Enacting the Security Community: ASEAN's Never-ending Story 9781503632035

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Enacting the Security Community

Studies in Asian Security s e r i e s e dit ors Amitav Acharya, Chief Editor American University

Alastair Iain Johnston Harvard University

David Leheny, Chief Editor Waseda University

Randall Schweller The Ohio State University

inte r nat ional bo a r d Rajesh M. Basrur Nanyang Technological University

Brian L. Job University of British Columbia

Barry Buzan London School of Economics

Miles Kahler American University

Victor D. Cha Georgetown University

Peter J. Katzenstein Cornell University

Thomas J. Christensen Columbia University

Khong Yuen Foong National University of Singapore

Chu Yun-han Academia Sinica

Byung-Kook Kim Korea University

Rosemary Foot University of Oxford

Michael Mastanduno Dartmouth College

Aaron L. Friedberg Princeton University

Mike Mochizuki The George Washington University

Sumit Ganguly Indiana University, Bloomington

Katherine H. S. Moon Wellesley College

Avery Goldstein University of Pennsylvania Michael J. Green Georgetown University

Qin Yaqing China Foreign Affairs University Christian Reus-Smit University of Queensland Varun Sahni Jawaharlal Nehru University

Stephan M. Haggard University of California, San Diego

Etel Solingen University of California, Irvine

G. John Ikenberry Princeton University

Rizal Sukma CSIS, Jakarta

Takashi Inoguchi Chuo University

Wu Xinbo Fudan University

Enacting the Security Community ASEAN’s Never-ending Story

Stéphanie Martel

stanford university press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2022 by Stéphanie Martel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martel, Stéphanie (Professor of political science), author. Title: Enacting the security community : ASEAN’s never-ending story /   Stéphanie Martel. Other titles: Studies in Asian security. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. |   Series: Studies in Asian security | Includes bibliographical references   and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022004024 (print) | lccn 2022004025 (ebook) |   isbn 9781503631106 (cloth) | isbn 9781503632035 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: asean. | Security, International—Southeast Asia. |   Southeast Asia—Foreign relations. | Southeast Asia—Politics and   government—1945Classification: lcc jz6009.s644 m37 2022 (print) | lcc jz6009.S644   (ebook) | ddc 355/.033059 — dc23/eng/20220213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004024 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004025 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover photos: “Blue Hue,” (top) emdot | Flickr; “yummy paper goodness,” (bottom) Chrysti Hydek, Flickr. Both images used under CC BY-NC 2.0 Creative Commons License. Typeset by Newgen in BemboAR 10/13.5

To Esther

Contents

Figures Acknowledgments Acronyms and Abbreviations 1 A Cautionary Tale: Discourse in the Making of a Security Community

ix xi xv 1

Part One 2 “It’s Alive!”: Security Community–Building as Practice

27

3 Ghosts of the Past, Present, and Future: ASEAN’s Approach to Regional Security

50

Part Two 4 The Bogeymen Are Coming: From Transnational Crime to “Non-traditional Security”

81

5 Here There Be Dragons: Managing Interstate Conflict in the Asia-Pacific Region

108

6 Sirens Are Calling: The “People-Centered” Security Community

137

7 To Hell and Back: ASEAN’s Continuing Odyssey

164

Appendix: List of Interviews Notes References Index

179 183 193 213

Figures

1. Map of Southeast Asia

2

2. The ASEAN-centric regional security architecture

77

3. “Missing the Target” by Cartoonist ZACH

82

4. “The ASEAN Community by 2015,” captures of promotional video by the ASEAN Secretariat

96

5. ASEAN and the big powers, by KhunPhol ขุนพล

109

6. “South China Sea Troubles” by Paresh

134

7. “Charity Begins at Home – My Home!” by Harn Lay

138

Acknowledgments

It took a village to get here. First and foremost, this book would have never seen the light of day were it not for the people who kindly and generously made time to chat with me and agreed to have their voices reproduced here. I am indebted to faculty, peers, and friends in the Department of Political Science during my time at the Université de Montréal, who have shaped the scholar I became. In the early stages of this project, Dominique Caouette offered so much more than his role required by making me a member of his barkada. JeanPhilippe Thérien also provided invaluable guidance and extensive feedback. So did Frédéric Mérand, director of the Montreal Center for International Studies, which extended financial support that proved instrumental. I am thankful to the Centre d’études de l’Asie de l’Est for being my institutional home during those years. On a more personal note, I am forever grateful to Anne-Laure Mahé and Camille Dagenais for their friendship, among other friends and colleagues from the UdeM community I do not have room to name here. My gratitude also extends to those who have shaped this project through their guidance and scholarship in those years and beyond. Vincent Pouliot at McGill University allowed me early on to find my theoretical home and, later, provided advice on how to turn this project into a book during a fellowship at the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies. At the Institute of Asian Research (University of British Columbia), Paul Evans generously welcomed me into his home in Vancouver, kept watch, and shared feedback and experience drawing from his extensive knowledge of Asia-Pacific regional affairs, which he has continued to impart since. I have also benefited tremendously from the kindness

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Acknowledgments

and mentorship of Brian Job during and since my stay at UBC, as well as David Welch. Both have followed the progression of this project closely until the very end, including by participating in a book workshop generously funded and coordinated by the Canadian Defence and Security Network. In this context, Steve Saideman, Stéfanie von Hlatky, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Srdjan Vucetic, Veronica Kitchen, and Jennifer Mustapha also provided extensive comments on an earlier draft that greatly improved the book, as well as guidance on the publication process. In addition, Jennifer, and also Aarie Glas, contributed moral support as well as theoretical and practical insights during our weekly writing sessions. This book further benefited from the insights of See Seng Tan, Richard Stubbs, and two anonymous reviewers. I am also indebted to the many wonderful scholars whom I had the pleasure to cross paths with and who provided feedback on pieces of this project at various stages: Alice Ba, Charlotte Epstein, Laura Shepherd, Brent Steele, Lene Hansen, Don Emmerson, Pierre Lizée, Shaun Narine, Sorpong Peou, Evelyn Goh, and Niklas Bremberg, among others. Any mistakes and omissions remain of course my own. I could not have found a better home for this book than Stanford University Press and its Studies in Asian Security series. I am fortunate that as series co-­ editors, Amitav Acharya and David Leheny saw potential in this project early on and set the revision process on the right track. At the press, I wish to thank Caroline McKusick, whom I interacted with most directly, as well as Alan Harvey. The swiftness with which they handled the final steps as well as their guidance, flexibility, and professionalism were highly appreciated. I am immensely thankful to those who provided logistical and other forms of support during field research. Many of them sent me into productive paths I did not know to take at first, allowed an outsider in their spaces, and shared their expertise and contacts. Marc Batac, “Yuyun” Wahyuningrum, and Lina Alexandra deserve special mention in this regard. So do Pranee Thiparat, Carolina Hernandez, and the late Aileen Baviera, whose generous mentorship well exceeded what was expected. I also wish to thank the research assistants who contributed to this project by transcribing interviews (Leilani, Ramon, and Biel), and most recently by helping with empirical updates and compiling feedback, among other tasks (Emma Fingler). Thanks to Sum, Dej, Mike, Oad, Nick, Kat, Janus, Ivy, Sascha, and Gilbert who offered friendship during my time in Southeast Asia, always making sure I was working with a full stomach. Thanks also to the BIPA 1 dengan Dette crowd for their camaraderie in Jakarta. I am grateful for the support and affiliations provided through research fellowships by the Department of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University,

Acknowledgments

xiii

IRASEC, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies ( Jakarta), and the Asian Center at the University of the Philippines-Diliman during fieldwork, and most recently by the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada. The research on which this book is based would not have been possible without funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec (Société et Culture), and the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations. The Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, where I currently work, also contributed funding, course releases, flexibility in my teaching schedule and a community of experienced colleagues full of great advice, all of which played an important role in bringing the manuscript to completion. The village’s boundaries, of course, extend well beyond the academic community. I am grateful to my friends for listening just long enough and for reminding me that there was, in fact, a life outside the Ivory Tower: Cécile M., Simon, Julien, Mathilde, J.P., Louis, Cécile P., Patrick, Mike, Julie, Marie-Josée, MarieLaurence, Claire, among others. My wonderful godsons, Léon and Laurel, were probably more effective than anyone in this regard. Family members (my grandmother Gertrude and late grandfather Hervé, my aunt Sylvie, and most importantly my mother, Paule) also contributed to the war effort through money, sustenance, much-needed encouragement, relentless optimism, and, perhaps most surprisingly, genuine interest in what I do. I am most grateful to Adrien, who had to share his wife for the last decade with a very strange nebula that he now knows like the back of his hand, but will also be happy to bid farewell to. He followed me to the ends of the world and back, helping me fight many invisible chimeras, and assuming various roles in the journey: watchman, sounding board, cheerleader, sponsor, life coach, cook, graphic designer, copy-editor . . . his love and patience mean more than words can express. Finally, I dedicate this book to the little one who just landed. She has been on my mind and close to my heart through it all, giving me just what I needed to bring this book into the world. Stéphanie Martel Kingston, Canada September 25, 2021

Acronyms and Abbreviations

ACSC ACWC

ASEAN Civil Society Conference ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children ADMM ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting ADMM-Plus ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus AEC ASEAN Economic Community AHA ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance AICHR ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights AIPR ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation AMM ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting AMMTC ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime AMOSC Asia Maritime Organization for Security and Cooperation APA ASEAN People’s Assembly APC Asia-Pacific Community APF ASEAN People’s Forum APSC ASEAN Political and Security Community ARF ASEAN Regional Forum ASC ASEAN Security Community ASCC ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN-ISIS ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies ASEAN-PMC ASEAN post-ministerial conferences

xvi

CICA CIRSS CLMV CoC CSCAP CSCE CSIS CSO DoC EAC EAS EEZ EPG EU FOIP GONGO GPPAC HADR HRWG IID IR ISIS LGBTIQ MOFA NADI NATO NGO NTS OSCE PLA PRC Quad R2P ROC RSIS SAPA

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies (Foreign Service Institute, Philippines) Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam Code of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Council for Security Cooperation in Europe Centre for Strategic and International Studies civil society organization Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea East Asia Community East Asia Summit Exclusive Economic Zone Eminent Persons’ Group European Union Free and Open Indo-Pacific government-organized non-governmental organization Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict humanitarian assistance and disaster relief Human Rights Working Group Initiatives for International Dialogue International Relations Institute of Strategic and International Studies lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or queer Ministry of Foreign Affairs Track II Network of ASEAN Defence and Security Institutions North Atlantic Treaty Organization non-governmental organization non-traditional security Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe People’s Liberation Army People’s Republic of China Quadrilateral Dialogue responsibility to protect Republic of China (Taiwan) S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Solidarity for Asian Peoples’ Advocacy

Acronyms and Abbreviations

SEANWFZ TAC TIP UN UNCLOS WEAVE ZOPFAN

Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons–Free Zone Treaty of Amity and Cooperation trafficking in persons United Nations United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Weaving Women’s Rights in ASEAN Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality

xvii

Enacting the Security Community

1

A Cautionary Tale Discourse in the Making of a Security Community

on december 31, 2015, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations1 formally announced the establishment of the ASEAN Community (ASEAN 2015f ). This declaration was made despite the organization’s inability, by its own admission, to meet its self-defined criteria for claiming this status. Indeed, the actual fulfillment of the grouping’s professed goals, which include its transformation into a genuine “security community,” was pushed back to yet another target spelled out in its Vision 2025. In this programmatic document, ASEAN admits that communitybuilding is an “ongoing process,” the next step of which is to “elevate” regional cooperation “to an even higher plane” (ASEAN 2016). And yet, ASEAN has also referred to itself as a security community on numerous occasions since the turn of the twenty-first century (ASEAN 2003; 2009; 2015c; 2015f ). A former ASEAN secretary general, the late Rodolfo Severino, even argued that “in a very real sense, ASEAN is already a security community” (Severino in C. Jones 2015, 4). Five years after the community was formally declared by its champions as both a tangible reality and a work in progress, in August 2020, ASEAN held a consultation on “the narrative of ASEAN identity.” This consultation, chaired by the current secretary general, Dato Lim Jock Hoi, was premised upon the recognition that while the institution was indeed transforming into a community, it still needed to “develop a sense of ‘we-ness’” (ASEAN 2020a). This characteristic, it so happens, is a central feature of security communities as defined in scholarly literature (see Deutsch et al. 1957; Acharya 2014). In ASEAN’s own words, this goal ought to be supported by “providing a narrative that addresses fundamental

