The Ascians have not been doing much. All Emet did was give people with an inferiority complex a weapon and they ran with with. Emet says himself that his MO is to just give the people the tools to make their own chaos. He was very hands off. The Garlean people are the racist, counqoer race because of how they were treated and pushed from theri homes. They got a weapon that could compete with magic and then ran with it. The only other thing Emet did was say primals are bad.