Priyanjli Tanwar and Sagarika Srivastava

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates why religious traditions that appear similar across Southeast Asia generate strikingly different geopolitical outcomes. Existing constructivist scholarship establishes that religion is not a fixed cultural backdrop but a constructed variable shaped by identity and norms; what it has not done is specify the mechanism by which the same religious tradition produces opposite political effects within a single region, and at times within a single state. This paper addresses that gap by developing the concept of religion as a “strategic grammar”: a structured but contestable vocabulary of legitimacy, belonging and threat that political actors selectively activate, institutionalise and redeploy according to historical memory, regime interest and regional norms. Combining a comparative case-study design across Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore with an integrated theoretical apparatus drawing on Constructivism, Identity Theory, Securitization Theory, Political Theology and Historical Institutionalism, the paper shows how historically rooted religious narratives are filtered through domestic institutions, ASEAN’s non-interference norm, and economic interdependence to produce divergent patterns of exclusion, negotiated pluralism, and regulated coexistence. The central finding is that religion’s political effect is never read directly off doctrine; it is produced through the interaction of leadership choice, institutional capacity, and regional diplomatic structure.

Keywords: religion and International Relations; strategic grammar; Southeast Asia; ASEAN; securitization; political theology; Rohingya; Pancasila; regulated pluralism.

1. INTRODUCTION

Why do religions that appear similar produce such different geopolitical outcomes in Southeast Asia? In Myanmar, Buddhism has at times been mobilised to justify exclusion and violence against the Rohingya (Foxeus, 2023; Maulidan, 2025). In Indonesia, Islam has supported both pluralist and exclusionary politics, depending on which organisation and which historical moment is examined (Evans et al., 2023). In Singapore, religion is tightly managed by the state in the name of social harmony and economic competitiveness. These contrasts raise a deeper puzzle that existing scholarship has identified but not resolved: religion does not uniformly shape politics, nor does geopolitics determine religious behaviour in any straightforward, mechanical sense.

The precise gap this paper addresses can be stated directly. International Relations scholarship on religion has moved through three broad positions. Realist and modernisation accounts long treated religion as a residual variable, expected to recede as states secularised and integrated into global markets. Liberal-institutionalist accounts that followed gave religion more attention but typically treated it as one input among many alongside trade, institutions and regime type, without explaining why the same tradition is associated with violence in one state and reconciliation in another. Constructivist scholarship, associated with Wendt, Finnemore and Acharya (2004), corrected the first two positions by showing that religious identity is socially constructed rather than given and that international norms are localised rather than adopted wholesale. Yet even within constructivism, much of the Southeast Asian literature remains case-bound: Myanmar is analysed as an ethnic-conflict problem, Indonesia as a pluralism problem, and Singapore as a governance problem, with comparatively little work asking what mechanism connects these cases analytically.

The literature, in other words, has an explanatory gap rather than a descriptive one. It has established convincingly that religion matters and that its meaning is constructed, but it has not specified how a single religious tradition becomes available for opposite political projects, nor has it built a portable analytical vocabulary that travels between cases. This paper’s contribution is to close that gap by reconceptualising religion not as a fixed explanatory variable but as a strategic grammar: a structured set of categories, such as purity and danger, belonging and exclusion, sacred order and profane threat, that supplies the vocabulary through which political claims are made, without determining which claims will actually be made.

The grammar metaphor is deliberately precise. A grammar constrains what can be intelligibly said within a tradition while leaving open which sentences are actually spoken. This moves beyond existing constructivist work in three respects. First, it specifies activation conditions, namely historical grievance, leadership incentive, institutional capacity and regional permissiveness, under which a dormant religious narrative becomes politically operative, rather than simply asserting that religion is constructed. Second, it integrates Securitization Theory and Political Theology into the same analytical frame as Acharya’s norm localization, allowing the paper to explain both why a narrative becomes coded as an existential security threat and why it acquires the absolute, non-negotiable quality characteristic of sacred claims. Third, it relies on systematic cross-case comparison rather than parallel single-country narratives, demonstrating that the same grammar produces divergent outputs depending on who controls the institutions that convert religious narrative into law and policy.

The argument proceeds in five further parts. Section 2 compares competing scholarly positions critically, rather than only summarizing them, in order to justify the conceptual move to strategic grammar. Section 3 expands the constructivist core with four additional theoretical resources. Section 4 justifies the comparative case selection and methodology. Section 5 compares Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore systematically across shared analytical categories. Section 6 concludes with implications for International Relations theory, comparative politics and regional governance.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The scholarly discourse on religion and state behaviour in Southeast Asia conceptualises religion not merely as a private belief system but as a political lexicon through which states define belonging, legitimacy, security and international relations. This section does not simply summarize that literature; it places competing positions in direct comparison, in order to show precisely where consensus exists, where positions diverge, and where the divergence itself is analytically productive.