2

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figure 1.  Map of Southeast Asia. Source: The World Factbook.

questions such as ‘Who are we? What do we stand for? and What does ASEAN mean?’” (ASEAN 2020a). This book starts at a very similar place. At first glance, that ASEAN could declare itself a “security community” without having provided compelling answers to these questions, while also recognizing that it is not actually one (yet?), is a blatant example of a gap between rhetoric and implementation. This gap, it is often suggested, is especially salient in the case of ASEAN. Yet it is also common in multilateral institutions where the pursuit of security is concerned. Beyond the surface, it also alludes to another, less obvious,

A Cautionary Tale

3

but equally important aspect of security governance and community-building: the central role discourse plays in the social construction of security, collective identity formation, and the conduct of world politics in practice. By acknowledging the necessity for ASEAN to produce a compelling self-­ narrative, practitioners themselves now explicitly recognize the power of discourse in bringing the security community into existence. The phrase “security community” is itself firmly tied to how ASEAN envisions itself and what it must become. Yet the recognition that discourse is not “just talk,” “mere rhetoric,” or “divorced from practice” but instead holds explanatory power in and of itself, and not just as a transparent conduit for other factors, is remarkably absent from most accounts of ASEAN’s journey. This book’s foremost concern, therefore, is to better understand the effects of discourse on security community–building.

Puzzle ASEAN’s tendency to prioritize buzzwords, showboating declarations, and empty slogans over concrete results despite conducting more than a thousand meetings a year is well known and often criticized. For its detractors, while ASEAN shares limitations that are common to multilateralism across various contexts, no other international/regional institution is more deserving of the label “talk shop.” The grouping’s bid to transform into a security community is often offered as a case in point. Indeed, the end point of this initiative remains especially elusive and ambiguous today. The ambiguity of ASEAN’s status as a security community, however, has not prevented scholars and practitioners of Asia-Pacific international relations to consistently suggest that such a community is, in fact, in the making.2 ASEAN is not only still described by some as “the most successful regional organization in the Global South” (Stubbs 2019, 941–942) but remains a favorite example of a “nascent” security community beyond the West (Adler 2008, 206). At the same time, it departs significantly from how this concept is understood in International Relations (IR), that is, as a group of states that have renounced the use of force as a legitimate means of dispute settlement and among which exist dependable expectations of peaceful change (Deutsch et al. 1957; Adler and Barnett 1998a). From renewed tensions in the South China Sea to the Rohingya crisis, among other issues, ASEAN is also widely seen by both its critics and its supporters as ineffective in the face of pressing security challenges. ASEAN’s impotence also leads to much frustration for many of its partners as well as non-state actors involved in Asia-Pacific regionalism. These concerns add to a familiar and fairly consensual cautionary tale about the organization since at least the turn of the twenty-first

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century, if not its very inception. If ASEAN is not able to walk the proverbial talk and offer practical solutions to regional insecurity, this warning goes, it will inevitably become obsolete and be sidelined, if not unravel entirely. In fact, “ASEAN’s irrelevance or even death has been predicted several times before” (Acharya 2009b, 265). Its longevity could certainly not be surmised at the birth of the organization in 1967. After a series of failed attempts at regional cooperation, many predicted that ASEAN “would probably not survive its infancy” (T. Koh 2011, ix, in Stubbs 2020, 604). Since then, ASEAN’s future has also been consistently put into question, as its ongoing difficulty to manage a never-­ ending list of crises and other “litmus tests”3 dealt additional blows to its credibility. And yet, grim prognoses about the grouping’s fate have still not materialized, as ASEAN recently commemorated its golden jubilee in 2017. Of course, doubt continues to proliferate over ASEAN’s capacity to meet the myriad of challenges it currently faces, and for good reason. Multilateral institutions, regional or otherwise, from every corner of the international system are currently under severe strain. These include some with far more resources than an organization that is certainly “no NATO” (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002) and is still commonly—if unfairly—portrayed as a poor parent of European integration (Rüland 2017).4 Some of these challenges result from specific events and developments: Brexit, military coups in Mali and Myanmar, the trade war between China and the United States, and the rise of illiberal leaders in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland are just some examples among many. These crises only exacerbate long-standing and ongoing concerns over the ability of multilateralism to keep “making the world hang together” (Ruggie 1998), to provide solutions to “wicked problems” like pandemics and climate change, and to continue to offer key opportunities to “mediate estrangement” (Der Derian 1987) in international society. ASEAN, in this sense at least, is not as unique as is often suggested. Despite its many flaws, ASEAN does more than merely carrying on. Not unlike other multilateral institutions facing similar charges, it continues to defy its skeptics through the steady extension of its security agenda as well as the continuous commitment of its member states and external partners. The latter category includes all current and (re)emerging major powers— China, the United States, Russia, and India. It also extends to many other secondary players—Japan, Australia, Canada, South Korea, the European Union, and New Zealand—aspiring to position themselves favorably in an “Indo-Pacific” order that is bound to become increasingly central to the conduct of world politics. Given the intensification of strategic competition between the United States and China, which plays out first and foremost in the Asia-Pacific region although its impacts are global, the significance of ASEAN as the institutional focal point of this regional order in

A Cautionary Tale

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transition is hard to deny.5 The grouping indeed remains at the core of broader multilateral, regional, and security governance processes that have become stable, albeit contested, features of world politics. As such, it carries hope for a better future for the region at least as consistently as it disappoints. In this context, the idea that ASEAN is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for regional peace has proven remarkably persistent, even as a causal link between the existence of the organization and the absence of war among its member states might very well be impossible to establish (Emmerson 2005). The realization of a security community with ASEAN as its locus is widely recognized as an imperfect but laudable quest that anyone involved in regional affairs should strive to improve. As frustrating as it can be to deal with such a “weak” (Stubbs 2014) regional institution, at least according to Western-centric standards, doing without ASEAN seems increasingly hard. The organization continues to escape forecasts of its impending doom and proposals for alternatives—whether in the form of an “Asian NATO” (Heydarian 2021) or something else. It does so despite not having reinvented itself (Tay, Estanislao, and Soesastro 2001) to the extent and in the way many, including its champions, have deemed necessary for it to prevent its decline. Further, the fact that so much criticism is waged at ASEAN for not being able to resolve the latest wave of major power tensions or the current crisis in Myanmar is a testament to the high expectations that even its most adamant detractors keep placing on it. Most tend to agree that, notwithstanding its limitations, the more ASEAN does, the better for regional peace and security. For these reasons, how ASEAN endures against less than favorable odds is, in and of itself, a crucial question of world politics (Stubbs 2019, 924). The importance of this question, however, is severely underestimated in a discipline that, in theory and as praxis, still struggles when it comes to “worlding beyond the West” (Tickner and Wæver 2009; see also Shilliam 2015; Acharya and Buzan 2019). This inquiry into ASEAN, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific region also serves as a stepping-stone for engaging broader questions that are currently taking on new salience. Multilateral governance, which increasingly takes place on a regional basis, is diversifying at the same time as it faces significant challenge and opposition. In the context of rising concerns about renewed great power rivalry, the transformation of global order, the crisis of multilateralism and, as a result, the unprecedented pressure exercised on security community–building institutions in every corner of the world, asking how these institutions work in practice (Bially Mattern 2001) remains as relevant as ever. This book seizes this moment to shed new light on the following: What does it mean to form a security community? How is such a community brought into

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existence, in the Global South and beyond? What effects does the diversification of security governance have on this process today? How do security community– building institutions that, like ASEAN, seem to be eternally in crisis, with no clear end point in sight, not only survive repeated foretelling of their demise but adapt in the face of changing circumstances, even as they consistently fail to bring about dependable expectations (Deutsch et al. 1957; Adler and Barnett 1998a) of peace and security? While these concerns are especially relevant for “nascent” security communities, they can also shape how we approach “mature” ones like NATO and the European Union (EU). Further, some of these questions have long shaped the study of not only security communities, but multilateralism and regional governance more generally. Others arise from new developments that already attract sustained attention in these fields of study, such as shifts in the distribution of global power, the proliferation of transnational and multidimensional problems of governance on top of more traditional challenges, and the rise of new interpretations of the rules of international society. In this context, scholars have noted a need to move past state-centrism, an exclusive concern with formal processes, and a tendency to center Western experiences as the basis for a “false universalism” (De Lombaerde et al. 2010, 748). Many also share the view that more attention needs to be paid to how institutions, actors, and regions not only interact but overlap (Breslin, Higgot, and Rosamond 2002; De Lombaerde et al. 2010; Börzel and Risse 2016; Börzel 2016; Söderbaum 2016; Acharya 2016a; Telò 2017). This realization is a key driver behind the surge of interest in comparative regionalism (e.g., Börzel and Risse 2016; Shaw, Grant and Cornelissen 2011; Telò 2017) in recent years, including scholarship that features ASEAN among others as case studies (e.g., Loewen and Zorob 2018; Coe 2019; Jetschke et al. 2021; Glas, forthcoming). Similar impulses also characterize ongoing discussions about the future of multilateralism and security governance that this book participates in. This interest extends to assessing the implications of the development of a postWestphalian (Hettne and Söderbaum 2006) or post-hegemonic global order (Telò 2017) that appears increasingly fragmented and complex (Acharya 2016b). In this context, regional institutions, particularly those in the Global South, are seen as playing a growing role in the fostering of peace and security (Glas and Zarnett 2020). This book tackles these important questions from an innovative angle, by shedding new light on the productive power of discourse in security ­community– building. It shows that discourse plays a central role in bringing the security ­community into existence, whether it is already recognized as established or, like ASEAN, remains aspirational. While it does not engage per se in the kind of

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“truly comparative” (Börzel and Risse 2016, 5) analysis that many scholars of regionalism have been calling for in recent years, the book speaks to similar concerns. ASEAN is treated here as an especially “relevant laboratory,” borrowing from Telò’s (2017, 2) description of the European Union, to yield insights into the multilayered, multidimensional, and contested character of multilateralism, regionalism, and security governance in the twenty-first century.6 I argue specifically that ASEAN can be conceived as a community of discourse, (re)produced through a never-ending debate between competing, potentially incompatible versions of its security community. More generally, security community–­building, and especially in the twenty-first century, is a deeply polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested process. First, security community–building is informed by distinct interpretations of (1) what the pursuit of security means for a given community and (2) where the boundaries of the community lie, thus making it inherently polysemic. In other words, the security community holds different meanings for social agents involved in its (re)production, with significant effects on the institution that purports to embody it. The book shows how these positions come together in various, relatively self-coherent “epic stories” that states, but also non-state actors, mobilize to enact the security community in ways that are not easily reconciled. These stories feature various kinds of “monsters” that the security community in the making must vanquish in order to be fully realized. Second, this process is omnidirectional, because these distinct interpretations set the security community in the making on equally distinct “heroic” quests, which are pursued not just sequentially, but simultaneously. Third, social agents draw from these competing interpretations to challenge the views of their counterparts as they all work to bring the security community into existence, thus making this process deeply contested. Once combined, polysemy, omnidirectionality, and contestation help make sense of why security community–building often, and surely in the case of ASEAN, appears as if it is never-ending. In the following sections, I situate the value of a discourse-based approach as the basis for providing a new explanation for ASEAN’s resilience as a regional security institution, distinct from rationalist but also “mainstream” constructivist approaches. I then discuss key components of my framework (unpacked in further detail in the next chapter) before turning to methodological considerations.

