Protests During the Pandemic in Asia: State vs. Society in Response to a Global Crisis

Amid a state of emergency, lockdowns, and various restrictive measures to stem the Covid-19 pandemic, it is commonly thought that the state and the ruling elites stood to benefit from “the rally around the flag” effects and an incumbency advantage. In contrast, protests and social movements were considered rare or exceptional, highly unlikely to bear fruits. This paper is intended to examine the contours of protests across Asia amid the pandemic, focusing on the State vs. Society dynamics under various regime types at different stages of the global pandemic between 2020 and 2023. The analysis begins with a critical reflection on the conventional theories of social movement which tend to consider the global-local nexus as subordinate to the structural-institutional factors that shape the opportunity structures. To base the analysis on observational evidence, we shall take advantage of the datasets including ACLED and OxCGRT that are pertinent to this inquiry. Through a systematic analysis of the (counter-)mobilization frames, the findings reveal not only how the global health crisis and the resultant restrictive measures were politically contested by state and civil society stakeholders, respectively, across Asia, but also the interplay of the global (pandemic) and the national/local (concerns) in a wide range of contexts.