Where the Scholarship Converges

The first point of convergence is that religion functions as a structural political force rather than a decorative cultural variable. Alatas (2021) argues that culture drives state behaviour rather than merely accompanying it, a claim echoed across the corpus on Indianisation, Islamisation and Buddhist kingship. Studies of early Southeast Asian polities such as Srivijaya, Tarumanagara and the Khmer empire show that kingship, law and sacred order were historically inseparable, which gives the deepest historical foundation to the claim that religion structures politics rather than reflecting it (Church, 2009).

A second convergence is that history functions as an active resource for present-day state behaviour rather than inert background. Foxeus (2023) and Maulidan (2025) show that Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya cannot be explained without the longer history of Buddhist-nationalist identity construction. Bertrand (2024) extends this logic across the region by showing that sub-state and state nationalism consistently draws on inherited religious categories rather than inventing new ones.

A third convergence is that religious traditions are internally contested rather than monolithic. Indonesian Islamic organisations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah draw on the same broad tradition that more exclusivist actors invoke, yet arrive at pluralist and moderate political positions (Evans et al., 2023; Ridho & Sa’ad, 2024). Sidik and Dilawati’s (2025) systematic review of religious peacebuilding reaches a parallel conclusion: the same doctrinal resources that justify violence in one context fund reconciliation in another.

A fourth convergence is that external normative frameworks are localised rather than adopted intact. Gerstl (2012) and Chang and Jenne (2025) both show that ASEAN’s post-9/11 counterterrorism agenda was deliberately reframed through regional norms of sovereignty and consensus so that it would not appear as a war on Islam to Muslim-majority publics. This confirms Acharya’s broader claim that Southeast Asia’s relationship to external norms is one of adaptation rather than passive reception.

Where the Scholarship Disagrees and Contains Internal Inconsistencies

The first disagreement concerns whether civilisational influence should be read as diffusion or as localisation. One reading of the Indianisation literature stresses the spread of Indian religion, kingship and law into Southeast Asia. A second reading argues that Southeast Asian societies actively remade Indian influence according to indigenous cosmologies and power structures. These positions are not simply opposed; they disagree about where causal weight lies, and that disagreement has direct consequences for how contemporary religious politics should be explained, since the second view restores local political agency that the first view risks erasing.

A second disagreement concerns ASEAN’s non-interference norm. One strand, represented by Alatas (2021), treats non-interference as protective: it shields postcolonial states with fragile sovereignty from external domination. A second strand, evident in the literature on the Rohingya crisis (Kolås, 2025; Kamal, Kaiser & Mariano, 2024), shows that the same norm prevented regional actors from acting against mass atrocity. The disagreement is not resolved by choosing one reading over the other; both are empirically accurate descriptions of the same institutional rule operating under different political conditions.

A third disagreement concerns economic interdependence. Liberal peace arguments expect trade to restrain conflict because violence would be economically costly. Myanmar’s case complicates this: continued Chinese, Indian and Russian economic and strategic engagement did not restrain the state from violence against the Rohingya; if anything, those ties insulated the regime from external pressure (Jaknanihan, 2026; Pempel, 2022). The disagreement here is theoretical as much as empirical — it concerns whether interdependence is best modelled as a constraint on state behaviour or as a resource that strengthens the state’s bargaining position vis-à-vis external critics.

A fourth disagreement concerns where religious authority ultimately resides. Some accounts treat religion as a bottom-up societal force, generated by communities and religious leadership and only later absorbed by the state. Other accounts, evident in studies of Indonesia’s Pancasila framework and Singapore’s regulated pluralism, show the state actively organising and disciplining religious narrative rather than merely receiving it. Neo (2021) frames this as a question of regional variation in religious nationalism: the same societal pressure produces different outcomes depending on whether state institutions are strong enough to filter it.

Explaining the Divergence: Why Similar Traditions Produce Different Political Uses

The descriptive observation that scholars disagree is less interesting than the analytical question of why the underlying cases diverge despite sharing comparable religious material. Three institutional factors recur across the literature and explain most of the variation. The first is state capacity to monopolise the production of authoritative religious narrative. Singapore’s developmental state has the bureaucratic capacity to enforce a single, state-sanctioned account of acceptable religious expression; Myanmar’s military-dominated state has comparable coercive capacity but uses it to enforce exclusion rather than restraint; Indonesia’s more fragmented and federally negotiated state apparatus instead produces a continuously bargained pluralism, because no single institution holds a monopoly over religious meaning-making (Bertrand, 2024).