Theory ASEAN’s resilience remains a paradox for most approaches in International Relations. Indeed, as Ba (2009, 2 –3) suggests, the preconditions typically put forward

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to explain the development and maintenance of international cooperation—be it common threat perceptions, the leadership of a hegemon, democracy, or shared interests and preferences—“have mostly been weak or missing,” and at the very least inconsistent, in the context of ASEAN (see also Glas, forthcoming, 12 –18). This state of affairs continues to inform long-standing7 scholarly discussions on ASEAN’s significance and status as a security community. It also reinforces what was already a familiar view at the turn of the twenty-first century (Emmerson 1987; Alagappa 1991; Acharya 1992; Leifer 1992; Wiseman 1992; Ganesan 1994; Simon 1998): that ASEAN may well be on its way toward a fully fledged security community but is at best a nascent one, and not immune from unraveling (see also Acharya 2014). Scholars continue to disagree on whether the concept of security community is really the best one available to describe ASEAN’s journey. At the same time, it is also undeniable that the mere suggestion that ASEAN is such a thing is imbued with a kind of discursive power that far exceeds that of other concepts used to describe the organization, such as “security regime.” There is symbolism attached to the security community that sees not only practitioners, but also scholars, invested in its realization— or alternatively in the debunking of the “myth” that ASEAN is indeed what it claims to be—to a degree that is simply unmatched. This state of affairs makes what could at first glance appear to the reader as yet another, perhaps even unnecessary, inquiry into ASEAN’s security community– building enterprise all the more pertinent. It is especially warranted from a discursive angle, given how observers of world politics are increasingly encouraged, and in fact convinced, to finally acknowledge the power of good storytelling (Steele 2008; Krebs 2015; Subotic´ 2016; Levinger and Roselle 2017; Hagström and Gustafsson 2019). Yet ongoing discussions about ASEAN as a security community in the making remain overwhelmingly focused on attempting to pinpoint its objective status as a security institution, and assess whether it meets criteria elaborated on the basis of Western experience. A similar tendency informs the study of security ­community–building across the Global South, including in Latin America, Africa, or elsewhere in Asia (Hurrell 1998; Ngoma 2003; Lanteigne 2006, among others). The conclusion of such an exercise is almost invariably that the institution, entity, or relationship under study in one region or another still lacks the requirements for being described as a genuine security community like the European Union or NATO. There are many explanations out there for why ASEAN may not work better, or why it is not (yet?) a security community in the “real” sense of the term. However, as Alice Ba also suggests, dominant (realist and liberal) approaches in

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International Relations do not have much to say on why it would work at all (Ba 2009, 2). To address this gap, many scholars have moved away from an exclusive emphasis on material factors and have convincingly demonstrated the crucial role played by ideas, norms, and socialization in ASEAN’s development throughout the Cold War ( Johnston 2003; Ba 2009) and, to some extent, its aftermath. Building on the constructivist research program on security communities spelled out by Adler and Barnett (1998b), Amitav Acharya (2014), whose work inspired the establishment of the ASEAN Political-Security Community, argues that a sense of sharing a common destiny or “we-ness” can sustain the development of a security community. Furthermore, this “we-feeling” can have effects even as material conditions have yet to foster the increased interaction that Deutsch et al. (1957) portray as the main impulse behind security community–building. A key driver of regional identity formation, for constructivist scholars, has been the so-called ASEAN Way—a set of norms and practices widely seen as prevalent in ASEAN diplomacy, which includes non-interference, consensus, consultation, informality, mutual respect, non-confrontation, and quiet diplomacy. This “diplomatic and security culture” (Haacke 2003) is, they argue, what held ASEAN together against otherwise dire odds. The constructivist turn in the study of ASEAN, however, has faced sustained resistance from rationalists and other detractors of the “ASEAN Way.” Critics have alternatively argued that its influence is overstated, impossible to measure, or even detrimental to the grouping’s ability to progress beyond the status quo (Khoo 2004; Emmerson 2005; L. Jones 2010). The debate on ASEAN, and its status as a security community in the making, has crystallized around a rationalist/constructivist divide that, to a significant extent, is reflective of a persistent stalemate in the discipline of International Relations (IR).8 The constructivist turn has importantly revealed the ways in which ideas, norms, and values shape global governance and its institutions while providing new ways to assess and understand their successes and failures beyond material indicators (Acharya 2016a, 121–22). Constructivist scholars have been predominantly concerned empirically with underscoring the role of ideational factors in world politics as an explanation for various outcomes, including an institution’s resilience, as opposed to—and often in spite of—factors outlined by rationalist scholarship (of both realist or liberal persuasions). In the study of ASEAN, this reinforced a misleading impression that the added value of constructivist explanations depended on the ability of scholars to demonstrate the causal power of ASEAN’s norms in sustaining regional peace (however defined), and therefore to champion the organization itself. For critics, being a constructivist equates to partaking in the naïve reproduction of a normative delusion about ASEAN’s relevance.

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Ba accurately points out that such assessments are based on a misreading of the constructivist argument that treats identity as an “independent variable” (Khoo 2004; Emmerson 2005), thus “mistak[ing] what is a constitutive question for a causal one” (Ba 2005, 261). This is partly because, she argues, constructivist scholars themselves have been ambiguous about the nature of their claims. As a result, the distinct added value of a constructivist account in underscoring the social constructedness of world politics and its effects on their daily conduct, which are not easily rendered in causal terms, got somewhat lost in the process (Tan 2006). Yet, as more critical strands of IR scholarship have underscored, there is nothing inherently optimistic about adopting a constructivist (broadly defined) outlook on world politics as social phenomena. Further, a commitment to such an understanding of the world does not have to be limited to the study of standards of appropriate behavior. Importantly, a focus on the social dimensions of world politics can help reveal power dynamics (normative, symbolic, and discursive) that are related to identity but are typically left unaddressed by the “mainstream.” The fact that social constructivists have had a tendency to neglect some of these dynamics does not mean that other “reflexivist” strands of IR, whether or not they claim the “constructivist” label, are not equipped to address them; to the contrary. This is fortunate given how such a focus is more needed than ever when it comes to understanding recent developments and challenges that pertain to multilateralism, regionalism, and security governance as persistent features of the global system. The stalemate between rationalism and “mainstream” constructivism nonetheless continues to inform much of IR scholarship on ASEAN despite exhortations to move past it (Ba 2020; Jetschke and Theiner 2020 ). It has also sustained a growing interest in bridge-building or thin analytical eclecticism (Sil and Katzenstein 2010) as a way to produce cumulative knowledge about regional governance. This interest echoes broader trends in the study of global governance and regionalism (Söderbaum 2016, 33). When it comes to ASEAN, attempts to “seize the middle ground” (Adler 1997) or some kind of via media (Wendt 1999) typically take the form of a recognition that norms matter to some extent, but that their influence, rendered in causal terms, is bound by material factors, such as rational interests and the distribution of hard power. As such, they do not really offer an alternative to the isms but actually reproduce many of the same limitations. This is because they remain anchored in positivist understandings of what counts as proper and rigorous social inquiry, that is, the development of causal, testable, and falsifiable explanations for phenomena “out there in the real world.” As a result of this persistent theoretical stalemate, a prevailing view today is that ASEAN faces a fundamental dilemma. In this view, the very norms that are deemed necessary to keep it united, and have sustained its development on the

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path toward its realization as a security community, also need to be significantly altered, if not abandoned entirely. This is necessary for the organization to move forward, adapt to an evolving regional context, and avoid becoming a “marginalized relic from the past” (Acharya 2014, 258, 261– 67). As Acharya (2014, 62) himself recognizes, however, “there is considerable room for doubt whether [the ASEAN Way] has been upheld in practice.” This makes pinpointing where the material stops and the ideational starts (or the other way around) all the more ­difficult—and in fact, quite futile. That ASEAN is stuck somewhere on a (non-linear) path toward its transformation into a genuine security community is now broadly consensual across theoretical strands. If there is one thing on which most observers of regional affairs overwhelmingly agree, however skeptical or optimistic they are about its future prospects, it is that ASEAN is imperfect and that, for the good of the region, it ought to be improved. This is, in fact, the basis of Ba’s (2020) position that the rationalist/constructivist divide is not as clear-cut a binary as it may seem. Of course, some would rather the conversation turn away altogether from the mirage they argue ASEAN is—and yet they cannot seem to avert their eyes either given the institution’s staying power of attraction (Khoo 2004; D. M. Jones and Smith 2007). Even Beeson, whose realist dispositions arguably protect him from the “wishful thinking” of those who “continue to place their faith in ­ASEAN’s potential,” concedes that, as “unlikely” as it is that the grouping addresses its “painfully apparent shortcomings,” the region’s policy makers “could do no better than give their [. . .] organization some real institutional firepower” (Beeson 2020, 577). This consensus, however weak it may be, nonetheless falls short when it comes to identifying the end point of a security community–building process characterized as “evolutionary but non-linear” (Acharya 2009b, 18) that, in fact, increasingly seems to be set on many quests at once. This challenge is not specific to ASEAN or the Asia-Pacific region. Security community–building today implies much more than the mere absence of war among states. On the one hand, non-military and transnational challenges now form an unavoidable and significant part of the mandate of security institutions in every corner of the world, as a result of a larger trend by which processes of securitization increasingly take place in multilateral settings (Haacke and Williams 2008; Buzan and Wæver 2009; Bremberg 2015). On the other hand, security governance now involves an unprecedented diversity of characters, both state and non-state, and takes place in venues that are no longer under the exclusive purview of government. As amply demonstrated by IR scholarship on norm diffusion, non-state actors such as epistemic communities (Haas 1992), international organizations—as actors in their own name

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(Barnett and Finnemore 2004)—and transnational activist networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Klotz 2002; Joachim 2003) play an active role in shaping processes of global governance, including in the security realm (Price 1998; Howorth 2004). These various actors promote very different views on insecurity and how to address it through multilateral cooperation. In the case of ASEAN, as in the United Nations (UN) and elsewhere, experts, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other actors also take part in the making of security governance (Mustapha 2019; Breslin and Nesadurai 2018). These trends in security governance have important implications for the ability of scholars to assess whether an institution, entity, or relationship qualifies as a security community, and of which kind (nascent, ascendant, mature or otherwise). As a result, what kind of security community ASEAN is or strives toward continues to elude scholarly consensus. According to existing accounts, to become a fully fledged security community capable of sustaining itself over the long term, ASEAN would need to exhibit heroic, almost supernatural qualities: to provide concrete solutions to conflict arising from internal, external, and transnational threats (Roberts 2010; Emmers 2017), effectively manage major power relations in the broader Asia-Pacific region (C. Jones 2015), develop into a supranational institution based on liberal values (Peou 2009), welcome the active involvement of civil society (Collins 2007), and further the emancipation of the people (Chang 2016), while also upholding the very norms it needs to abandon in order to do any of these things (Acharya 2009b). Despite the seemingly impossible character of this heroic quest toward the security community, which is to a great extent the result of the organization itself defining its mandate in aspirational—and one could argue highly ­unrealistic— terms, the assumption that ASEAN has the potential to meet the challenge despite its limited resources still underlies most accounts. This assumption is a strong indication that claims that ASEAN— or any other entity—is a security community in the making amount to something more than mere rhetoric. Indeed, these claims are imbued with productive power that shapes the realm of possible action for the further conduct of regional—and global—governance, even as the objective existence of the community “out there” may very well prove eternally out of reach. It is not simply that the end point of the process is a moving target. More accurately, this book shows that there are multiple end points to the security community, and they are likely to be irreconcilable. Rationalists, constructivists, and eclectic analysts alike have their own views on what the end point of security community–building entails. As such, they all similarly “take for granted the discursive conditions of possibility for [. . .] action” as well as the “apprehension of the external world” outside of interpretation as

