Scaffolding sovereignty: How Southeast Asian states leveraged international organisations to contain a prison crisis without structural reform

How do Southeast Asian states leverage the capacity of international organisations to govern a crisis inside an institution they do not intend to reform? This first comparative study of international organisations inside Southeast Asian prison systems examines Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines during COVID-19. It draws on 154 policy documents and 37 elite interviews with prison administrators, health officials, human rights commissioners, and international organisation staff. Bringing policy capacity and crisis governance into a single frame, it develops the concept of delegated carceral capacity, whereby states leverage international organisations by borrowing analytical and operational competences while retaining political control over the scope of engagement. Borrowed capacity was assembled and contained through four mechanisms: crisis delegation, technical depoliticisation, accountability buffering, and institutional normalisation. Governments stabilised prison systems while leaving overcrowding, punitive drug criminalisation, and constraints on independent scrutiny untouched. This article breaks new ground on three fronts. First, it overturns the traditional view of policy non-change as inertia, showing it to be actively produced through substantial governing work. Second, it reconceptualises policy capacity as relational rather than state-held. Third, it exposes a sovereignty-preserving mode of engagement that existing measures cannot detect, hence establishing an agenda for crisis governance in closed institutions. Preprint (author’s original manuscript). Submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.