The second factor is the presence or absence of an organised moderate religious counter-elite. Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah constitute exactly such a counter-elite, with independent institutional bases, mass membership and theological authority that can compete with exclusionary actors for control of the same tradition (Evans et al., 2023). Myanmar’s Buddhist sangha, by contrast, has produced influential nationalist organisations such as Ma Ba Tha with comparatively weaker organised pluralist counterweights at the national level (Foxeus, 2023), which helps explain why the exclusionary strand of the tradition became dominant rather than merely available.

The third factor is the regional and economic environment within which domestic religious politics unfolds. ASEAN’s non-interference norm and continued economic engagement by major external powers function as permissive conditions: they do not cause exclusionary religious politics, but they remove a category of external cost that might otherwise discourage it. This is consistent with Historical Institutionalism’s claim, discussed further in Section 3, that timing and sequencing of institutional choices, such as ASEAN’s founding commitment to sovereignty, continue to constrain options long after the immediate strategic logic that produced them has changed.

Read together, the agreements and disagreements in the literature point toward a specific conclusion. Religion is not a fixed cause of conflict, peace or economic cooperation; it is a contested resource that leaders, institutions and societies mobilise selectively under varying political and institutional conditions. The literature’s internal contradictions are not weaknesses to be resolved away. They are evidence that the same religious material is read differently depending on who controls the institutions of interpretation, which is precisely the analytical space that the concept of strategic grammar is designed to occupy.

3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Understanding Southeast Asia’s geopolitical behaviour requires a lens that treats meaning, identity and interpretation as political forces in their own right, rather than as residue left over once material variables have been accounted for. This section builds that lens in five layers: a constructivist core, supplemented by Identity Theory, Securitization Theory, Political Theology and Historical Institutionalism. Each layer answers a question the others cannot answer alone, and together they justify the paper’s central concept of religion as strategic grammar.

3.1 Constructivism: The Foundational Layer

The study is grounded in the constructivist tradition of International Relations, developed through the foundational work of Alexander Wendt, Martha Finnemore and Amitav Acharya. Constructivism argues that state behaviour is not determined solely by material power, military capability or economic interest; it is shaped by ideas, identities, norms and socially constructed meanings. Unlike realism, which explains state behaviour through security and power calculations, or liberalism, which emphasises institutions and economic interdependence, constructivism opens analytical space to examine how historically embedded religious narratives shape the way states define themselves, identify threats, justify authority and respond to conflict.

From Acharya’s work specifically, this paper draws the concept of norm localisation: the proposition that external ideas, whether human rights, counterterrorism frameworks or models of religious pluralism, are filtered through local political cultures and institutions rather than adopted unchanged. Constructivism supplies the foundational claim that religion is constructed; it does not by itself specify when a constructed religious narrative becomes politically operative. The next four theoretical resources fill that gap.

3.2 Identity Theory: Explaining Belonging and Exclusion

Identity Theory, drawing on the social identity tradition associated with Henri Tajfel and John Turner, explains how group categorisation generates in-group favouritism and out-group exclusion as a near-automatic cognitive and social process, which political actors can then amplify for strategic purposes. Applied to Southeast Asia, this framework clarifies why religious categories so easily become categories of national belonging. Once Buddhist identity is fused with Burmese national identity, the Rohingya are not merely a religious minority; they become, in Identity Theory’s terms, an out-group whose presence threatens the coherence of the in-group’s self-definition (Kolås, 2025).

Identity Theory also explains why the same fusion of religion and nationhood does not automatically produce exclusion in every case. Indonesia’s Pancasila framework constructs national identity around a layered, multi-religious in-group rather than a single confessional one, which changes the boundary conditions under which religious minorities are categorised as threatening. Identity construction, in other words, is necessary but not sufficient for exclusion; it must combine with the institutional and leadership conditions discussed below.

3.3 Securitization Theory: Explaining How Narratives Become Threats

Securitization Theory, associated with Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and the Copenhagen School, argues that an issue becomes a security problem not because it poses an objective existential threat but because a securitising actor successfully frames it as one before an audience prepared to accept extraordinary measures in response. This framework explains a step that Identity Theory alone cannot: how an out-group categorisation is escalated from social distance into a justification for citizenship exclusion, surveillance or violence.