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unproblematic. Therefore, they also neglect how the enactment of such positions on what constitutes insecurity “are already a narrative construction” (Weldes and Sacco 1996, 368). I posit, therefore, that the problem is not so much that ASEAN itself is “running in place” (Weatherbee 2012), but that our understanding of it is. All major approaches either on their own or combined share a similar difficulty in accounting for ASEAN’s awkward position between continuity and change since the turn of the twenty-first century. While rationalists struggle to explain how such a “weak” institution is allowed to carry on, constructivists have increasing difficulty explaining how exactly an increasingly elusive and contested “ASEAN Way” can continue to operate as the anchor of a regional “we-feeling” (see also Glas, forthcoming, 17; Martel and Glas n.d.). Because they otherwise recognize that world politics are (at least partly) socially constructed, but are often ambivalent about the implications, “mainstream” constructivists find themselves on shaky terrain that their detractors are keen to exploit. Apart from helping understand why it is “stuck” in a seemingly never-ending crisis, bridge-building between rationalism and constructivism does not tell us much about how ASEAN, as a security community–building institution, works in practice that the isms have not already illuminated on their own. It also does not insulate eclectic scholars from critiques from both “sides.” Fortunately, these are not the only options available to make new sense of regional (or, in fact, global) relations and politics. A distinct path forward involves unapologetically standing farther away from the pull of positivist tenets, closer to the other end of the constructivist spectrum, and fully embracing co-constitution as a type of explanation. This book provides but one example. In fact, it is part of a niche but growing strand of “neo-constructivist” scholarship on ASEAN that draws from new developments within the “reflexivist” camp of IR that can help account for the crucial role of practices (discursive or otherwise) in shaping regional relations without ceding unnecessary ground to rationalism (e.g., Tan 2013b; Davies 2016; 2018; Nair 2019; 2020; Collins 2019; Glas 2017; Glas, forthcoming; Mustapha 2019; Martel 2017; 2020; Martel and Glas n.d.). This scholarship is “only just beginning to emerge” (Mustapha 2019, 5), is not a coherent research strand, and as such has yet to make a convincing inroad as a clear alternative to “mainstream” approaches. As others have pointed out, Southeast Asia remains “largely neglected” when it comes to critical IR scholarship (Mustapha 2019, 5; see also McDonald 2017). For the time being, the debate on the grouping’s status as a security community, which shows no sign of abating, remains as stuck as its object of focus, with no resolution in sight. The lack of commonly agreed criteria for assessing the significance and effectiveness of international institutions is certainly a factor (see Stubbs 2019, among others), and so is (meta-)theoretical incommensurability.

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That said, it is also compounded by the fact that it remains unclear what kind of security community, if any, ASEAN is supposedly moving toward. This is also becoming increasingly hard to ascertain in virtually any context. Explanations rooted in the play of material interests, or those focused on the role of “norms,” or a mix of both, can only bring us so far. This is because all of these approaches involve partaking in a search for the security community “out there” instead of treating it for what it is: at best an ideal type (Bueger 2013) and, more importantly, an artifact that is commonly reified, but actually social—and discursive— “all the way down” ( Jackson 2006; Hellmann et al. 2014). Taking discourse seriously is something that rationalists, constructivists, and eclecticists, whether they study ASEAN or not, have consistently shied away from, albeit in different ways. On the one hand, rationalists treat discourse as inconsequential, and a mere reflection of rhetoric disconnected from the “hard truths” and raw motives and interests of actors defined by logics of consequence. On the other hand, constructivists often center language in their analysis but reduce its role to that of a mere conduit for other factors situated outside of language, somewhere in the ideational realm of shared understandings and human cognition. This persistent commitment to subjectivism means that most constructivists partake in unnecessary “methodological acrobatics” (Weldes and Sacco 1996, 371) by which they draw from their assumptions to infer ideational explanations (ideas, beliefs, values, norms, etc.) from the empirical observation of what actors say, write, and do. Those who combine these two approaches fare no better in circumventing these limitations. A focus on the power of language as language, or on meaning-making, as this book does, cannot falsify rationalist explanations for actors’ behavior any more than making room for, or even centering, the ideational can. However, it does provide a unique way to illuminate the polysemy of security community–­ building and its effects. By doing so, a language focus also takes part, in its own way, in a broader push for process-focused research that “appreciates the subtleties inherent to this region,” relates them to a wider context, and makes room for the ambiguities, inconsistencies, and tensions that arise from the coexistence of contested meanings in world politics (Foot and Goh 2019, 398). Thus, it contributes to making the security community literature more “global” and pluralistic on both theoretical and empirical counts.

Framework In this book I shift the focus from trying to locate the exact place of ASEAN on the heroic path toward the realization of its security community, advancing

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an argument on what this would objectively require, and speculating about the future prospects of this enterprise—with possibilities ranging from a mere avoidance of reversal to actual progress beyond the status quo. Instead, I focus on how the grouping’s identity as a security community “in the making” is reproduced in and through practice. I look at how the security community is “talked into existence” (Adler 2002, 101) through “epic stories,” and I look into the effects that stem from social agents claiming that ASEAN is moving toward such an end point in the first place. The key premise here is that, if a security community–building institution like ASEAN is arguably not much more than a “talk-shop,” as its critics often point out, then studying it through a focus on language, discourse, and ­“meaning-making” is certainly a good way to approach its current evolution (see also Ba 2009). It also seems, if the recent consultation on ASEAN’s “identity narrative” is any indication, that ASEAN practitioners themselves would agree. Building on recent developments in practice theory as well as scholarship that centers the “power of words” in International Relations (Epstein 2008), I develop an innovative approach to security community–building that allows me to account for the “polysemy” of this process. By this I mean the multiplicity of meanings that the phrase “security community” holds simultaneously, the cacophony of voices involved in (re)articulating such a project, and the ambiguity, tension, and contestation that this leads to. Such polysemy remains a blind spot not just in the study of ASEAN, but of existing knowledge on security community–­building in general. This book understands discourse, in lieu of motives, beliefs, norms, or “background knowledge,” to be the site where the identity of a security community ultimately takes hold ( Jackson 2006). The origin point of the community, in other words, is located in claims, which are enacted through the deployment of power/knowledge, that a collective incarnates a security community in the making. Therefore, this origin point is necessarily an unstable one. This means that the security community, as any social fact, is not presumed here to have any objective “existence” outside of social agents talking and acting as if it exists. The security community, in other words, is very much what social agents who are involved in its construction say it is, from various positions of discursive authority. It does not mean, however, that it has no meaning or “real” impacts. Taking discourse seriously means acknowledging that it is more than “just talk” or a mere conduit for explanatory factors located inside actors’ heads and “outside the text.” As such, this book takes the step that others, including most constructivists, would not. What follows is that discourse holds explanatory power in and of itself. It does not simply refer to other objects or factors situated in material or ideational

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realms, but produces the social world as we know it. Discourse delineates what can and cannot be said about certain subjects and objects, and therefore how we act in relation to them. It provides the constitutive link between identity and policy (Hansen 2006). Thus, a focus on discourse leads to a “type of explanation that has [. . .] meaning as its main focus” (Epstein 2008, 4). It is not causal in any strictly positivist sense of the term, because it “acknowledges the difficulty of cataloguing, measuring, and specifying the ‘real causes’ [of ] social phenomena, and concerns itself instead with [. . .] the manifest political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another” (Campbell 1992, 4). Yet discourse still shapes outcomes, by exercising pressure that narrows down what the options are for political action or by opening up new options (Wæver 2002, 28). In other words, discourse needs to be studied not because it causes anything by itself, but because it has effects that cannot be properly grasped without paying attention to it. The outcome under examination would likely not have been the same without discourse ( Jackson 2011, 232; see also Kurki 2006). Focusing on discourse thus allows us to bypass a well-established but ultimately problematic distinction between “explaining” and “understanding” in International Relations (see also Epstein 2008, 4). To put it simply, a focus on discourse permits us to do both at the same time. This framework allows me to reveal security community–building as a process of discursive performance that involves constant negotiation between competing understandings of both security and community. This process is inherently polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested. The security community holds different and competing meanings for social agents, thus setting the security community– building institution on different quests simultaneously. This means that there are various “versions” of the security community that coexist and compete for dominance in the discursive field where it is brought into existence. These versions are grounded in very different understandings of the dangers (or “monsters”) that the security community faces. Further, the contestation that accompanies the discursive reproduction of the security community manifests in two distinct but interrelated forms, which I refer to as “external” and “internal.” On the one hand, social agents engage in “external” contestation by advancing distinct, relatively coherent, but potentially incompatible “epic stories” that support different—and competing—“versions” of the security community clashing together in the discursive field. On the other hand, even when social agents privilege a particular epic story and converge over a specific version of the security community, they still engage in “internal” contestation. They do so by debating the meaning, boundaries, and policy solutions associated with this version. Therefore, I also highlight how “internal” contestation

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simultaneously takes hold within each version of the security community. Both forms of contestation combine to shape the realm of possible action for the further reproduction of the security community in practice. Sometimes this will mean that courses of action that could have been considered were sidelined or marginalized. Yet discursive contestation also opens new possibilities for (more or less radical) alternatives. My discourse-based approach to security ­community– building helps me show how, and to what effect, social agents involved in AsiaPacific multilateralism advance competing, and potentially irreconcilable, views about the source of insecurity, what needs to be secure, ASEAN’s role in making it so. A focus on the role of discourse does not mean that “anything goes,” that anyone can claim that a security community exists or that any collective can be deemed one. Indeed, several underlying assumptions make claims that something “counts as” a security community possible. As social agents (discursively) enact the community in practice by invoking distinct “epic stories” about the dangers that the security community–building institution must triumph over, they do a number of things that allow them to be part of a common heroic enterprise. They position themselves as part of the same community, at least in aspiration. They recognize that they share a common destiny, in either doom or peace (which can be defined in positive or negative terms). They commit to collaborating toward the achievement of security for the collective. They make claims of authority, competence, or legitimacy in defining the meaning of security for the community, as well as where its boundaries lie, that are at least partly acknowledged as such by other members of the community. The polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested character of security ­community –building certainly makes it difficult to devise a coherent plan toward the realization of a full-fledged community. Yet it also creates a productive tension out of which the security community –building institution derives a special kind of — discursive — power that helps sustain it not only in spite of, but through what can look like a never-ending crisis. To provide a satisfying account of the current evolution of security community –building institutions, and ASEAN more specifically, we need a better understanding of how change takes place within continuity, and the other way around. My approach makes it possible to study the heroic quest for a security community “in the making” without partaking in it at the same time. For this purpose, I use an interpretative methodology grounded in discourse analysis that also pays serious attention to the individual agency of social agents who enact the security community in practice. In the next section, I briefly discuss key methodological choices that such an approach entails.

