Connective Spaces of Radical Hope rhizomatic Youth Struggles for Viable Futures in Southeast Asia

Many youth in Southeast Asia reject and actively resist their governments’ authoritarian and oligarchic politics that jeopardize their generation’s freedoms and future aspirations. The rise of massive youth protest movements in Indonesia (2019–2020), Thailand (2020–2021), and Myanmar (2021–2022) – and the remarkable innovation and similitude of their discourses of resistance and repertoires of action, indicate ecosystems of practice that transcend national and sectoral borders, articulating a shared generational aspiration and a common generational struggle for systemic change. Combining the concepts of ‘viability’ and ‘rhizome’, I argue that these ecosystems of practice materialize through rhizomatic processes of decentralized and interconnected action, in which activist youth ‘think across’ protest domains in order to ‘think against’ the systemic foundations of the regimes they resist. In doing so, they create connective spaces of radical hope, which allow them to ‘think out’ viable alternative futures, while defying despair in repressive conditions in which sustaining hope as such becomes a radical act. Hence, these spaces of radical hope attest to the viability of resistive ecosystems of practice itself.