The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary, Xi Jinping, announced the Global Security Initiative (GSI) on 21 April 2022 at the annual Boao Forum. The timing was noteworthy. It came only weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and China joined Russia in blaming the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the cause for Russia's aggression.

In the arc of Boao Forums throughout the Xi era, development has been the dominant theme. Xi's 2015 Boao speech was entitled “Towards a Community of Common Destiny and A New Future for Asia”. It was still a time of high hopes and few doubts within China about its rise, but then each subsequent year saw mounting problems that needed answers. In 2016, Donald Trump, who vowed to rectify trade and market access imbalances with China, won the US presidential election. In 2017, the Trump administration launched the US Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) initiative. The year 2018 saw the start of the Sino-US trade war and the consolidation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) between the United States, Australia, Japan and India. Xi was confident that he could win a trade war, and he invoked Mao's call for “self-reliance” to brush off worries about Beijing's continuing technological dependence on the United States. China's then foreign minister Wang Yi dismissed the Quad as something that would “dissipate like sea foam”. But by 2020, he would accuse the Quad of being a new “Asian NATO”.

In 2019, Xi skipped the Boao Forum. He began the year warning Taiwan that unification “must be and will be achieved”. Then the Sino-US trade war deepened; a million Hong Kong citizens marched to protest a criminal extradition law that would violate Hong Kong's Basic Law and China's one country–two systems commitment in the Sino-British Joint Declaration; and the Second Belt and Road Forum saw Chinese officials pledge to reform the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was ridden with concerns over debt sustainability, corruption, environmental impacts and local benefits. As growth slowed, Xi called for a “new Long March” to overcome “major challenges at home and abroad”.

Rodrigo Duterte was the first president to have hailed from Mindanao. Along with federalism, making peace with Moro Muslim separatists in the conflict-ridden south was among his priorities. He pledged to uphold the 2014 peace deal and to grant greater autonomy to the Bangsamoro.

While the goal of federalism slowly faded and was eventually abandoned, he has delivered on his promise of bringing peace and prosperity to Mindanao despite some setbacks and persistent challenges. The Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL), signed and passed in 2018, is regarded as Duterte's greatest legacy. This chapter examines the achievements of and challenges to Duterte's peace-building efforts in Mindanao and the prospects for sustainable peace after his presidency. The chapter is organized as follows: the first part provides a brief background of the Mindanao conflict and the events that led to the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM); the second and third sections examine the achievements of the BARMM during Duterte's tenure and the challenges to the established peace, respectively; and the final section discusses the developments under the new Marcos Jr. administration.

The Long Road to Peace

The Mindanao conflict was complex and multifaceted, involving ethno-religious, cultural, historical, political and ideological aspects. The often-cited cause of the conflict was the incompatible divide between the Muslims and the Christians, but the long-standing and unresolved socio-economic grievances of ethnic minority Moro Muslims, political repression and enduring patterns of inequality and injustice also contributed to its continuance. The origins of the Mindanao conflict date to as far back as the sixteenth century (when the native Muslims resisted Spanish colonialism), but most of the literature identifies the 1968 Jabidah Massacre as the spark that ignited the contemporary armed resistance. It triggered the reinvention of Moro identity and spurred the creation of the revolutionary Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in 1971, whose chief objective was to gain the independence of the Bangsamoro.

The conflict between the Philippine government and the Muslim insurgents intensified following the imposition of martial law by President Ferdinand Marcos in September 1972. The attempts by the government to disarm Muslim groups led to a full-fledged war between the Philippine military and the MNLF, resulting in an estimated 60,000 deaths and about 200,000 to 300,000 people displaced.

