The Strengthening Human Rights and Peace Research and Education in ASEAN/SEA Programme or SHAPE SEA is funded by Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. This program envisioned a Southeast Asia where the culture and values of human rights, peace and democracy are instilled through widespread research and teaching in higher education. It was premised on the assumption that building regional cooperation on human rights and peace in higher education would contribute to the promotion and protection of human rights and sustainable peace for all peoples in Southeast Asia. We believe that the threats to human rights, whether in rising populism, shrinking civil society space, increased racism, or the impunity enjoyed by human rights violators, cannot be effectively addressed unless there is evidence-based knowledge and highly skilled network of experts (or champions) in the region.

The overarching objective was to contribute to the improvement of human rights and peace situation in Southeast Asia through applied research and education. The strategy of the programme was to directly involve and engage universities to play a more significant role in promoting human rights and peace by contributing research and by increasing the knowledge of human rights and peace by incorporating them into university education.

Activities implemented in Phase I  (2015-2019) included awarding grants for cutting edge and innovative research, capacity building for researchers through trainings of emerging scholars in ASEAN/SEA, and disseminating findings, recommendations, and knowledge from the research through public advocacy, publications, conferences and seminars. A large number of academics and other stakeholders have been involved in the process of implementation.

Shape-sea has indeed, in a number of ways through its activities, innovated the landscape of human rights promotion and peace building through research and education in the region. It has tapped a significant number of scholars to do studies on human rights and/or peace at the local, national and/or regional levels. Another endeavor are research projects initiated by programme. Themes such as Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, Human Rights and Peace Education, and Technologies and Human Rights were comprehensively tackled by both leading and emerging scholars based in the region. Furthermore, through its annual publication entitled, Human Rights in Southeast Asia Outlook, Southeast Asian scholars, for the first time, were given the opportunity to assess critical human rights and peace issues in all eleven Southeast Asian countries.

In summary, the following Programme Outputs were achieved:

• 58 research projects, ranging from support for MA and Ph.D theses to regional-level research, were supported and finished
• 204 university-based scholars from 10 countries were trained on human rights and peace research design and methodology
• 109 lecturers from 70 universities and two government institutions from 13 countries were trained on teaching human rights
• 1008 scholars, academics and members of civil society participated in national seminars and regional dialogues on various critical human rights and peace issues
• 6000+ joined the national seminars through live streaming
• The SHAPE-SEA website was created to host open source materials, including the Human Rights Textbook, the Human RIghts Outlook, Research Outputs- Academic Papers, Policy Briefs, among others.
• 12 books were published and made available as open source on the SHAPE-SEA website
• SHAPE-SEA published books have been downloaded 10,000+ number of times. In addition SHAPE-SEA has served as a platform for the SEAHRN series  which has been downloaded 14,000+ times.
• 17 policy briefs are published on the website
• Co-organized two (2) international conferences on Human Rights and Peace in Southeast Asia in 2016 in Bangkok and in 2018 in Manila, with the Southeast Asian Human Rights Studies Network (SEAHRN)
• 7 lecture tours were organized with academics from 10 universities.
• Conducted 7 high-level outreach at the ASEAN level to promote human rights and peace research and education
• We have supported the development/ refinement of new courses on human rights in partner universities. One of which, Human Rights in ASEAN, will now be offered yearly to the Master of Law students at Pannasastra University in Cambodia.

SHAPE-SEA has gained visibility and established credibility as a reliable, constructive and nurturing hub for Southeast Asian human rights and peace scholars, researchers and academics. The following are significant impacts achieved in the span of five years (2015-2019.