In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalist organisations including Ma Ba Tha performed precisely this securitising move, framing the Rohingya not merely as outsiders but as an existential demographic and civilisational danger to the Buddhist nation-state, a framing subsequently absorbed into citizenship law and security discourse (Foxeus, 2023). Securitization Theory also explains ASEAN’s post-9/11 counterterrorism politics: Muslim-majority member states worked to prevent counterterrorism from being securitised as a war on Islam, illustrating that securitising moves can be contested and resisted, not merely accepted (Gerstl, 2012; Chang & Jenne, 2025).

3.4 Political Theology: Explaining the Absolute Quality of Religious Claims

Political Theology, drawing on the tradition running from Carl Schmitt’s analysis of sovereignty through to contemporary scholars such as William Cavanaugh, examines how political concepts borrow their structure and their absolute, non-negotiable character from theological concepts. This layer explains something Securitization Theory leaves underspecified: why religiously framed threats are so resistant to negotiation or compromise once activated. A security threat framed in ordinary strategic terms can in principle be bargained away; a threat framed in the vocabulary of sacred order and civilisational danger is harder to negotiate, because compromise can itself be experienced as a betrayal of sacred obligation.

This explains the durability of Myanmar’s exclusionary politics despite sustained international criticism, and it explains why Thailand’s monarchy-centred Buddhist legitimacy makes the southern Muslim-majority insurgency so resistant to purely administrative solutions (Jerryson, 2009; McCargo, 2009). It also explains, in the Indonesian case, why pluralist religious leadership frames coexistence itself in sacred terms, such as the Islamic concept of rahmah or compassion, which gives moderation a comparable theological weight to exclusion rather than treating it as a merely secular compromise.

3.5 Historical Institutionalism: Explaining Why the Past Constrains the Present

Historical Institutionalism, associated with scholars such as Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen, argues that institutions created at one historical moment, often in response to a specific problem, persist and constrain choices long after the original conditions that justified them have changed. This concept of path dependence explains why colonial-era citizenship categories continue to structure Rohingya statelessness decades after independence, and why ASEAN’s founding commitment to non-interference, designed in the 1960s to prevent intra-bloc conflict during the Cold War, continues to limit collective action against intra-state atrocity even though the original strategic rationale has receded.

Historical Institutionalism also clarifies why reform is so difficult once an exclusionary religious-legal order is institutionalised: each subsequent policy decision is made within, and constrained by, the categories established earlier, producing what the literature terms increasing returns to existing institutional arrangements. This is the theoretical bridge between the paper’s historical-memory argument in the discussion section and its claim that religion’s political effects are mediated by institutions rather than expressed directly.

3.6 The Integrated Framework: Religion as Strategic Grammar

Combining these five layers produces the paper’s central analytical move. Constructivism establishes that religious narrative is constructed rather than fixed. Identity Theory explains how that narrative generates categories of belonging and exclusion. Securitization Theory explains how an exclusionary identity claim is escalated into a justification for extraordinary state action. Political Theology explains why, once escalated, such claims acquire an absolute quality that resists ordinary political bargaining. Historical Institutionalism explains why the resulting arrangements persist long after their originating conditions change. Religion as strategic grammar names the combined product of these five mechanisms: a structured vocabulary, available to all actors within a tradition, whose political deployment depends on identity construction, securitising leadership, theological framing and institutional path dependence operating together rather than in isolation.

4. METHODOLOGY

4.1 Research Design

This paper uses a structured, focused comparison of three cases: Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore. Structured, focused comparison, as a method, asks the same set of theoretically derived questions of each case, in order to isolate which conditions explain variation in outcomes while holding the broader regional and religious context constant. This design suits a question about variation in outcomes across similar conditions better than either a single in-depth case study, which cannot establish comparative variation, or a large-N statistical design, which cannot capture the qualitative, interpretive mechanisms central to the strategic grammar argument.

4.2 Case Selection Criteria and Justification

Cases were selected purposively rather than randomly, on the basis of three explicit criteria designed to maximise analytical leverage.

• Shared regional and historical context: all three states are situated within mainland or maritime Southeast Asia, share exposure to comparable waves of Indianisation, Islamisation and colonial disruption, and are members of ASEAN, which holds the regional institutional environment constant across cases.
• Variation on the dependent variable: the three cases display markedly different outcomes along the same underlying dimension of state management of religiously defined belonging, ranging from exclusionary citizenship politics in Myanmar, through negotiated pluralism in Indonesia, to regulated and state-disciplined pluralism in Singapore. This is a deliberate most-different-outcomes design intended to expose the institutional and leadership mechanisms that produce divergence.
• Data availability and triangulation potential: each case has a substantial body of peer-reviewed scholarship, official and intergovernmental reporting, and documented policy material, which allows claims to be checked against more than one type of source rather than relying on a single account.

