It is a pretty good time to be a fan of Liverpool Football Club. Just last week, Liverpool beat Real Madrid by two goals to nil in the UEFA Champions League, a moment of some catharsis following years of defeat to the Spanish side that included two Champions League finals and a Champions League knockout stage. But even from a broader perspective, it has been pretty good for many years, since the appointment of manager/messiah Jurgen Klopp.
(At this point, let me point out that many challenges and difficulties still lie ahead for Liverpool. Those of you familiar with the Jinx Gods understand.)
Now when times are good, one very curious habit many fans have is to try and make the point that they are not so-called “glory hunters”. After all, people do not want to be seen as supporting a team that just happens to be winning. To avoid being seen as “glory hunters” or “front runners”, fans will claim that they “suffered” through the Liverpool years of Roy Hodgson and the wilderness years of the later Rafa Benitez era or the Roy Evans years. All fine except I would just point out, how much do we “suffer” when we happen to choose Liverpool and not a team like, say, Portsmouth is worth considering.
These fans are attempting to demonstrate that they have stuck with the team through (what they perceive to be) difficult moments and so they are real fans through and through. There is a term for this in anthropology which is “credibility enhancing displays” or “CREDs”. According to Harvard professor Joseph Henrich, CREDs are behaviours that are costly to ourselves, whereupon we suffer those costs because they provide a more honest signal of our beliefs than our words. Essentially, a CRED is the anthropological term for “actions speak louder than words”.
But it is particular kinds of actions. Specifically, they are actions that impose a cost on ourselves. We are willing to take that cost because we want to demonstrate coherence with beliefs we spout or things we say. For example, we may be taken more seriously as real football fans if we support the team through tougher times. Other examples include military leaders who fight alongside their troops on the frontlines in a dangerous mission that they believe in, or people who emphasise the importance of lifelong learning and actively pursue advanced degrees or additional certifications. Think about how seriously we would take Greta Thunberg if she flew around in private jets.
As we head into Malaysia’s Asean chairmanship in 2025, we believe that there is a terrific opportunity for the country to actually build significant credibility as a regional, if not global, geopolitical player. In 2024, we became an associate member of the BRICS community, and the prime minister recently travelled to South America to deepen relationships with countries in that part of the world. This South-South engagement, with Malaysia playing an active role, is something pretty promising for global relations, particularly given the global geopolitical tensions today.
But as anthropology would teach us, it is not enough to say that Malaysia will take the lead in forging deeper South-South relationships and that we will drive greater collaboration among Asean states. For our words to be taken seriously, we need some CREDs.
What would CREDs look like in the context of Malaysia as the chair of Asean? Consider the potential bid for accession by countries that have shown interest to join Asean — Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea and Bangladesh, to name a few. If unity through diversity is our anchoring belief, then perhaps Malaysia should support the accelerated admission of these countries as member states. Sure, Asean has been criticised for the inefficiencies of consensus decision-making as a principle for guiding interactions between member states, and the inclusion of more countries would surely lengthen the process of reconciling interests. But let’s be real, the rotating chairmanship and new agenda-setting each year in itself are so often cited as a hindrance to progress. Are we willing to pay the price of inefficiencies in exchange for opportunities to broker reconciliation among member states and extend the peace dividend?
Just as other countries made their bid to join Asean, so has Malaysia made its bid to join BRICS, gaining the status as an associate member in October 2024. Admission to the club and what we do with it must be done in consideration of the nation’s long-standing principle of non-alignment. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said joining BRICS will “… strengthen the Global South and offer economic opportunities free of external pressure”. Within BRICS, the Sino-Brazil alignment has strengthened over the years with China reducing its agricultural dependence on the US and welcoming staples such as soybeans, corn, wheat and sorghum from Brazil.
Malaysia may similarly face pressure to realign its trade priorities, potentially compromising existing relationships or incurring significant costs to reconfigure supply chains. Furthermore, identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in South-South supply chains may require Malaysia to invest heavily, particularly in areas where its existing comparative advantage — or that of Asean — is not immediately clear. These upfront investments, necessary for diversification and resilience of a different bloc, could strain national resources and delay tangible benefits from addressing immediate domestic concerns. Taking a step back, a really important test of our CRED would be — under a scenario in which BRICS emerges as a competitor to the G7 order, how can Malaysia maintain its resolve to ensure a unified Asean approach, ensuring collective interests, neutrality and a cohesive bloc?
Of course, we do not have to wait for a formal chair position to demonstrate our CREDs. Another geopolitical mega issue in which we find ourselves is that of semiconductor diplomacy. We know that major players like the US and China are trying to figure out how best to maintain the resilience of their semiconductor supply chains, and thus, Malaysia has already been a beneficiary of some reshoring and offshoring. But that is us as receiver. Of course we want people to come here; that is not really a CRED. What if we could also consider how we may pull in other countries from the Global South that have semiconductor aspirations of their own and use our relatively advanced position in the space to help develop those ecosystems in other countries, even as they may one day eat some of our lunch? What if our companies could be for other countries what the likes of Intel, AMD and Hitachi were for Malaysia?
Global posturing aside, Malaysia needs to remember the battles on its home front. Putting aside all the fancy acronyms and international alliances, Malaysia could also do with more CREDs at home. One grossly simplified but powerful CRED is decision-making transparency. We have heard of plenty of initiatives that have started with so-called baseline or stock take efforts to understand the status quo; many of these initiatives never venture beyond this stage as there is insufficient, dated data and an unwillingness to open up the books.
Given our mixed record, the aversion to increased scrutiny is understandable. But if we are unwilling to be transparent, there will be little avenue to have a comprehensive diagnosis of the root of the problems we are facing and we may lose a prime opportunity to earn CREDs. Governments can talk about governance and accountability all they want, but continue to take actions that fly in the face of that and the public cannot take the talk seriously.
Thus, much like being a sports fan (kind of), building geopolitical, economic and governance credibility requires us to take on some costs to ourselves. Simply saying we will do this and that but not actually following through at some expense to ourselves is like making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, but not actually doing anything about it. CREDs cannot just be about the vibes. Credibility, and therefore trust, cannot be earned overnight and merely through words.
This article was co-written with Carissa Livan Ding