• Activities provided opportunities for network building among participants at various levels – from identifying possible joint activities, to collaborating on research projects, to uniting on specific issues across institutions, e.g., in formulating the Surabaya Principles of Academic Freedom.
• Most of the activities were a result of consultation with local stakeholders, i.e., activists, academics and students. The needs-based approach ensures that stakeholders are receiving information and expertise most useful to them.
• We were able to facilitate meaningful interaction among academics, scholars, governments and other civil society actors, like NGOs and the media, where they are encouraged to discuss and collaboratively identify solutions to specific human rights and peace issues.
• The Research Grants Programme enabled researchers to reach out to and report on the issues of marginalized and vulnerable communities that remain under-represented in the regional human rights and peace discourse and narrative.
• Through the research trainings, critical strands and rights-based tools for data collection and analysis were mainstreamed.
• Through the mentorship programme, the close collaboration with experts on human rights and/or peace helped build the capacity of researchers. It also allowed academic/scholars to network with one another through knowledge sharing, exchange of faculty members and strengthening institutional and individual capacities.
• Through the Human Rights in Southeast Asia Outlook and research projects, the state of human rights and peace in the region was documented, which can become an important tool to learn from the past in order to address recurring and prevent future violations.
• Through the work in Publications, there is now a quality body of work specific to human rights and peace in Southeast Asia written primarily by Southeast Asians. The Outlook, for example, is a commentary of the writers on the state of human rights in their home countries, providing the necessary credibility due to proximity and familiarity.
• The national seminars, in total, have welcomed 909 participants, with over 6000 participating remotely. As these seminars were conducted in the national languages, we are able to support [re]producing, [re]narrating and [re]nativizing human rights and peace in Southeast Asia in the most relevant way possible.
• The regional dialogues were purposively designed to highlight gender and gender equality issues in the region. They provided not only a forum for academics and CSOs to interact; but more importantly they were safe spaces given to reflect on our practices and for intergenerational interaction.
• The lecturer workshops have provided safe and constructive space for lecturers to share their experience and strategies in teaching human rights in increasingly restrictive contexts, and this likewise served as input in improving the training module.
• The public advocacy component is crucial to advocating for policy change for human rights and peace research and education in the region. While the academe remains a priority, small headway is being made in gathering tools of/ for advocacy.
• These efforts are supported by the high-level outreach to Southeast Asian governments to lobby for the institutionalization of a common university-level program/ courses on human rights and peace, with the development of key inputs including a curriculum, teaching manual, textbook and other reference material.

SHAPE-SEA’s theory of change is to be able to actualise one of the most effective and sustainable ways to move towards human rights and peace, which is through the promotion and strengthening of education and research. This is much elaborated in the graphic below:

SHAPE-SEA’s main role (and niche, particular contribution to change) is to serve as incubator and hub for the development of individual researchers and academics and their community, leading towards the building of a critical mass of academic-scholar advocates. This critical mass of academic-scholar advocates will be SHAPE-SEA’s main contribution to the improvement of human rights and peace situation in Southeast Asia, as they serve as the fulcrum for generating/effecting other changes and influencing arenas and other potential change agents like governments and corporations. SHAPE-SEA endeavors to develop academic-scholar advocates as individuals (as local agents of change in their countries and individual higher education institutions) as well as a community (developing collaborative advantage to leverage greater change).

The academic-scholar advocates are expected to be the main channels or avenues for replication and diffusion of cutting-edge research, thinking and practice of human rights and peace.  They are also expected to be champions to create enabling environments for human rights and peace research and teaching in their respective higher education institutions (i.e., as local activists).

SHAPE-SEA’s expectation is that effective work on the development of individual researchers and academics  and their community will translate into positive developments in (a) creation of collaboration networks of advocates beyond the academic circles, and (b) influencing human rights and peace language and public discourse, mediated especially by mainstream and alternative media. This also opens opportunities for academics and researchers to influence/inspire decisions on and implementation of public policy. It is then expected (or assumed) that other actors (frontline activists, social movements, and civil society organisations) will take learning from their collaborative work with academics into their own particular work of campaigning, advocacy, social movement building and activism vis-à-vis governments and corporate private sector entities in Southeast Asia to influence the latter’s policies, practices and behavioural changes.

Finally, the ultimate result that SHAPE-SEA expects to happen is durable and sustainable changes in the lives of at-risk population groups in the region.