This is consistent with John Stuart Mill’s method of difference as adapted in comparative politics: cases that share most background conditions but differ on the outcome of interest allow the analyst to isolate which remaining factors, here institutional capacity, the presence of a moderate religious counter-elite, and the regional permissiveness created by ASEAN norms and economic interdependence, account for the divergence.

4.3 Analytical Framework Applied to the Cases

Each case is analysed against the same five-part theoretical sequence developed in Section 3: how religious identity is constructed in relation to national belonging; whether and how a securitising move has been attempted; whether the resulting claim has acquired a politically theological, non-negotiable quality; what institutional path-dependent constraints shape available state responses; and what role ASEAN’s non-interference norm and economic interdependence play in either constraining or enabling the outcome. This shared sequence is what allows the discussion section to move beyond country narratives to systematic comparison.

Table 1. Operationalisation of the Strategic Grammar Framework

Analytical dimension	Question asked of each case	Evidence used in analysis
Identity construction	How is religious identity connected to national belonging, citizenship and the definition of the political community?	Citizenship narratives, Pancasila, Buddhist-nationalist discourse, state pluralism frameworks and scholarly case studies.
Securitising move	Is a religious or ethnic community framed as an existential threat that justifies extraordinary state action?	Ma Ba Tha discourse, Rohingya crisis literature, ASEAN counterterrorism debates and comparative security scholarship.
Political-theological framing	Does the claim acquire a sacred, absolute or non-negotiable quality that makes compromise politically difficult?	Evidence on Buddhist kingship, sacred order, Rohingya exclusion, Islamic moderation and pluralist theological counter-framing.
Institutional path dependence	Which inherited institutions convert religious narratives into durable legal or policy outcomes?	Colonial-era citizenship categories, post-independence constitutional settlements, Pancasila and Singapore’s developmental-state regulatory model.
Regional and economic permissiveness	How do ASEAN non-interference and economic interdependence enable, constrain or insulate domestic religious politics?	ASEAN norms, external economic engagement, security partnerships, investment ties and literature on liberal peace limitations.

4.4 Data Sources and Limitations

The analysis draws on peer-reviewed journal literature (including Foxeus, 2023; Neo, 2021; Bertrand, 2024; Gerstl, 2012; Chang & Jenne, 2025), policy-oriented and intergovernmental reporting on the Rohingya crisis (Kolås, 2025; Kamal, Kaiser & Mariano, 2024), and comparative historical scholarship on Southeast Asian state formation (Church, 2009; Hack, 2012). This is a qualitative, document-based design rather than one built on original fieldwork or elite interviews, and that is its principal limitation: as the conclusion argues, the paper’s reliance on secondary literature and elite-level sources leaves the lived religious experience of ordinary citizens, particularly in less-studied cases such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Timor-Leste, comparatively underexamined. This limitation is acknowledged rather than concealed, and it defines the agenda for future field-based research set out in the conclusion.

5. DISCUSSION

5.1 Religion as Strategic Grammar and Selective Activation

Religion does not directly cause conflict or peace in Southeast Asia. It functions as a strategic grammar: a politically accessible language through which states and non-state actors establish legitimacy, shape belonging, identify threats and ground moral order. Its political impact depends entirely on which actors control the elements of that grammar, through which institutions, and for what political goal.

In Myanmar, state actors and allied Buddhist nationalist groups invoked Theravada Buddhist ideas of purity and civilisational danger to portray the Rohingya as religiously unsuitable for inclusion in the national community (Foxeus, 2023). Violence gained political legitimacy not because Buddhism inherently fosters exclusion, but because exclusionary elements were selectively emphasised and then embedded into citizenship law and security discourse, illustrating the Securitization mechanism described in Section 3.3.

Indonesia shows the reverse activation of the same broad religious civilisation. Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah have drawn on Islamic tradition to build an inclusive national identity, emphasise pluralism, and support international mediation (Evans et al., 2023; Ridho & Sa’ad, 2024). Singapore introduces a third variation, in which the state itself writes the grammar rather than allowing societal actors to determine it, framing religion as politically acceptable only when it supports social harmony, economic competitiveness and national order.

Collectively, these three cases show that religion gains political influence not merely because of its doctrinal content but because of how it is selected, amplified and institutionalised. The grammar is present in every tradition; the determining variable is who holds the institutional power to write sentences in it.

5.2 Historical Memory as a Living Political Force

Southeast Asian states do not simply store the past as inherited memory; they use it as statecraft. Colonial trauma, civilisational memory, Islamisation, Indianisation and Buddhist kingship continue to define how states organise authority, respond to minorities and negotiate external pressure. Scholarship has tended to fragment these processes by country, treating Myanmar as an ethnic-conflict case and Indonesia as a pluralism case; read together, however, they reveal a regional pattern in which history becomes policy once it is converted into identity, law and a state’s narrative of self-creation (Bertrand, 2024).