While there is no official poverty line in Singapore, the expansion of government support programmes for low-income individuals reflects an increasing poverty problem that has required government intervention. In 2007, Singapore introduced Workfare, with the Workfare Income Supplement (WIS) and the Work Support Programme (WSP) as anchor income-support programmes. WIS gives older lowwage workers an automatic earnings supplement, whereas WSP was a means-tested programme for low-income households. Both programmes have since greatly expanded. For WIS, the income ceiling and payout amounts have been periodically revised, and the age eligibility will be lowered from thirty-five to thirty in 2023. WSP has evolved into ComCare Short-to-Medium-Term Assistance, and in the last three years it had an average annual disbursement of S$25.8 million. This represented a twofold increase from when it was first introduced in 2007. These two workfare programmes are in addition to the existing welfare support through public assistance (now referred to as ComCare Long-term Assistance), and they operate alongside the Progressive Wage Model (PWM), which sets minimum wages by sectors corresponding with skill ladders. Evidently, from initially catering only to the most needy who cannot work, Singapore's welfare system now includes a range of support programmes for low-earning individuals and households.

The persistence of poverty is unsurprising given global economic trends of technological-biased development and globalization that have combined to compress the wages of lower-skilled workers. As a small, globalized economy with a lean welfare system, the issue of low wages is especially challenging. In earlier papers, I have estimated that Singapore's incidence of poverty and low wages are relatively high compared with OECD economies. Given the trends, made worse by COVID-19, support for low-income households will need to expand on account of income poverty alone.

However, the support will be inadequate to lift Singaporean households out of poverty if we do not also take into account three forms of non-income poverty, which this chapter will discuss. First, digital resources have become necessities in today's world of technology; thus, tackling digital poverty needs to become a priority. I will argue the case for universal digital access. Second, I will discuss attention poverty, which my colleagues and I have found is more adversely experienced by people in financial need and parents of young children.

The year 2022, dominated by intensifying fears of a global recession and armed conflict between major powers, was difficult enough for a healthy government to navigate, but the governing Thai coalition was nowhere near healthy. Generalturned– prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, who was initially greeted with a wave of enthusiasm after staging a bloodless coup in 2014 and was re-elected after the 2019 general election, had become immensely unpopular for a combination of reasons: his snappish public persona, his failures to implement meaningful reforms and bridge the political divide, his weak economic performance, and his favouritism of powerful family conglomerates. With the end of the four-year parliamentary term drawing near, infighting within the crowded eighteen-party coalition that Prayut led and inside the military grew more palpable. These developments, coupled with the controversy around Prayut's tenure, fuelled never-ending talk about a House dissolution, a snap election, and even a counter-coup.

In late August, Thailand's Constitutional Court suspended Prayut from office after opposition lawmakers filed a petition asking whether Prayut, who ascended to the premiership in 2014, had violated the eight-year constitutional term limit. The suspension only lasted five weeks. Prayut returned to take the helm in early October on the grounds that the eight-year term limit dictated by the current constitution came into force only in 2017, meaning that the countdown clock must start ticking from that point onwards. The final green light from the Constitutional Court, ruling in favour of the regime and granting Prayut roughly two more years of eligibility for the premiership, was more or less predictable. What was uncertain, however, was the extent of public opposition. Polls indicated that much of the Thai public wanted Prayut out right away, and this popular frustration threatened to spill over because of the court's seemingly biased ruling and the waves of anti-government protest in other countries.

The rocky governing coalition eventually managed to survive and host this year's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leader's Meeting in Bangkok on 18 and 19 November without popular domestic resistance.

The year 2022 marked the second year of Indonesia's economic recovery after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from the economic, health and social scourges of the pandemic, Indonesia also felt the effects of the war in Ukraine. As has been the case for many other countries, rising fuel and food prices brought into sharp focus the need to prioritize food security through both domestic measures and international diplomacy. Indeed, 2022 was the year for Indonesia, and President Joko Widodo (also known as Jokowi), to make its mark on the international stage with the hosting of the Group of Twenty (G20), where it could raise the issues of food security, environmental protection and economic growth. With the controversial passing of the new criminal code, however, Indonesia's successes will be tempered by questions about the quality of its democratic institutions as it moves into a heated campaigning season ahead of the 2024 elections.

Election Ferment and Jokowi's Legacy

Election ferment for the 2024 polls was on the rise in 2022. Several prominent figures indicated their interest in running in the presidential race, with some already securing major party endorsements. These include Jokowi's former rival and current defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the recent governor of Jakarta Anies Baswedan, and Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo. Popular vicepresidential candidates include minister of tourism and creative economy Sandiaga Uno, minister of state-owned enterprises (SOE) Erick Thohir, West Java governor Ridwan Kamil, Democrat Party chairman Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono (the eldest son of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono), and Speaker of the House of Representatives Puan Maharani (the daughter of Megawati Sukarnoputri, another former president and the current chair of the Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle [PDI-P]).

