Many authoritarian rulers of Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, have managed to cling onto power for decades. They have done so by strategically designing their extractive political economic institutions to support their winning coalitions to extract rent from natural resources and other public resources. These strategies have resulted in adverse impacts on the local populations, provoking resistance from the weak grassroots communities and non-governmental organizations, commonly known as civil society organizations. Strategies of regime survival and dissensus: Strongmen versus weak men in Southeast Asia is the first attempt to analyse how these authoritarian rulers maintain their durability in office, and, in this context, explains why some movements of civil society organizations succeed while others fail to achieve their demands. It discusses the relationship between the state-society-business in the political survival context. The first comparative analysis of strategies of regime survival across Southeast Asia, this book also provides an in-depth insight into the various opposition movements, and the behaviour of antagonistic civic and political actors in the region.