Agung Wardana’s Turning Defenders into Defendants: The Use of Lawfare against Environmental Activists in Southeast Asia provides a powerful portrayal of the ways in which law has been used to stifle environmental activism in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. However, the book presents a much more nuanced picture than this description and the book’s title suggests. First, this is because Wardana’s interest is not just in “the nature of legal attacks on environmental defenders” and “the consequences of these attacks on environmental movements,” but also in “the responses of environmental defenders and movements” to these attacks (6). Second, it is because Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have – whether relatively for the region or in their own right – been sites of notable legal victories and innovations in environmental law. Third, and relatedly, the picture of lawfare is complicated by the fact that all three jurisdictions have, in recent decades, introduced reforms that ostensibly seek to prevent environmental defenders from being turned into defendants. That is, both Indonesia and the Philippines introduced more or less explicit legislative prohibitions against Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) – in both civil and criminal form – being brought against those involved in environmental activism, while Thailand has empowered public prosecutors and the Attorney General to identify and withhold criminal proceedings that they do not believe are in the public interest.

Ultimately, it is the final point above that appears to be the book’s starting point and motivation. In fact, the most clear framing of his research project, which emerges in the conclusion, sees Wardana explain the book as being “devote[d] … to understanding why those provisions aiming to protect environmental defenders have little effect on the ground” (208). The answer to this question, it seems, is that Anti-SLAPP protections in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines exist in tension with political economies that are fundamentally premised on resource extraction, albeit in different ways and to differing degrees. That resource extraction has, in turn, given rise not only to an ever-increasing number of environmental conflicts but also to the capture of political institutions by powerful domestic business elites who profit from that extraction. For its part, the judiciary in each country – despite providing environmental defenders with some notable wins in landmark rulings – has largely internalized the state’s “developmental” definition of “the public interest” (39). The result is Hegemonic Environmental Lawfare (HEL): a phenomenon wherein political and economic elites have used law to “discipline … environmental struggles and educate the public on the risk of not submitting to the status quo” (47).

All this may seem somewhat unsurprising, especially to those familiar with the countries – or the wider region – in question. However, this animating tension – between formal legal protection for environmental defenders and a political climate that is hostile to their cause – is made compelling by the dexterity with which it is conceptualized and studied. For this, Wardana looks to Transnational Environmental Law, an emerging sub-field which he describes as embodying “an approach to legal studies and practice” that relies on comparative, empirical, and interdisciplinary methods (7). Here, comparison is deployed to highlight transnational trends and similarities, rather than to explore differences. As a result, the reader is left with a clear sense of the remarkable similarities between the trajectories of environmental law and politics in three distinctly different legal contexts, albeit with the purported “cross-fertilisation” (119) – not to mention notable divergences – between them left under-explained. Meanwhile, empirical inquiry is primarily pursued through the consideration of 178 cases in which, between 2010 and 2022, 790 environmental defenders found themselves on trial. Drawing on court judgments, but also reporting from news outlets and NGOs, Wardana provides numerical breakdowns of the HEL phenomenon, as well as succinct descriptions of some richly illustrative examples. On top of this is layered data from semi-structured interviews.

After laying out the conceptual grounds in the Introduction, Wardana dedicates Chapter 1 to exploring them in more detail. This begins with some fundamental assumptions, drawn from political ecology, the Murdoch School and critical criminology, which exemplify the book’s interdisciplinarity. Applying these to environmental law, Wardana posits that “environmental governance,” which arose in the 1990s with a promise of managing environmental conflicts through institutions and procedural rights, has failed to “secure legitimacy and mobilise consent (hegemony)”; a failure that “has led increasingly to the use of authoritarian measures” (48). Hence, we are introduced to HEL, which is conceptualized using Commaroff and Commaroff’s taxonomy of lawfare – wherein the weaponization of law from above represents its “hegemonic” form (43). Next, leveraging work by Zanin, Martins, and Valim, HEL is described as having “three strategic dimensions: geographies, weaponry, and externalities” (53). Notably, weaponry refers to tools in civil, criminal, and administrative law that can be used in the battle against environmental activism, though Wardana himself acknowledges that the administrative aspect of this trinity appears relatively sparsely. Nonetheless, this conceptual framework forms a useful structure for the analysis in later chapters.

Chapter 2 then embarks on a well-researched expedition through the macropolitical histories of Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, identifying “critical junctures” in the political economy of each (63). Here, the reader is introduced to the important ways in which the direct experience of colonialization – or proximity to empire – shaped political, economic, and environmental trajectories of each nation, as well as to the varieties of authoritarianism experienced during the Cold War and the (increasingly flimsy) post-authoritarian settlements arrived at thereafter. Chapter 2, meanwhile, traces the strikingly parallel development of modern environmental law in each jurisdiction. While this includes an acknowledgement of key courtroom victories, Wardana is quick to caveat these by noting that they should not “automatically lead to an argument that the judiciary is a natural ally of environmental movements” (107). This neatly frames an analysis of the more recent Anti-SLAPP reforms. Here, in spite of his skepticism, Wardana provides real insight into variation in the form, overtness, and breadth of protection provided by these innovations, linking this thoughtfully to the constitutional bases upon which each was developed.