For the most part, Indonesian politics in 2022 was marked by expediency and flexibility over strict loyalties. With the popularity of Jokowi and of other political figures who have made their mark as capable technocratic managers, solid track records are likely to appeal to Indonesian voters. Jokowi's party, the PDI-P, was the only party in the 2019 elections that won the required twenty per cent of legislative seats to be allowed to unilaterally nominate a presidential ticket in 2024.

Any discussion on political Islam in Malaysia will necessarily centre around the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS). This is largely because of its Islamist and revivalist goals, which aim to incorporate Islam into every aspect of life, including politics, law and governance. In the 1980s and 1990s, PAS and its arch-rival, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), engaged in a fierce battle to out-Islamize one another. This also resulted in the party leaders labelling each other deviant (kafir-mengkafir). Today, the competition to out-Islamize one another seems to have waned, with both parties having recently entered into an alliance called Muafakat Nasional (MN). In the 1970s, both UMNO and PAS were part of the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition when the parties were united by the aim of national reconciliation. However, their partnership in MN was based on Malay- Muslim unity. Founded in September 2019, the MN lasted less than three years as the two parties contested against one another in the 15th General Election (GE15) held in November 2022. In this most recent election, PAS contested under the Perikatan Nasional (PN) banner and won the highest number of seats in its history, outnumbering even UMNO.

PAS has historically championed political Islam and the promotion of an Islamic state. In 1993, the party wanted to introduce the Syariah Criminal Code Bill II in Kelantan, and in 2002 the Syariah Criminal Offences (Hudud and Qisas) in Terengganu. In 2003, they published the Islamic State Document, which detailed the party's idea of an Islamic state governed by hudud laws. The president of the party, Abdul Hadi Awang, continues to advocate for an Islamic state in Malaysia, although the form may not be the same as what PAS proposed two decades ago.

However, recent developments in the Malay(sian) political scene suggest that PAS is no longer the only party championing political Islam; UMNO appears to be just as big a player as PAS. As long-standing historical rivals, UMNO has traditionally been viewed as the party that champions the protection of Malay supremacy and nationalism, while PAS has almost consistently advocated Islamism and conservative Islam.

Doing business in China is often associated with informal, “under- the-table” transactions, the vast majority of which constitute corruption by contemporary international standards. A reductive explanation for this phenomenon concentrates on the Chinese cultural concept of guanxi, translated as “relationships” or “connections”, that allegedly creates an inclination towards informality and exchange of favours and gifts. However, the reasons behind China's struggle with corruption are not cultural but institutional and relate to its economic model, weak commitment to the rule of law and opaque governing system. Instead of a traditional culture that breeds corruption, China has a political, economic and legal system that has for a long time encouraged and sustained a culture of corruption. This reality raises many concerns about business and ethical practices as well as the competition standards that the BRI promotes at a global scale.

These fears seem well- founded as China has been criticized for using bribes to advance the BRI on a few occasions. In 2018, Macau- based Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng, a businessman affiliated with the CCP, was found guilty of bribing UN officials to support Macau's bid to house the UN Office for South– South Cooperation. In 2019, Patrick Ho, the head of an NGO backed by the CEFC China Energy Company Limited, a Global Fortune 500 energy and finance conglomerate, was involved in multiple corruption scandals in Africa while promoting the BRI agenda. The CEFC founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, who developed important business and political links in the Czech Republic, has also been detained in China since 2018 on bribery charges. In many Chinese- financed projects, from Malaysia to North Macedonia, Sri Lanka to Uganda and Kenya, there have been accusations and evidence of corruption. These cases play into a widespread perception of the BRI as lacking transparency, consisting of shady deals that are poorly regulated and involve illicit transactions.

Although China's own struggles with corruption are well known, corruption in the BRI is ultimately a matter of regulatory and monitoring efficiency of the institutions involved in its development, Chinese and local. Host government capacity in this regard is an important variable in the success or failure of a project, shaping the local experience of the BRI (Song 2015: 33).