This is most visible in Myanmar. The Rohingya crisis is rooted in a longer Buddhist-majoritarian imagination of the nation, sharpened by colonial and postcolonial anxieties about territorial unity, through which the Rohingya are written outside the remembered past of the Burmese Buddhist national community (Kolås, 2025). Once a community is placed outside a state’s remembered past, exclusion can be presented as self-defence rather than persecution.

Indonesia’s plural memory of negotiated Islamisation was institutionalised through Pancasila, which preserves religious symbolism in public life while preventing the imposition of a single religious identity on the political sphere. Thailand adds Buddhist kingship to the comparison: the monarchy’s legitimacy derives from older concepts of moral order and Buddhist guardianship, which helps explain why the Muslim-majority southern insurgency is persistently framed as a civilisational rather than purely administrative problem (Jerryson, 2009; McCargo, 2009). Across these cases, the logic is the same even where the outcome differs: historical memory gains political currency to the extent that states choose, institutionalise and defend it as national truth.

5.3 The Localisation of External Norms

External norms in Southeast Asia rarely enter unchanged; their political meaning emerges only once they are translated into local identities, institutions and religious logics. The historical Indianisation of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia illustrates this: Indic ideas of sacred kingship and cosmological order shaped polities such as Srivijaya and the Khmer empire, but only after local rulers selected, adapted and combined them with indigenous cosmologies (Church, 2009).

A parallel pattern appears in ASEAN’s response to the post-9/11 counterterrorism agenda. Rather than adopting Western security frameworks intact, Indonesia and Malaysia reframed cooperation through ASEAN’s familiar principles of sovereignty, non-interference and religious moderation, presenting counterterrorism as a defence of regional stability rather than hostility toward Islam (Gerstl, 2012; Chang & Jenne, 2025). Localisation in this sense is neither passive borrowing nor outright resistance; it is the selective reshaping of external ideas so that they become usable within existing political and religious orders.

5.4 ASEAN’s Non-Interference as a Double-Edged Norm

ASEAN’s non-interference principle has long been a pillar of regional stability, allowing diverse governments to coexist without external intervention in internal matters, and giving postcolonial states room to build national identity on the basis of sovereign equality. The same principle carries a structural silence: ASEAN’s institutional design provides no mechanism for collective response when a member state commits atrocities against its own population. Non-interference therefore functions simultaneously as a stabilising norm and a mechanism of impunity (Alatas, 2021).

The Rohingya crisis is the clearest illustration. A religiously constructed conception of national sovereignty underpinned Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya; Theravada Buddhist nationalist discourse, strengthened by movements such as Ma Ba Tha, framed the Rohingya as an existential danger to a Buddhist nation-state (Kamal, Kaiser & Mariano, 2024). By treating citizenship, territorial belonging and religious identity as interdependent, the Burmese state rendered the Rohingya not only stateless but, in the vocabulary of Political Theology, ontologically incompatible with the sovereign body.

International norms encounter heightened resistance once sovereignty itself is framed through religious nationalism. ASEAN member states, many with their own ethno-religious fault lines, had institutional incentives to preserve the non-interference barrier rather than weaken it. Regime survival was consistently prioritised over human security, understood as the protection of persons rather than states; ASEAN’s silence on the Rohingya was not a procedural failure but the predictable outcome of a system designed to protect regimes first.

5.5 Economic Interdependence and the Limits of Liberal Peace

Liberal peace theory, associated with Adam Smith and David Ricardo and operationalised through institutions such as ASEAN, expects trade and economic integration to make conflict economically irrational and thereby to promote stability and peaceful coexistence. The experiences of Myanmar and Singapore show the limits of this expectation: economic interdependence alone does not guarantee peace without a strong underlying social contract (Jaknanihan, 2026; Pempel, 2022).

Myanmar maintained substantial economic and strategic relations with China, India and Russia throughout the period of its military-dominated politics, yet remained mired in authoritarianism and ethnic violence. Since the 1962 coup, political power has remained concentrated in the military, and the partial democratic opening under Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy did not dislodge that institutional dominance. The 2017 displacement of nearly 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh occurred without disrupting continued Chinese infrastructure investment, Russian military supply, or Indian strategic cooperation, demonstrating that geopolitical and economic interest can override humanitarian considerations (Kamal, Kaiser & Mariano, 2024).