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Methodology Discourse, in the approach I put forward here, extends beyond the ability of social agents to argue, persuade, teach, or socialize by using language as a mere vehicle for other factors—material or ideational—situated “outside” of it. Discourse does not matter because it gives us access to what goes on “in the real world out there” or inside the minds of actors. It matters because it is through discourse, first and foremost, that actors interpret reality and engage in the social construction of world politics. It shapes the realm of possible action by ascribing meaning, sidelining alternatives, and delineating the nature of relationships between subjects and objects. Yet discourse is also entirely dependent on its (re)production by speaking agents in practice. Therefore, it is constantly in flux and open to change as it necessarily involves ambiguity, tension, and contestation. As such, the agency of “speaking actors” (Epstein 2011, 343) should not be underestimated. While there is no definitive set of prerequisites for studying discourse in IR, a common ground can still be identified that includes the following: an understanding of meaning as socially constructed, a recognition of the productivity of discourse, and a commitment to “the play of practice” (Milliken 1999, 230). Discourse analysis, therefore, will aim to problematize what is treated as given, to contest what is uncontested, and to explain how key aspects of world politics come about (Diez 2014, 322). The conceptualization of discourse I adopt here carries with it a set of (meta‑)theoretical commitments and methodological choices. This section provides a brief overview of my methodology, unpacked in more detail in Chapter 2. The empirical demonstration applies this framework by mapping out the main discourse “strands” (Larsen 2005, 72) that inform the debate over ASEAN’s identity as a security community, and support the (re)production of its distinct “versions.” To reconstruct these discourse strands and the “epic stories” they feature, I draw from Hansen’s (2006) three-tiered model of text selection for poststructuralist discourse analysis. I make use of a variety of textual data— official documentation, memoirs, policy analysis, statements by NGOs, media commentary, and so on—produced by “speaking subjects” associated with the main “tracks” in Asia-Pacific regionalism: official (Track 1), expert/informal (Track 2), and nongovernmental/alternative (Track 3).9 The first category of documents includes official statements, declarations, and initiatives adopted by ASEAN and related fora—ASEAN Plus Three, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting(-Plus). The second category features policy texts produced by actors associated with key regional networks of security think tanks and institutes.10 The third category is composed of statements by

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regional non-governmental organizations and networks that engage the ASEAN process.11 Finally, the corpus also extends to media texts authored by agents of all three “tracks,” complemented by documents gathered on a more ad hoc basis during field research in Southeast Asia. The final corpus, crucially, also incorporates other kinds of “texts” (defined here as specific instantiations of a discourse in context) as key materials for analysis. These texts include the verbatim transcripts12 of semi-directed interviews conducted with a total of sixty-five individuals from these three tracks.13 Following other discourse analysts who rely on interview data (Griffin 2009; Shepherd 2015), I analyzed these transcripts like other written documents: not as authoritative sources of knowledge, but as specific articulations of positions in a debate, enacted in a dialogical encounter with the researcher. My research also consisted of participant observation of multilateral meetings—formal, semi-formal, informal, and non-governmental— on regional security, rendered into field notes.14 The inclusion of such “texts” allows me to link methods more typically used in (written) text-based discourse analysis to the study of meaning-making practices (Bueger 2014) enacted in the discursive field where the various “versions” of ASEAN’s identity as a security community are performed. Each of the three versions of ASEAN’s security community I discuss in Part 2 of the book involves specific understandings of insecurity (the “monsters” that need to be vanquished) and the boundaries of the regional community that ought to be protected. First, a “non-traditional” version of the security community relies on a particular “discourse on danger” (Campbell 1992) that situates the source of regional insecurity in the “transnational” realm, where non-military and transboundary challenges (which I refer to as “bogeymen”) are threatening the ability of ASEAN states to exercise control over their national (and, by extension, regional) territory. Second, a “traditional” version of the security community treats the resurgence of traditional security concerns, including major power rivalry between two “dragons,” the United States and China, and the persistence of other interstate tensions, as the primary source of danger for the broader community of states in the Asia-Pacific region. ASEAN’s centrality in the wider region is portrayed (and challenged) as the most appropriate solution to mitigate insecurity because of ASEAN’s undervalued but ultimately heroic qualities. Third, a “people-centered” version of ASEAN’s security community positions the organization as a champion of the people. It makes room for the recognition of a human dimension to regional security and is aimed at enhancing the physical safety, well-being, and dignity of Southeast Asian populations. It requires, however, that ASEAN resists being lured by the “sirens” of foreign conceptions of human security and the responsibility to protect.

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These versions involve various objectives that, in and of themselves, are not necessarily incompatible, although they are surely hard to reconcile. More importantly, however, they are premised upon competing positions on security and community that shape the (re)production of the security community while rendering it fundamentally unstable and in constant need of rearticulating. This, in a nutshell, explains why ASEAN’s security community–building enterprise is likely to be a never-ending story.

Structure The book has five main chapters in addition to this introduction and a conclusion. The next chapter (Chapter 2) situates the argument of the book in recent debates informing the study of security community–building in International Relations, discusses its contributions in more detail, and unpacks the theoretical and methodological framework underpinning the empirical discussion. This framework incorporates insights from practice theory, the study of ontological security, and poststructuralist scholarship in IR. It explains how my discoursecentric framework makes it possible to better account for the omnidirectional, polysemic, and contested character of security community–building in practice. Chapter 3 then provides necessary background on the historical development of ASEAN’s approach to regional security, from the creation of the organization in 1967 to the formal establishment of the ASEAN Community in 2015 and the adoption of Vision 2025. This chapter offers much more than a condensed institutional history of ASEAN, however, as it highlights the productive role of discourse in the gradual, incremental framing of ASEAN’s identity as a security community “in the making.” I employ a discursive historical approach attuned to how discourse delineates between paths of action that end up being favored while others (which I refer to as “ghosts”) are sidelined, if only to come back to haunt ASEAN later. This chapter deconstructs the organization’s self-narrative, which positions ASEAN on a teleological path toward the security community since its inception. It covers the main thresholds of ASEAN’s formative years and its evolution after the end of the Cold War through a focus on major debates that accompanied the adoption of key declarations and initiatives, up until the formal launching of the security community in 2015. The chapter shows how the narrative of ASEAN as a security community in the making has developed and is reapplied retroactively to instill a sense of coherence and linear progress into the organization’s development. Part 2 provides the bulk of the empirical discussion of ASEAN’s security community–building process as omnidirectional, polysemic, and contested. Each of

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the three chapters focuses on a particular “discourse strand” that supports the (re)production of one “version” of ASEAN’s security community in the making. Within each strand, actors from different “tracks” of Asia-Pacific regionalism promote specific interpretations of the essence of (in)security and the appropriate contours of the regional community. Each chapter undertakes an analysis of how a particular discourse strand emerged within ASEAN’s official discourse on regional security; how different sets of actors position themselves with regards to ASEAN’s approach to a subset of security issues, and how these actors assess the grouping’s ability to deal with them; and how tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities that necessarily arise from the reproduction of this version of ASEAN’s identity as a security community in practice shape the process moving forward. The order of chapters follows a flexible chronological sequence roughly based on the inception of each discourse strand in ASEAN’s approach to regional security. At the same time, these strands have been further affirmed in the context of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and its immediate aftermath, and they have been coexisting ever since in the regional security discourse and in ASEAN’s approach to security community–building. The first discourse strand discussed (Chapter 4), which underpins what I refer to as ASEAN’s “non-traditional” security community, deals with the construction of transnational crime as a primary source of insecurity for ASEAN member states—including terrorism, illicit trafficking, sea piracy, illegal migration, cybercrime, and so on. The chapter traces the process through which transnational crime came to form the core of the more recent notion of “non-traditional security” (NTS) in ASEAN’s approach to regional security. The discussion shows that while transnational crime is widely presented as a major challenge for ASEAN member states, there is no consensus on the nature and source of the threat, nor on the best way for the grouping to address it. While it is clear that the “bogeymen” are coming to get ASEAN as a result of its actions, the organization is not much closer to getting rid of them today than it was when transnational crime first appeared on its agenda. This is not merely because the organization is too weak, but because it constructs threat and solution in a way that the danger can never be captured. Yet there is also a great deal of “constructive ambiguity” in how ASEAN portrays non-traditional security, which allows the organization to claim added value in the pursuit of security in the region. Given the especially fluid and contested character of NTS, it also finds its way in other versions of the security community, although it takes on a less central but instead supporting role there. A second discourse strand (Chapter 5) addresses persistent and renewed concerns over a resurgence of traditional security threats in the broader Asia-Pacific

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region, including major power rivalry, especially between China and the United States, and the latest phase of tensions in the South China Sea. It sustains the (re) production of another (“traditional”) version of the ASEAN security community as a small but heroic protagonist best placed to mediate between giants (or “dragons”), and to protect the region from falling into chaos. The chapter also discusses how a renewed focus on traditional security concerns informs the debate about ASEAN’s approach to conflict management and how it affects its position in the Asia-Pacific regional architecture and in the newly minted “Indo-Pacific” regional order. ASEAN’s approach to “traditional” security concerns has typically focused on “soft,” non-sensitive, and consensual issues, which leads the grouping to tiptoe around “hard” security challenges. This has been an important source of frustration for many of ASEAN’s dialogue partners, and several proposals have been made over recent years that are interpreted by ASEAN actors as attempts to further undermine the grouping’s claims of “centrality.” Chapter 5 reviews how ASEAN has been responding to these attempts by reforming current mechanisms, devising new ones, and gradually adapting its formal position on the South China Sea disputes. The third strand discussed (Chapter 6) deals with issues pertaining more directly to ASEAN’s cautious approach to the “sirens” of human security and the “responsibility to protect.” It centers on the gradual integration of a “human dimension” to ASEAN’s approach to regional security, and the development of a “people-centered” version of its security community. This people-centered focus is applied to issues that have long been part of ASEAN’s security agenda, but it also gives new salience to health and environmental security concerns, peacebuilding, and the development of a regional agenda on “Women, Peace, and Security.” Chapter 6 also deals with growing engagement from a specific type of protagonist, that is, civil society, and NGOs in particular, in the formal regional process. It zooms in on the different types of discursive practices these actors deploy in order to shape ASEAN’s approach to regional security, with some degree of success despite important constraints. It includes an analysis of NGOs’ critical engagement of ASEAN’s response to trafficking in persons and armed conflict, as well as the Rohingya crisis. A concluding chapter, Chapter 7 puts the three strands into direct conversation to better highlight where they overlap, compete, and differ, and the implications of these encounters for ASEAN’s attempts to stabilize its identity as a security community “in the making.” It shows that each version of the security community conveys a different interpretation of security and the appropriate

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boundaries of the regional community. At the same time, participants in the regional security debate share a common set of underlying assumptions that contribute to sustaining the security community–building process over time, not merely in spite of, but through crisis. This chapter reiterates the main arguments, conclusions, and contributions of the book, outlines new directions in ASEAN’s approach to the pursuit of security, and discusses the possibility of radical change in regional security governance.

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“It’s Alive!” Security Community–Building as Practice

the reposit ioni ng of the security community concept into the constructivist research program after its initial Deutschian formulation has fostered a sustained interest among scholars situated somewhere within the big tent of constructivist IR. Despite forming a “relatively small niche” (Koschut 2014, 519) in IR today, this scholarship has produced a number of fruitful insights in recent years. Rather than asking whether or not security communities—and the “wefeeling” supporting them— exist, the focus is now on improving our understanding of how they work in practice (Bially Mattern 2001, 353). The security community concept has been mobilized to account for a growing number of relationships, entities, and institutions in virtually every corner of the world. Furthermore, the study of security communities has undertaken a productive turn away from an exclusive focus on ideational factors to a growing emphasis on how social agents construct the security community in practice. This shift is well exemplified by a surge of interest in “communities of practice” by scholars associated with the “practice turn” in IR, yet it also includes work on security community–building that draws from the “linguistic turn,” discourse theory, and poststructuralist IR scholarship. The insights produced by these theoretical strands, which share a “thicker,” more explicitly interpretivist approach to security community–building than earlier constructivist scholarship, have not traveled as well outside the West and the realm of “mature” security communities. These approaches also evolve on separate planes, but as I suggest in this chapter, they can be fruitfully reconciled to produce new insights that can

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improve our understanding of security community–building in the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I build on, and critically engage with, both strands of scholarship before unpacking my discourse-based framework for the study of security community–building. This framework draws heavily from poststructuralist IR scholarship and consists of three key components: (1) a discursive approach to the social construction of security, (2) a relational conception of collective identity, and (3) a practitioner-near approach to discourse as “meaning-in-use.” Taken together, these elements serve as the basis for advancing a reconceptualization of security community–building as a product of discourse and as an omnidirectional, polysemic, and contested process anchored in practice.