Many analysts have noted that the BRI is missing a map (Narins & Agnew 2020). This is puzzling because mapping is commonly used by the CCP to reshape geopolitical realities according to its nationalistic and stra-tegic priorities: depicting Taiwan as a province, laying claim to the entire South China Sea with the infamous “9 dash- line”, delineating China's Exclusive Economic Zone and claiming sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands are just the most recent examples of mapping as a way to define where China begins and ends. In addition, maps have been employed to graphically correct historical “mistakes” in China's borders with Vietnam, India and Russia, while today nationalistic circles refer to (ironically western) maps of the Qing dynasty as part of their nostalgia for a time when China ruled all under heaven. Given the systematic use of maps to imagine China in the world and vis- à- vis its neighbours, why is there not an official, definitive map of the BRI? The answer lies in the BRI's gradual evolution from a development initiative on China's periphery to its main global platform for economic relations and diplomacy.

The official narrative states that the BRI was initiated in September 2013, when Xi Jinping publicly promoted the creation of a “Silk Road Economic Belt” with central Asian nations while on an official visit in Astana, Kazakhstan. The following month, he made a similar announcement from Jakarta, calling for a twenty- first- century “Maritime Silk Road” of investment and trade. The Belt and Road appeared for the first time in an official party policy document in November 2013, where setting up new financial institutions and improving infrastructural connectivity with neighbouring countries are stated as aims of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road (Communist Party of China 2013). Its debut in the realm of policy documents was a modest one, given the BRI's subsequent development. The reference to what would evolve into the BRI was hidden at the end of point 26 of China's plans for deepening reform in a paragraph titled “Further opening up inland and border areas”.

Xi Jinping often talks about the “green” BRI as a part of his vision for China's ecological civilization, which was outlined in the 2019 BRI Belt and Road Forum. In the words of the person tasked with instrumentalizing this vision, it establishes “a green consensus with BRI participating countries, strengthens cooperation on global biodiversity conservation, and moves together towards the 2050 vision of ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ and pursues the goals of the UN's Agenda for Sustainable Development” (Xi 2019). Indeed, much of the discussion on “BRI 2.0” is centred around China's new commitments to sustainability (Ang 2019).

The BRI has so far created a small network of environmental initiatives: the BRI Green Development Coalition, the BRI Environmental Big Data Platform and the Green Silk Road Envoys Program that provides training for participating government officials. At the same time though, the BRI – a massive infrastructural initiative geared towards energy and transport sectors – is going to affect ecosystems from China to Chile. China's domestic environmental record is improving of late but only after decades of an outright war on nature in the pursuit of development (Watts 2010). This raises concerns about the capacity of various green “bolt- ons” to mitigate the sheer destructive power of rapid industrial development. The argument is convincing: if China failed to protect its own environment, why would Chinese companies be more environmentally minded elsewhere, especially in countries with weak regulatory systems (which abound on the Belt and Road)?

In some ways, this argument is unfair to China. Historically, economic development brought about environmental destruction, followed only later by the willingness and ability to repair some of the damage – a pattern known as the “environmental Kuznets curve” (named so after the more famous Kuznets curve correlating inequality and development). Following this line of reasoning, if the BRI brings about economic development in the “dirty” sectors of energy and transport, some envir-onmental degradation is expected and would have happened anyway. We could also add that China's development was partly facilitated by the displacement of polluting industries from more developed econ-omies, so it is not surprising that the West's dirty hand- me- downs are now being passed on to a new group of developers willing to trade the environment for industrial development.

Since the 1990s, researchers, commentators and politicians have been asking the question “What does China want?” What are China's ambitions and goals, given its dramatic ascendance as an economic superpower? And is its “peaceful rise” possible? (Segal 1999; Johnston 2003; Buzan 2010; Brown 2017). Following the collapse of the USSR, the first version of the “China Threat scenario” emerged among US conservative policy circles, but China's increasing openness after Tiananmen, culminating in its 2001 entry into the WTO, rendered it irrelevant until the end of the Hu- Wen era.