Hobbes’s emphasis on sovereignty and order as preconditions for stability is instructive here: Myanmar’s military justified authoritarian rule in the name of national unity, but in the absence of an inclusive social contract, sovereignty functioned as coercion rather than legitimate order. Singapore, by contrast, represents a comparatively more successful adaptation of economic interdependence, building a governance model influenced by Lockean ideas of legitimacy and the rule of law, anchored institutionally in vehicles such as Temasek Holdings. Even so, Singapore’s record of rising inequality and constrained political freedoms shows that economic interdependence reduces certain categories of conflict without, by itself, producing the inclusive social contract that durable peace requires.

5.6 State Management of Religious Pluralism

Across Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore, the state does not simply mirror religious diversity; it actively organises how religious identities are permitted to exist in public life. The three cases display distinct governing logics: exclusionary management in Myanmar, negotiated pluralism in Indonesia, and regulated pluralism in Singapore.

In Myanmar, religion functions as a boundary of belonging rather than a shared civic resource; Buddhism is closely tied to nationalism while Muslim minorities face legal exclusion and surveillance, a pattern of state-backed sorting of communities into insiders and outsiders rather than a passive reflection of social prejudice. Indonesia offers a negotiated model: the state recognises several official religions and invokes Pancasila to hold diversity together, while continuing to intervene in ways that both protect and constrain particular groups, producing a pluralism that is unstable but functional (Neo, 2021).

Singapore represents the most institutionalised form of control. The state permits religious diversity while tightly regulating its public expression through law, monitoring and norms of restraint, channelling religion toward state-defined coexistence rather than open contestation. Taken together, the three cases support the broader claim that modern states do not merely accommodate religion; they organise it. Myanmar uses religion to rank citizenship, Indonesia uses it to bargain for coexistence, and Singapore uses it to discipline difference.

5.7 Why the Contradictions in the Literature Strengthen the Argument

Classical political theory often treated religion as a declining factor in a globalising, secularising world; contemporary Southeast Asian politics demonstrates that its influence remains profound, and the literature’s apparent inconsistency on this point is itself informative. Some scholars emphasise religion as a foundation for transnational cooperation and soft-power diplomacy. Cambodia’s post-war reconciliation offers a documented example: following the Khmer Rouge period, the Buddhist monk Maha Ghosananda initiated the Dhammayietra peace walks from 1992 onward, grounded in the principles of ahimsa and metta, which contributed to disarmament and grassroots reconciliation (Sidik & Dilawati, 2025).

Other scholarship documents religion as a catalyst of systemic tension, particularly when religious doctrine is strategically aligned with specific political agendas; the events of 11 September 2001 sharpened global academic attention on this dimension and reopened the question of whether religion is part of the solution to political violence or part of its cause. The two readings are not contradictory once it is recognised that every state possesses a distinct history, political structure and socio-economic situation, such that the same religion is interpreted and presented differently depending on context.

Religion in Southeast Asia therefore cannot be reduced to a binary of peace or conflict. Its influence shifts according to specific temporal and spatial contexts, continually reshaped by history, contemporary circumstance and political dynamics. It is precisely this combination of convergence and contradiction that justifies treating religion as a strategic grammar rather than as a fixed independent variable.

5.8 Policy Relevance

Religious narratives shape law, social norms and political mobilisation in ways that matter for inclusion, equity and stability, yet policymakers often default to viewing religion narrowly through the lens of security and extremism. This narrow lens misses how everyday religious discourse shapes legal and political outcomes well before any security threshold is crossed. The priority task for policy is to identify which narratives are being activated, who is amplifying them, which institutions carry them, and what political ends they serve.

Mapping matters first: narratives travel through places of worship, educational institutions, media and social networks, and different actors mobilise them for different ends, from building electoral majorities to securing legal privileges. Timing matters second: interventions before exclusionary narratives harden into law are markedly less costly than remedies attempted after violence has escalated, and can include dialogue with faith leaders, support for inclusive theological interpretation, and regulatory safeguards against hate speech that do not suppress legitimate religious expression.

Policy design should, third, remain rights-based, protecting freedom of religion alongside minority rights and non-discrimination, with legal tools addressing institutional capture where state bodies privilege one religious narrative over others. Monitoring matters fourth: regularly tracking shifts in public discourse and mapping the networks that spread exclusionary narratives provides early warning. Policy must, in short, treat religion as a dynamic political force rather than only a security threat.

5.9 Systematic Cross-Case Comparison

The preceding themes are organised by topic; this subsection compares the three cases directly against the shared analytical sequence developed in Section 4.3, in order to make the theoretical implications explicit rather than implicit in parallel country narratives.

