critical move: that ethics-frame AI governance, when separated from binding legal-regulatory scaffolding, functions to defer the harder governance questions rather than to resolve them, and that the resulting "ethics washing" pattern is particularly costly in Global South contexts where the structural asymmetries between AI-deploying actors and the populations subject to AI systems are at their starkest.

The country-level texture sits inside this critical frame. The report draws on the Coconet article-series mapping of digital-authoritarianism patterns in Southeast Asia — surveillance of dissenters, AI-augmented disinformation in election cycles, and the deployment of automated content moderation against civil-society speech — and uses these to anchor the political-economy dimension of the analysis. The report's geographic coverage spans the ASEAN region with concentrated attention on Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Cambodia, treated together as a cross-jurisdictional civil-society analytical unit rather than as separate national case studies.

Recommendations and posture

The report's recommendations follow from the structural critique and concern the roles that Southeast Asian civil society can play in shaping AI governance from positions of strategic participation rather than reactive opposition. Civil society is called on to engage with AI governance discussions on technical-policy terms (rather than ceding the terrain to industry-aligned ethics framings), to push for binding legal regulation in addition to non-binding ethics principles, and to build the regional analytical and convening capacity necessary to act on AI governance at the speed AI deployment requires. The recommendation set is operationalised through EngageMedia's wider research-and-convening line — the report's findings re-surfaced at EngageMedia's DRAPAC23 Critical Perspectives on AI Adoption and Governance sessions in Chiang Mai, in the Pretty Good Podcast Episode 17 with the author, and in the Geopolitics of AI in Southeast Asia follow-on work that the December 2021 announcement post pre-committed to as the report's downstream extension.

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Southeast Asia is the first publication anchored on Southeast Asia and the first Asia-Pacific publication anchor outside South Asia. The publications slate has previously clustered around the United States (Unmasking AI, Bug Bounties for Algorithmic Harms, Comply To Fly?, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, A Hazard to Human Rights, Losing Humanity), the United Kingdom (Participatory Data Stewardship, Not a drop to drink), Continental Europe (Automating Society Report 2020, Civil Society Statement on the EU AI Act, Black Box), Latin America (Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina, Estado de la vigilancia), South Asia ("No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food"), the Gulf (AI Investments in the Gulf), and East and Southern Africa (Legal Analysis of Laws, Policies and Government Strategies Relating to Artificial Intelligence in Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia). The Southeast Asian and broader Asia-Pacific region was the last major in-scope geography on the publications slate without an anchor; this report installs that anchor and supplies the corpus's first Southeast-Asian civil-society analytical lens on regional AI governance.

The publication exercises the EngageMedia org-as-publisher pattern under the organisation's Digital Rights and AI-and-Human-Rights research line and is the structural counterpart of the Paradigm Initiative-led Legal Analysis of Laws, Policies and Government Strategies Relating to Artificial Intelligence in Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia on the African side and the Derechos Digitales-led Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina on the Latin American side: a Global South civil-society organisation building a comparative regional evidence base on a specific AI-policy register through the work of researchers embedded in or contracted by the organisation — Velasco and Venturini's five-dimension human-rights audit applied across four LatAm jurisdictions in the Derechos Digitales case, the four-law-firm legal-analysis methodology applied across seven East and Southern African jurisdictions in the Paradigm Initiative case, and Jun-E Tan's civil-society-participation analytical frame applied across ASEAN in the EngageMedia case. The methodological register differs (legal analysis in the African case, sectoral audit in the LatAm case, civil-society-participation analytical frame in the SEA case) but the structural shape — Global South regional anchor, civil-society organisation as publisher, researcher- or law-firm-contributed substantive analysis — is shared across all three.

The report's continued circulation in revised June 2023 edition and its onward concretisation in EngageMedia's October 2025 Tracing the Indonesian Government's AI Technology Procurement Track from 2021 to 2024 report supply the corpus's evidence that the December 2021 analytical scaffolding has held up across the subsequent four years of accelerating AI deployment in the region — the 2025 Indonesian procurement-tracking work operationalises the 2021 report's call for civil-society evidence-base building at the country level by inventorying Indonesian state AI procurement across the four-year window the original report identified as the critical period for governance scaffolding. The publication is referenced from the EngageMedia body's AI and human rights in Southeast Asia section, where the Jun-E Tan collaboration and the June 2023 PDF are the standing reference points the corpus carries on EngageMedia's regional AI-governance research output.