Security Community–Building as Practice An explicit aim of the constructivist research program on security communities was to move away from a “commitment to behavioralism against the demand for a more interpretive approach” that would give attention to the role of identity, norms, and the social constructedness of world politics (Adler and Barnett 1998c, 8 –9). While scholarship on security community–building in the Global South has heeded this call to some extent, it remains mostly wedded to positivist tenets and has maintained an artificial separation between theory and fact by searching for the security community “out there” instead of embracing its social all the way down quality. Most of these accounts, even when they emphasize process and allow for the possibility of reversal, implicitly treat the security community as the end point of a unidirectional path. This scholarship underscores the role of norms, defined as “shared understandings,” in shaping the construction of a “wefeeling” among a given set of states. As a result, it fails to fully appreciate the play of practice in this process. Taking the study of security communities in a more productive direction, scholars associated with the “practice turn” of IR emphasize how practices—­ socially meaningful patterns of action performed more or less competently (Adler and Pouliot 2011b, 4)— of diplomacy, self-restraint, or cooperative security within certain groups of states have come to form a defining feature of a security community (Adler 2008; Adler and Greve 2009; Pouliot 2010). They adopt a practitioner-near approach to world politics, zooming in on the inner workings of security communities and the micro level of interactions among “those speaking, writing and doing [world] politics” (Bueger 2014, 384) on a daily basis. These scholars, who focus predominantly on the EU and NATO as case studies, show how the community is brought into being in and through everyday practice

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(Bremberg 2015; Græger 2016; Hofius 2016). Instead of looking for signs of the community in public rhetoric, proponents of the practice turn focus on uncovering the “background knowledge” practitioners speak from (Pouliot 2008). They also look at how practitioners engage in a “struggle over competence” (AdlerNissen and Pouliot 2014, 895) within the joint security community–building enterprise that coalesces around shared practice. In parallel, a distinct subset of the security community–building literature studies practice differently, by shifting attention away from “the social in the mind” (Bueger and Gadinger 2015, 451) to the productive power of discourse as practice. In her analysis of the Suez Crisis, Bially Mattern (2001) exposes how language-power can act as a motor in the reproduction of security communities in practice, particularly in moments of crisis that see members striving to bring back a rogue actor into the community’s fold. A discursive approach of a similar kind is also prevalent in studies that focus on NATO. Kitchen (2009) shows how the security community can be simultaneously maintained and transformed through debate about how to adapt its mandate to an evolving context. Gheciu similarly emphasizes the key role of “constitutive narratives” in how NATO secures its sense of Self and adapts to new circumstances (Gheciu 2019, 33). Another example is Williams and Neumann’s (2000) discussion of how a discursive process akin to securitization sustains the security community’s longevity against claims of obsolescence by allowing it to transition away from the initial mandate. This scholarship highlights the intrinsic relationship between claims about what a security community is and what it ought to do as the site where identity is located ( Jackson 2003). These research strands in the study of security community–building as practice have evolved on separate, somewhat competing paths, reflective of a broader divide between discourse scholarship and the “practice turn” in IR. Yet scholars from both “sides” have also made attempts at bridge-building (Neumann 2002; Hansen 2011; Faizullaev and Cornut 2017). These attempts do have some ground to stand on. Indeed, the “practice turn” and poststructuralist IR scholarship, in particular, both “understand social order as a product of collectively shared knowledge, although they situate that knowledge in different sites” (Bueger and Gadinger 2015, 451): either in extra-subjective structures of meaning enacted in situ (Holzscheiter 2014) or in “inarticulate know-how” (Pouliot 2008). Despite their incommensurable positions on the (im)possibility of grasping world politics “outside the text,” they do share a similar “performative understanding of the world” (Bueger and Gadinger 2015, 449). Practice theorists and discourse analysts both understand discourse/practice as having a role in creating order but also in opening up the possibility for change through the agency of social actors,

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even if the extent of the agency they allow for varies (Hansen 2006; Bueger and Gadinger 2015). This common focus on performativity can be fruitfully mobilized in making better sense of why the security community needs to constantly push its end point forward to a new horizon—because it depends on its constant re-­enactment in and through practice. This is an important finding, which can easily be extended to the study of how security community–building unfolds outside the West, but it requires moving beyond a narrow understanding of this process to fully embrace its multiplicity and (relative) indeterminacy. Unfortunately, insights from the study of practice in IR have surprisingly not traveled as well as earlier work on security communities to the Global South. One of the reasons, already discussed above, has to do with the positivist underpinnings of the scholarship on security community–building beyond the West. However, it is not the only one. Scholars who probe into the role of practice in security community–building remain mostly preoccupied with objects of study situated within the geographical core of a “not so international discipline” (Wæver 1998). This narrow, Westerncentric empirical scope, which as discussed in the previous chapter is also reflected in cognate literatures, has important theoretical implications. On the one hand, it implicitly reproduces a sequential, evolutionary, if not necessarily linear view of security community–building as progressing in stages (Adler and Barnett 1998a) along a single path, where the mature stage is predominantly defined from a Western standpoint. As a result, it fails to properly account for the variety of ways in which social agents define this enterprise today. On the other hand, it introduces a fundamental tension between (1) a commitment to the idea that the security community is necessarily in a “state of permanent becoming” (Adler 2008, 199) and (2) a persistent inability to move past a need to pinpoint the security community as something that exists “out there” before the play of practice becomes apparent and amenable to study. Indeed, dependable expectations of peaceful change, defined first and foremost as the absence of interstate war, remain the underlying prerequisite for probing into the role of practice. It is typically only after a security community is broadly recognized as existing as such “in the real world” that interest is then paid to the role of practice in redefining the mandate of said community. This redefinition occurs as a result of “new circumstances” that are treated, if often only implicitly, as mostly exogenous (e.g., the end of the Cold War and/or the rise of new security challenges). This tendency reproduces the “unproblematic apprehension of the external world [. . .] taken as given” (Weldes and Sacco 1996, 368) that many social constructivists refuse to let go of, albeit less overtly than their rationalist counterparts. Taken together, both limitations contribute to sustaining a prevailing but

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misleading impression that how this process typically unfolds outside the realm of “mature” communities in the West is strange or amounts to unfinished business. In sum, studies on security community–building tend to exhibit a narrow understanding of security community–building as following a single path. The security community is still a reified artifact (Hellmann et al. 2014), even when the focus of analysis is on practice. As a result, the literature is generally ill equipped to seriously account for what I refer to as the polysemy of the security ­community–building process: how the security community takes on a plurality of meanings simultaneously, and not just sequentially, irrespective of the “stage” it is considered to have reached. As the ASEAN example shows, social agents are not waiting for a collective to be unequivocally recognized as a security community “in the objective sense” before claiming the status in its name, if only as an aspiration, and debating what their “joint enterprise” entails. Nothing precludes applying a practice- and/or discourse-based approach to an entity defined by its agents as an aspiring security community, even if this incomplete status is itself a subject of contestation. As such, my approach to security community–building can help us understand how this process unfolds in a variety of contexts. Because security community–building is now such a diverse and complex enterprise, long-standing debates on the role played by multilateral (international or regional) institutions in the pursuit of security have recently taken on a new dimension. Security community–building institutions from every corner of the world are called to provide solutions to “a mix of conventional and non-­ conventional dangers” (Gheciu 2019, 33). As a result, some scholars have begun to argue for a more expansive definition of the security community concept. A security community can in fact be conceived as a collective in which members securitize together to protect a common referent from threat (Buzan and Wæver 2009; Bueger 2013, 301; Bremberg 2015). Yet the implications of new developments in security governance have not been given enough attention in the security community literature, which tends to remain wedded to a conventional definition of security as the absence of interstate war. Scholars continue to mostly treat non-military and transnational security issues as secondary to, or derivative of, peace defined as the absence of war, insofar as they are addressed at all. In addition, they remain predominantly focused on relations among states and their agents. As a result, this scholarship is more limited in its understanding of how security community–building unfolds in practice than commonly assumed. Further, as will soon become apparent, claiming that a security community exists “in the making” does not necessarily require, as argued elsewhere, “a shared

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understanding of what constitutes a threat and what does not, what requires security action and what does not” (Bueger 2013, 301). It merely presupposes a shared position, enacted through authoritative claims, that seeking this common understanding is what the “joint enterprise” is about, even if it is unlikely to be achieved, and a commitment to participate in this quest. In fact, the inherent polysemy of security community–building also means that the level of coherence involved in this process tends to be overestimated. My approach thus paints a more flexible picture than other recent reformulations of the security community concept (Buzan and Wæver 2009; Bueger 2013) because it gives central importance to processes of differentiation and contestation. Security community–building has as much to do with difference as with homogeneity and a sense of “we-ness.” It always involves a form of “boundary work” distinguishing actors positioned inside the community from those situated outside of it, while still others are stuck in a liminal position (Rumelili 2003; Hofius 2016). The degree of consensus prevailing inside should not, however, be overstated. Indeed, difference also often emerges from within (Bially Mattern 2001; Bjola and Kornprobst 2007). In such cases, the security community’s ontological security—its sense of Self— can be unsettled by the clash between different interpretations of its core values and defining practices among its members (Greve 2018; Gheciu 2019). These moments when internal cohesion is challenged hold “significant policy implications for members as well as nonmembers” (Greve 2018, 860). Yet internal contestation can also have productive effects for the security community, especially when tolerance for divergence comes to form an integral part of its identity, as illustrated by Browning and Joenniemi’s (2013) study on the Nordic peace. However, these productive effects extend beyond situations where difference is merely tolerated and resolved thereafter, if only momentarily. In a context where security governance involves a great diversity of actors and extends to an increasing number of issue-areas, contestation, as a product of difference, is not an exceptional event but part and parcel of the security community–building process. Distinct positions are advanced by practitioners operating within the discursive field where the scope and boundaries of the security community are negotiated. Irreconcilable versions of the security community, grounded in different understandings of what it means to seek “security” and distinct spatial imaginaries about the regional community, can coexist and clash with each other without one clearly dominating, even as their respective influence may wax and wane over time. A key advantage of adopting a discourse-based approach to security community–building is that it makes instability, contingency, and contestation over meaning the central focus of analysis, whereas proponents of the “practice

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turn” will instead tend to prioritize the ways in which meaning acquires fixity through practice (Adler and Pouliot 2011a, 3). To better assess how contestation unfolds in the security community, I make a distinction between “internal” and “external” forms of contestation. As they engage in a struggle to define the meaning of security and the boundaries of the community, social agents benefit from being able to draw from a relatively coherent understanding of what “their” version (i.e., the one they enact in the discursive field at a given moment) entails. As such, they will draw from a set of internally coherent positions on (1) the meaning of (in)security, (2) the boundaries of the community, which acts as the collective referent object that needs to be secured, and (3) the kind of solutions that ought to be pursued to achieve security for the community. These positions are different from those prevailing under other versions of the security community, and will be launched against them in “external” contestation. Yet even when speaking agents agree on these fundamentals, they often debate the more precise shape and contours of each version of the security community, leading to “internal” contestation. Both forms of contestation inform and reshape how a collective’s identity as a security community is (re)produced in practice. In the next section, I unpack the main components of the discourse-based approach that undergirds my study of security community–building in the context of ASEAN. I do so by linking this approach back to broader considerations about the role of discourse in International Relations, with special attention to how these can guide our understanding of the social construction of security and the (re)production of collective identity. Yet a focus on discourse does not necessarily mean partaking in “armchair analysis” (Neumann 2002, 628). As such, my discourse-based approach also relies on a “practitioner-near” interpretivist methodology that pays due attention to the agency of social agents involved in security community–building.