Table 2. Systematic Cross-Case Comparison of Religion as Strategic Grammar

Analytical Dimension	Myanmar	Indonesia	Singapore
Identity construction	Buddhism fused with national selfhood; Rohingya cast as out-group	Pancasila constructs a layered, multi-religious national in-group	National identity built around developmental order rather than a single faith
Securitising move	Successful: Rohingya framed as existential demographic threat	Largely resisted by Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah counter-framing	Pre-empted by the state, which forecloses securitisation through regulation
Political-theological quality	High: exclusion framed as civilisational necessity	Contested: coexistence itself framed in sacred terms by moderate actors	Low: religion subordinated to developmental and legal logic
Institutional path dependence	Colonial-era citizenship categories persist; military institutional dominance	Pancasila compromise institutionalised at independence continues to structure bargaining	Developmental-state model institutionalised since the 1960s constrains religious expression
Regional/economic permissiveness	ASEAN non-interference and external economic ties insulate the regime	ASEAN membership stabilises but does not directly drive domestic pluralism	Economic competitiveness justifies tight domestic regulation of religion
Resulting outcome	Exclusionary management	Negotiated pluralism	Regulated pluralism

Three implications follow from this comparison. First, for International Relations theory, the cases confirm that religious identity construction is necessary but not sufficient to explain outcomes; the same fused religious-national identity produces different outcomes depending on whether a securitising move succeeds, which is itself contingent on the presence of an organised counter-elite. Second, for comparative politics, the comparison shows that institutional path dependence explains the durability of each outcome better than the content of doctrine itself: each state’s current religious settlement is substantially inherited from choices made at or before independence. Third, for regional governance, the comparison shows that ASEAN’s non-interference norm and economic interdependence are best modelled as permissive conditions rather than causes; they do not generate exclusion, pluralism or regulation, but they remove a category of external cost that might otherwise alter the domestic calculation in each case.

6. CONCLUSION

Scholars and policymakers have long treated religion as either humanity’s eternal saviour or its irredeemable curse. The Southeast Asian evidence exposes this binary as a dangerous simplification. Religion is not a fixed force of destiny but a malleable instrument wielded by those who understand and control its grammar; the same sacred texts that inspire peace can be made to justify violence, and the same historical memories that unite communities can be weaponised to divide them. This is not a flaw in religion as such; it is, as Section 3 argued, a predictable feature of the interaction between identity construction, securitisation, political theology and institutional path dependence.

Read through this lens, the central empirical claims of the paper are mutually reinforcing rather than merely additive. Religious leaders and state actors do not stumble into conflict or cooperation accidentally; they compose narratives of meaning, selectively activating particular grievances and framing contemporary struggles in sacred language, as the Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore comparison demonstrates (Foxeus, 2023; Evans et al., 2023; Neo, 2021). The decisive analytical question is therefore not whether religion causes peace or conflict, but who controls the narrative within a given institutional setting, and which institutional conditions allow that control to be contested.

This research also challenges the assumption, common in liberal international theory, that economic interdependence renders conflict obsolete. The Myanmar case shows that trade and investment can flow across borders thick with historical animosity, and that commerce itself can become contested terrain rather than a neutral pacifying force (Jaknanihan, 2026). Equally, ASEAN’s non-interference principle, often celebrated as enlightened diplomatic restraint, is better understood as a sovereignty compact: an agreement allowing member states to consolidate control over their own religious narratives while remaining strategically indifferent to crises in neighbouring states (Kolås, 2025; Kamal, Kaiser & Mariano, 2024).

A significant limitation of this research, acknowledged directly in Section 4.4, is its reliance on secondary literature and elite-level sources, which creates an epistemic gap around the lived experience of communities at the intersection of faith and precarity. In the Philippines, where Moro identity politics intertwine with colonial memory; in Vietnam, where underground Buddhism negotiates state secularism; and in Timor-Leste, where syncretic faith reshapes post-conflict identity, the populations whose beliefs are analytically central to this debate remain comparatively unheard in the literature this paper has reviewed (University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, 2013).

Policymakers can no longer treat religion as a residual or purely security-coded variable. Engaging with religious narrative requires recognising that existing analytical frameworks may themselves be obstacles rather than tools, and it requires centring the voices of those excluded from elite policymaking circles as essential sources of evidence rather than as illustrative colour. This paper does not close the research agenda; it opens one. The most important scholarship on religion and Southeast Asian geopolitics will emerge once researchers combine the comparative, institutional analysis developed here with sustained field engagement with lived religious belief in all its contradiction and ambiguity. The question is no longer whether religion shapes geopolitics, but whether scholars and policymakers are prepared to understand the mechanism in time to respond to it as something other than alarm. 

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