The 2010s, however, witnessed an increasing alarmism about the rapidly expanding presence of Chinese economic actors globally. When US anxiety focused mainly on the military and political rise of China, its seemingly capitalist economy had provided a much- needed tonic to calm the nerves. But now a more robust rearticulation of the China Threat idea stated that Chinese activities in the economic field also hide malicious intentions. Under this prism, the BRI is seen as the economic pillar of Xi Jinping's grand strategy to reshape the global balance of power to China's favour. The group supporting this view could not be more diverse, including voices from the left, centre, right and far- right of the political spectrum.

Is the BRI really a strategy, perhaps even a “grand” one? Can it reveal to us China's plans and intentions? We will confront this question by starting from the notion of “grand strategy” itself. The study of “grand strategy” can help analyze a country's intentions by taking a step back and getting a more holistic perspective on whether a unified picture exists or not, thereby linking together different pieces of the puzzle. However, the idea of a grand strategy can also act as a lens that distorts reality to provide justification for a certain policy preference. Think, for instance, about the Cold War era “domino theory”, which assumed that the USSR's grand strategy was to export revolution to different parts of the world and set up puppet regimes controlled by Moscow. This assumption distorted the nature of anticolonial struggles in places such as Vietnam and provided the rationale for the US military intervention.

A train of thought that presents China's global economic activities as an attempt at political domination has become commonplace over the last decade. Books, journal articles, policy reports and political speeches from around the world began to warn of China's new- found assertiveness. At the same time, Xi Jinping suddenly seemed eager to loudly proclaim his ambitions and emerge from the sidelines of global politics. Take the examples above, which suggest China used economic power as a way to acquire a political foothold in Greece (where even Xerxes failed, no less). What motives might the authors be suggesting? To what ends will this “political foothold” be used? Will China build a new Sinocentric world order? Will it push out the US and the West, one country at a time? Will it write the last chapter of its long revenge for the century of humiliation? This appealing argument has captured public imagination about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, the Initiative, sometimes called “OBOR” due to its Mandarin name yi dai yi lu 一带一路, literally “One Belt One Road”). However, there are four main problems with the logic behind this perception that prompted us to write this book at the end of the BRI's first decade.

The first issue is that this narrative is self- perpetuating and addictive. If we start off believing that Chinese activities are part of an imperialist plan to dominate the world, we can easily pile up evidence that this is happening simply by reframing all economic deals, loans, trade agreements and new infrastructure projects as shrewd moves on a global chessboard.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been defined as “a voluntary set of practices by which corporations establish criteria and goals beyond their primary aim of making a profit when planning and enacting their business strategies” (Taylor & Rioux 2018: 172). These practices usually refer to promoting environmental goals, human rights, fair labour standards and the interests of local communities (ibid.: 172– 3). In theory, CSR goals are integrated into the entire operation process and supply chain, from planning to execution and its aftermath. Codes of conduct, routine monitoring, audits and investigations in response to complaints are the main tools that companies have at their disposal. In practice, however, this reliance on voluntary self- regulation has proven to be inadequate and, as many cases of violations of human and labour rights have demonstrated, even large corporations with strong CSR mechanisms struggle to meet the goals they have set themselves.

At its core, CSR is about branding, creating a positive corporate image for consumers (ibid.: 178). When used exclusively as a public relations mechanism, it fuels justified cynicism. In such cases, the logic of profit maximization often drives the exploitation of workers and local communities, overriding any CSR goals. Negative externalities affecting communities and workers can be intentional (e.g., essential to profitability) or unintentional, resulting from inadequate oversight of the business operations, or both, when multiple levels of oversight are involved. Whatever the case, however, they may cause significant reputational and financial damage to individual corporations and projects.

In this chapter, we turn to the issue of the BRI's social responsibility by focusing on two dimensions, human rights and labour, for which the Initiative continues to attract considerable criticism. A key theme of this book is that the BRI is an extension of China's economically successful experience with development. But, as argued throughout, this is not just a “copy- paste” process in which China exports its practices, regulations and standards alongside its investments, what is referred to as a process of “Sinification”. Instead, we observe a complex dynamic of negotiation and adaptation in the local contexts of host states under the pressure of global capitalism, transnational institutions and local agendas.