Security Community as Discourse: A Framework for Analysis This section starts by clarifying what a focus on the productive effects of discourse entails for the study of world politics and how it can fruitfully inform our understanding of security community–building. I then discuss the main components of my theoretical and methodological framework. First, I set up the theoretical foundations of my approach to security community–building, which locates the security community in the discursive—and, in this case, regional—space where identity and security meet. This framework can be further unpacked by discussing what a discursive approach to the social construction of security and a relational conception of collective identity respectively entail. Then, I discuss some

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methodological choices that support the practitioner-near variant of discourse analysis I adopt. Taken together, these elements form the basis of my reconceptualization of security community–building as a polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested process rooted in the enactment of “meaning-in-use” (Weldes and Sacco 1996; Milliken 1999; see also Wiener 2009).

Constructing World Politics through Discourse My approach to security community–building is informed by what can be referred to as “poststructuralist”1 scholarship in International Relations, to the extent that it is interested in uncovering how the meaning of world politics is constituted in text and context. Authors who are broadly associated with this highly diverse research tradition in IR have alternatively self-identified as “postmodernist” (Doty 2000), “post-constructivist” (Bially Mattern 2005), or “radical constructivist” (Tan 2013b). Whether or not this type of work can be described as “constructivist,” which remains up for debate mostly as a result of disciplinary boundary work, it is situated in a broader spectrum of interpretative approaches to IR that share an ontological interest in the social construction of world politics. Contrary to more mainstream forms of constructivism, however, a poststructuralist approach to IR entails a clear departure from rationalism and positivism. As such, it rejects previous calls for seizing the middle ground, deemed contradictory to the social constructivist impulse, while also reintroducing (discursive) power at the core of inquiry into the social dimensions of world politics (Guzzini 2000). The critical ethos that characterizes poststructuralist IR means that scholars associated with this current typically refuse to partake in what they see as a futile quest. By this I mean the search for a stable, pre-discursive foundation to knowledge that would be devoid of value, hidden beyond human experience, and against which it would be possible to measure the ability of a theory to render the world “as it really is.” Instead, my approach accepts the Foucauldian premise that the world does not present itself to us in pure form, free from prior assumptions, and is not the accomplice of our knowledge (Foucault 1971). A poststructuralist perspective on IR will therefore entail a consistent attempt to denaturalize or “make strange” what is taken for granted in a particular context, to open up thinking space, and to rediscover alternative paths of action that have been put aside as a result of (discursive) power dynamics. The framework developed here draws from a common ground of poststructuralist IR as a body of work, which includes (1) an interest in the productive effects of language in the social construction of world politics and (2) a conception of discourse as both structure and practice—hence the “post” in poststructuralism.

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Contrary to what is often assumed, adopting such an approach does not mean denying that there is a world “out there” that is external to thought or “outside the text.” It requires, however, rejecting the idea that this world can be grasped independently of the meaning we ascribe to it, and therefore of discourse. As Laclau and Mouffe suggest in an analogy commonly used by poststructuralist scholars to convey their epistemological standpoint to the uninitiated: “An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of [one’s] will.” However, whether such an event is construed by social agents as a natural phenomenon or a manifestation of divine wrath “depends upon the structuring of a discursive field” (Mouffe and Laclau 2001, 108). While discursive practices may be related to physical facts, this is not a necessary connection, since these facts “do not alone determine what meanings will be attached” to them, and in any case, do not present themselves as facts without the observer having to resort to language as a means of interpretation (Weldes and Sacco 1996, 376). Therefore, it is the latter part of the story, and the effects this discursive process has, that I am interested in when it comes to world politics, and security community –building in particular. A poststructuralist approach entails moving away from a conception of language as the transparent medium of non-discursive factors situated in the background of material reality (or human cognition). This move, as discussed in Chapter 1, requires a departure from an exclusive focus on material factors and interests, but also from an emphasis on “the ideational” as something that exists outside of discourse. Instead, the approach I adopt is to take meaning as having explanatory power on its own, and to look at how it comes to life in social practice (see also Weldes and Sacco 1996, among others). As such, security and community are treated here as products of discourse enacted by social agents in context. Such a discourse always involves the making of an “Other” against which a reified “Self ” can act, whether it is defined as what is dangerous, not secure, or merely not part of the “we.” This Other is thus positioned either on the margins or firmly outside the security community. While there is no unanimous definition of discourse, it can be understood as a grid of intelligibility (Milliken 1999, 230) through which social agents make sense of the world, and interpret events, risks, or threats ( Jackson 2011, 71). Alternatively, following Epstein (2008, 2), discourse is “a cohesive ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations about a specific object that frame that object in a certain way and, therefore, delimit the possibilities for action in relation to it.” It is performative in the sense that it constructs the object of which it speaks as a particular kind of object.

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While discourse does not cause political outcomes—at least not in a linear, positivist understanding of causality (Kurki 2006; Jackson 2011)—it has effects that extend beyond language, as it links identity and political outcomes in a mutually constitutive relationship (Hansen 2006) that “makes things social happen” (Pouliot 2014, 240). In other words, instead of allowing us to provide answers to “why” something occurs, a discourse-based approach tackles “how-possible” questions that delve into “how meanings are produced to various social subjects/ objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions which create certain possibilities and preclude others” (Doty 1993, 298). Scholars working in this tradition have looked into the conditions of possibility (Weldes and Sacco 1996; Campbell 1992) of various policies that are otherwise unproblematized, from the War on Terror (e.g., Mustapha 2019) to gender mainstreaming in international institutions (e.g., Shepherd 2021) or ecological conservation (e.g., Epstein 2008). They show how such policies were made possible by the discursive construction of problems as problems, enabling particular responses. Such an understanding of discourse takes this concept away from common usage that presents it as synonymous to “text,” “language,” or “rhetoric.” Whereas language is a “system of signs” that has no significance in and of itself, discourse is what gives language meaning by putting signs in relation to one another. Because it conveys a dominant understanding of the world, and induces a certain regularity in how statements about specific objects are produced, discourse is partly structure. Yet while a distinction is commonly made between discourse (often conflated with “rhetoric”) and “practice,” a poststructuralist approach to IR eschews what is, from this standpoint, an artificial dichotomy. Because a discourse has to be created, maintained, and constantly rearticulated by “speaking actors” in practice, it is also fundamentally unstable. It strives for fixity— or “suture”— but it does not exist in a vacuum. It is in its inherent instability that the possibility for change is situated. Discourse is therefore as much about change as it is about continuity; it is as much practice (or “meaning-in-use”) and a product of agency as it is structure.

Discourse in the Co-constitution of Security and Identity Beyond the productive effects of discourse, which extend beyond the realm of IR, a poststructuralist approach to the study of world politics is characterized by a particular understanding of security and identity as intertwined, co-constitutive products of discourse embedded in practice. A Discursive Approach to Security.  Poststructuralism was first introduced in IR as a critique of the predominance of political realism in the discipline. Scholars

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including Richard Ashley, R. B. J. Walker, William Connolly, Roxanne Doty, and others targeted what they saw as a pervasive tendency to reify the state as a fixed, coherent, and firmly delineated geographical entity, therefore engaging in the reproduction of an artificial divide between the domestic/community and the international/anarchy—what Doty (1996, 172) refers to as the “territorial trap.” Instead of treating national sovereignty as a natural principle of political organization, this strand of IR approaches the state as an enterprise of space demarcation supported by a discrete discourse and set of practices, namely foreign policy. This conceptualization of foreign policy as discourse clarifies the link between identity and political outcomes geared toward the “international.” It emphasizes how foreign policy necessarily involves “the making of an Other” against which a Self (most commonly, the state) is ascribed the ability to act. This relationship between identity and policy is “co-constitutive”: foreign policy is derived from a certain representation of a state’s identity, but this identity is also produced and reproduced through foreign policy. In other words, foreign policy is best conceived as a performance of the state’s identity. For Campbell (1992), this performance often involves a “discourse on danger” invoking an Other. As such, the pursuit of “security,” as a radical policy, is the very condition of the state’s existence precisely because it is Janus-faced and projected against an Other that is often situated outside the state and the community, in an ­anarchical/international realm. In security discourse, this Other is often a threatening, “radical” one—it is typically presented as “evil, irrational, abnormal, mad, sick, primitive, monstrous, dangerous, or anarchical” (Connolly 1991, 65). This does not mean that this Other is necessarily radical, or even singular, or well defined. It can be geographical, but also temporal, when the Self engages in a revolt against its own past as something to avoid returning to (Wæver 1996). As Hansen points out in her analysis of discourses on the Bosnian War, even a radical Other “is often situated within a more complicated set of identities.” In other words, the articulation of a security discourse, as any exercise in identity construction, can involve “degrees of Otherness” (Hansen 2006, 33). The Self can summon multiple Others, ascribe different levels of responsibility to them in contributing to its insecurity, or portray them as either “superior, inferior, or equal” (Hansen 2006, 68). ASEAN, too, invokes many non-radical Others in attempts to delineate the boundaries of its security community and to preserve it from danger: the European Union, the West, Southeast Asia pre- or post-ASEAN, non-state actors and/or transnational forces threatening the security of member states and their population, major powers or other non-ASEAN states involved in Asia-Pacific regionalism, “uncertainty,” and so on.

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Furthermore, there can also be multiple Selves intertwined within a security discourse. Indeed, while discourse serves as a way to stabilize the Self ’s identity, this is an “inherently unstable and often contested project” (Hansen 2006, 69), as the Self is articulated in different ways among speaking actors. This will become apparent in Part 2, which highlights the coexistence of different versions of ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making, rooted in distinct interpretations of insecurity and representations of the Self. To reiterate, security is grounded in a “discourse on danger” that positions the Self against more or less radical Other(s). Such a conceptualization of security as discourse draws from Wæver’s definition of security as a “speech act,” a key component of securitization theory: In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promise, naming a ship). By uttering “security,” a state representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it. (Wæver 1995, 55)

Securitization refers to the intersubjective process through which an issue is discursively constructed as an existential threat to a referent object, requiring emergency measures outside the normal bounds of political procedure (Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998, 23 –25). Security, therefore, can be conceived as a discourse but also a “self-referential practice by which an issue is presented as an existential threat to a Self that has to act upon it” (Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998, 24). It “signifies a situation marked by the presence of a security problem and some measure taken in response” (Wæver 1995, 56). A security discourse has political effects that extend beyond speech, in the sense that it delineates the realm of possible actions in dealing with a particular object. This does not mean, to be clear, that securitization involves a chronological sequence that starts with discourse and ends with practice. It is discourse through and through, intertwined in practice.2 The social construction of security, however, rarely takes the form of a temporally delineated, discursive event, or a single illocutionary act. It is better understood as a social process involving multiple stages (McDonald 2008), in which the utterance itself is embedded into a broader set of practices—verbal or nonverbal, but always discursive insofar as they convey meaning. As Oren and Solomon (2015) show in their discursive analysis of the Iraq War, such practices often include the “ritual incantation of ambiguous phrases” conveying crisis, danger, and urgency, but that do not necessarily or always feature the word “security.” A Relational Conception of Identity.  My approach to security community– building relies on a conception of identity as inherently relational, which sets