Chapters 4 and 5 form the empirical core of Turning Defenders into Defendants, as they explain the nature and effect of HEL. Chapter 4 relies heavily on the discussion of cases, artfully interweaving quantitative analysis of the statistical trends with qualitative description of specific cases, all through the framework of “geography” and “weaponry.” Hence, we learn that criminal prosecution accounts for 93.4%, 92.7%, and 83.8% of instances of Hegemonic Environmental Lawfare in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, respectively; and of striking cases, such as that of Budi Pego, the environmental activist sentenced to four years in prison after a banner with communist symbolism was raised at an anti-mining protest he had organized. Chapter 5 starts with a recognition that, as a weapon of lawfare, those criminal proceedings have also been much more effective than civil ones. However, its most significant contribution is the discussion of “subjectivity transformation,” in which Wardana details how HEL turns an individual activist into “a proxy of the environmental struggle in which he or she is involved,” in order for their public profile (and that of the wider movement) to be “reconstructed through a new set of identities characterised as deviant” (166).

Resistance to HEL is the focus of Chapter 6. As such, we learn that NGOs in Indonesia have sought to build on the (albeit limited) success that the aforementioned Anti-SLAPP provisions represent by working with institutions involved in their implementation. By contrast, faced with what appears to be a less favorable set of opportunity structures at the domestic level, activism in Thailand and the Philippines has shifted to the regional and international level. Rather than elaborating upon this divergence, however, Wardana moves on to a broader critique of rights, which he argues are inadequate as tools to counter HEL, and to the promise of “the ‘duty-turn’ in resistance studies” (178). This first appears as a theoretical proposition, wherein resistance is understood as “a duty in a society where the environment and people’s means of survival are continuously destroyed” (195). However, a subsequent examination of the relevant legal frameworks and court cases reveals that defenses of (even prima facie illegal) activism may find persuasive grounds either in an established individual or collective duty/obligation to the environment, or in an ecologically inflected claim of self-defense.

While it is clear that the advent of Anti-SLAPP law in Southeast Asia – and the question of its effectiveness – forms a central conceit of Turning Defenders into Defendants, it is equally clear that Wardana’s horizons are more expansive and his critique more fundamental. For Wardana, SLAPP is merely one iteration of the broader phenomenon of Hegemonic Environmental Lawfare; a phenomenon that will continue so long as “the political-economic structure from which the exercise of law to defend the status quo emerges from in the first place ramins intact” [emerges from] (191). This, of course, will be a familiar line of critique for law and society scholars. However, the nuanced and thoroughly researched application of this logic to the empirical realities of a pressing topic (environmental defense) in an under-researched but ecologically significant region (Southeast Asia) makes it an especially important contribution. As such, Turning Defenders into Defendants is a powerful corrective to the growing literature on SLAPP, which has focused primarily on jurisdictions in the Global North, but will also be of interest to those who study law and society, social movements, and the rule of law in the Global South.

At the same time, the move from an exposition of the inadequacy of Anti-SLAPP law to a critique of the rule of law is worth pondering. At first blush, the fact that Indonesia has achieved “the rate of dismissal… similar to that of Canada,” wherein “almost all civil lawsuits aimed at intimidating environmental defenders were rejected” (154–155), is itself quite impressive. However, Wardana’s acknowledgment of the effectiveness of Anti-SLAPP protections at preventing the use of civil law by private (read: corporate) actors to stifle environmental activism is somewhat understated, even begrudging. Of course, this skepticism is justified. As is well demonstrated by the numerical data, the use of criminal law for those same purposes is clearly both more common and more effective. One possible response would be to call for more independence, proactivity, and environmental consciousness on the part of those (judicial) institutions that are charged with checking the (ab)use of state power. In other words, a call for a “thicker” and greener rule of law. A more critical response, of course, would be that the rule of law itself is always-already bound-up with the logic of capitalist modernity, and therefore irredeemably predisposed to facilitating extraction and its consequent environmental harm. Yet, from that perspective, toward which Wardana seems to be inclined, the attribution of HEL to a “neoliberal rule of law”Footnote ¹ (209) seems to obfuscate the extent to which the phenomenon has been a well-documented feature of law dating back to the British enclosure movement, if not before.

Likewise, although Turning Defenders into Defendants provides a clear-eyed appraisal of Anti-SLAPP law in practice, it also prompts a range of questions that lend themselves to further socio-legal inquiry. To start, it is worth noting that the field is fast-changing, particularly in Indonesia. As recently as August 2025, for instance, a ruling by Indonesia’s Supreme Court clarified – and in effect broadened – the scope of Anti-SLAPP protections, raising the question of whether environmental defenders might now reap more tangible benefits from them. Meanwhile, that Supreme Court decision appears to be the result of sustained efforts to engage with the judiciary on the implementation of Anti-SLAPP protections. To the extent that this approach diverges from that adopted in Thailand and the Philippines, questions about the strategic decisions made by environmental movements – and the different contextual factors that influence those decisions – seem viable and important. More generally, Wardana’s approach, which focuses on the quantification and (admittedly rich) description of case law, means that certain questions remain unanswered. To what extent do environmental defenders know of and feel protected by Anti-SLAPP protections, for example, and does this differ from other activists who do not (at least theoretically) benefit from similar protections? Or, given the kleptocratic nature of political institutions in the region, how can we explain the emergence of Anti-SLAPP law in these jurisdictions (and not in others), and the emergence of protections specifically for environmental (but not other forms of) activism? Lastly, how would these admittedly partial, victories be narrated by those involved in securing them? The fact that this – far from exhaustive – series of questions emerge from Turning Defenders into Defendants is, in itself, a testament to how timely and thought-provoking a contribution it is.