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it apart from other, more mainstream variants of constructivism in IR. As such, I draw from poststructuralist critiques of Wendt’s conceptualization of identity (e.g., Doty 2000; Zehfuss 2001). Wendt’s conception of identity is grounded in a distinction between “corporal” and “social” dimensions, and as such considers identity as having a pre-social, exogenously given, corporate “essence” that a state (as the actor par excellence in international politics) brings with it in its social interaction with an Other (i.e., Alter). The possibility of a transformation of this identity, which is therefore treated as fixed a priori, arises only after this “first encounter” (Wendt 1999, 328). For poststructuralist scholars, this move is anything but innocent, as it forms the basis of Wendt’s “rump” materialism, his search for a “via media,” and the claim that a reality “out there” can be grasped independently of discourse (Wendt 1999). This “schizophrenic” (Doty 2000, 139) reification of the state therefore puts Wendt’s “thin” constructivism in a “dangerous liaison” with identity (Zehfuss 2001, 316). For Zehfuss, it threatens the very possibility of a constructivist alternative to rationalism, because the “necessary givenness” ascribed by Wendt to identity can only hold if it is separated from social construction entirely (Zehfuss 2001, 316). This artificial delineation between a fixed essence “out there” and the play of the social—and therefore, the discursive—is reproduced implicitly in most constructivist accounts of world politics, including those that focus on regional identity formation in ASEAN. By contrast, the relational approach to identity I adopt here treats it as social “all the way down.” Identity is conceived as arising out of the relationship between Self and Other, not as ontologically prior to it. As Epstein explains, “the Self does not simply encounter the Other once it is fully formed. [. . .] Rather, the relationship with the Other is the very site where its original identity takes shape” (Epstein 2011, 337). Because of this, identity is not to be situated in the realm of “ideas,” but conceived as a product of discourse, which involves the constitution of difference at every step. It is only when entering the social realm that a body—be it a human being, a state, or an international institution—becomes “an instance who says ‘I.’” The Self, in other words, is made by “making meaning,” and therefore it is necessarily constituted through some kind of “narrative act” (Epstein 2011, 336). There is no need to assume a pre-existing cohesive identity to engage in the study of mutual constitution between Self and Other. Discourse, therefore, is not a conduit for what social agents enacting it “are” at a deeper, essential level of being—their desires, interests, motives, beliefs, ideas, and so on (Doty 2000). Instead of determining their identity a priori, a poststructuralist, discourse-based approach starts by observing how social agents establish who— or what—they are as individuals, states, or international institutions by stepping into a particular discursive field. This relational approach informs my

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own understanding of ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making as a product of discursive performance. Identity and security are deeply intertwined and co-constitutive, whether the space in which this encounter takes form, created as a particular kind of space, is regional (Bilgin 2004) or otherwise. In other words, the search for “ontological security”—the “security of being” (Lain in Kinnvall and Mitzen 2018, 826)—is central to security community–building. Ontological security is both the value and the location that, if reached, would see the fully fledged security community finally be realized. As such, this concept is useful to convey why this process “can never be fulfilled but is a constant quest for what will always [. . .] remain out of reach” (Kinnvall and Mitzen 2018, 825). This is because the realization of the security community presupposes something that cannot be—the achievement of “full” security, a stable sense of Self, and therefore, the removal of the fundamental anxiety and unfixity that drives the quest for the security community in the first place. The only way for a security community–building institution to come close to filling this absence is by telling a good story about itself (Steele 2005; 2008), or by writing a convincing, captivating autobiography (Subotic´ 2016) over and over again. A good story necessarily features some form of danger, conflict, or adversity that ought to but will never be overcome—the Otherness where insecurity lies. That the story changes over time, by adding new characters, events, or obstacles, is only to be expected as it keeps being retold by various narrators who do not follow the same script and will unavoidably add their own hue to it. There is often more than one version of such a story, and security communities, whatever their kind, are no strangers to the “Rashomon effect” (Baldaro 2021). The story of ASEAN’s security community is certainly a case in point.

A Practitioner-near Variant of Discourse Analysis The main goal of any discourse analysis is to map out the constitutive elements of a discourse. Some of these constitutive elements are taken for granted and have crystallized over time, and they are therefore hard to unsettle. However, others are more amenable to change. Indeed, a discourse involves several layers or “degrees of sedimentation” (Wæver 2002, 32). Discourse analysis guides the researcher in the process of uncovering the layered structure of a discourse (Wæver 2002, 31)— or what Foucault (1969, 192) refers to as its “tree of derivation.” Governing statements at a deeper layer— or roots— delineate the conditions of possibility of more specific, derivative enunciations at the branches. Change is most likely to arise at the most superficial layer, where the ambiguities, irregularities, and contradictions that inevitably come forth as a result of

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constant (re)articulation in practice are much more apparent. Yet change is not an either/or event. Instead, it manifests at some layers within continuity at others (Wæver 2002, 32). In the case of ASEAN, the security community can be conceived as a core set of positions reproduced in discourse that are ultimately rooted in underlying, deep-seated assumptions that remain implicit. This common core then branches out into several discourse strands. Each strand tells its own epic story about the security community. It involves a relatively coherent set of more specific statements about the main source of insecurity, the referent object, and ASEAN’s role in the provision of regional security. Combined, these elements (re)produce a particular version of ASEAN’s security community in the making that is relatively self-coherent but comes into tension, sometimes implicitly, and at other times much more directly, with other versions. Speaking actors are an integral part of both the maintenance and transformation of a discourse. Depending on their position in the discursive field, they are more or less prone to circulate from one strand to the other. Some will tend to remain nested in one, while others will move more freely around. While their identity as social agents is partly dependent on how they situate themselves within the discursive field, they are also never fully its captive—borrowing from Foucault’s arboreal metaphor, they will visit, and sometimes nest, in other trees or discourses. Discourse analysis allows us to reconstruct how meaning circulates in a discrete ecosystem, knowing that a discourse is necessarily part of a broader “forest” that connects discourses together. The discourse-based approach to world politics I use here requires doing away with artificial distinctions between the material and the non-material, between discourse and practice, or between the physical and the social. Indeed, these are so closely intertwined in practice that they cannot be analytically separated. Instead of treating these elements as opposite, I posit that they can be reconciled into a single discourse-based analytical framework. This framework pays due attention to the agency of social agents as well as the enactment of specific practices through which the security community is “implemented,” because such practices also involve meaning-making (Hansen 2006, 69). The social construction of security depends on repetition, and a form of ritualistic incantation where both the speaker and the audience take part in performative practices that involve not just collective bodies like states, regional institutions, and other organizations “speaking” through written text, but actual people with individual agency (Salter 2008; Oren and Solomon 2015). The following chapters show that various state and non-state human actors hold various forms of discursive power and participate in the meaning-making of security and the boundary work that community-building involves.

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To map out this intersection between discourse (as structure) and the various discursive practices that enact the security community in situ, my approach to security community–building adopts a flexible methodology. I rely on methods that are not only common in (poststructuralist) discourse analysis but are also mobilized by other IR scholars engaging in practice theory–driven research: participant observation, in-depth interviews with practitioners, and document analysis. These tools of discourse analysis can be mobilized to “look down” into how individuals enact the security community in practice. Making my reliance on discourse explicit holds important methodological advantages that sets my approach apart from others that similarly center the social construction of international politics. First, because I study discourse as discourse, and work on texts3 “for what they are, not as indicators of something else” (Wæver 2002, 26), my methodology circumvents a major limitation of other strands of the broad tent of constructivist IR that treat language as a transparent conduit for unobservable factors—whether rooted in a “real world out there” or in human cognition. This has important implications when it comes to the study of practice, because the type of analysis I use is interpretivist, but not meant to “reconstruct background knowledge” (Bueger 2014, 388). It stops short at meaning that is “shared”—as in conveyed, but not necessarily commonly accepted or taken for granted. As Epstein (2008, 15) explains, taking shared meaning as the focus of analysis means that it is no longer necessary to assess “how much” a social agent “truly has” internalized a norm, been “really” persuaded, as opposed to being driven by rational calculus, or what she “speaks from” beyond the text (although one text necessarily draws from other texts). To put it bluntly, there is no need to open up anyone’s head to assess whether an actor believes what she says (see also Weldes and Sacco 1996, 371). In fact, “[w]hat matters is, quite simply, what the actor says” (Epstein 2008, 15), writes, or otherwise enacts, not her “secret plan,” or the deeper motive or belief, for why she says what she says, writes what she writes, or does what she does (Wæver 2002, 27). It does not matter whether the actor tells the truth or lies insofar as what she says has political effects—narrowing down options while enabling others, and further delineating what can be said from what cannot. A focus on shared meaning “restores the dynamic and bloody processes” that bring ideas to life in the first instance (Epstein 2008, 11). While scholars associated with the practice turn have taken issue with what they see as a “representational bias” (Pouliot 2008, 259), the reliance on discursive, representational practices remains the de facto inescapable anchor of any practice-based analysis (Bueger 2014, 389). Fortunately, a focus on text (i.e., the locus of shared meaning) as the unit of analysis can still accommodate the kind

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of unrehearsed and incoherent sharing of meaning that occurs when discourse is articulated in situ, including in interviews and other, more or less spontaneous, social encounters (see also Martel and Glas n.d.). As discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, my practitioner-near approach to discourse analysis extends to such texts as well, which provides a “more holistic account of the discursive terrain” under study (Shepherd 2015, 891). Second, focusing on discourse allows me the flexibility to travel across levels of analysis and study multiple types of actors—individual and collective. Indeed, one of the main advantages of studying discourse in the form of texts is that it does not require “a predetermined definition of who counts as actors” (Hansen 2011, 290). Instead, such an approach lets the unfolding of practice itself structure the analysis. As the discursive terrain of engagement is mapped out through discourse analysis, “who speaks” (Epstein 2011) and counts as a practitioner is defined broadly in theory, but inductively empirically. Discourse analysis targets all speaking actors indiscriminately, as long as they can successfully claim some authority in engaging in a particular debate. The “who” in question can be as much a collective actor (e.g., ASEAN) as an individual (e.g., the secretary general). Because it does not involve predetermined assumptions about what the relevant actors to security community–building are, my approach also makes room for the possibility of both state and non-state actors taking part as “meaning architects” (Lessig 1995 in Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 897) in security ­community– building. This includes non-state elite actors, but also non-elite, subaltern, and/ or marginalized actors who disrupt, challenge, and re-politicize dominant understandings of the security community (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016; Boemcken 2018) despite being in a situation where the discursive field is stacked against them. Indeed, while the ability to set the agenda, to promote new norms, or to monitor their implementation encapsulates many of the ways in which nonstate actors shape global and regional governance (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010), the overemphasis on norms as the primary medium of change in mainstream constructivist IR literature has also led to an underappreciation of the productive power of discourse in this story. Reducing the agency of actors like experts and activists to their ability to foster normative change fails to capture other, more subtle ways in which they exercise influence that cannot easily be measured or rendered in causal terms. Recent scholarship in norm research that focuses on norm contestation, polysemy, and resistance (among others, see Wiener 2009; 2012; Krook and True 2012; Bloomfield 2016 ) fare better than earlier work on making room for discursive practices and struggles over meaning, including those deployed by non-state

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actors. Yet they remain wedded to a truncated understanding of the power of “meaning-in-use” that ultimately reasserts the “ideational” as a realm beyond language where shared understandings of what counts as appropriate behavior take root. As an alternative, some scholars have emphasized the need for a pragmatist (Pratt 2020) or non-essentialist (Linsenmaier, Schmidt, and Spandler 2021) approach to norms as contested “all the way down” (Niemann and Schillinger 2017; Martel and Glas n.d.), making methodological choices that connect more closely with the approach taken here. In many instances, however, moving away from norms altogether is necessary to cover a broader spectrum of meaning-making dynamics in a way that more fully accounts for the ability of non-state actors to deploy (discursive) power. This becomes especially important when assessing how actors who remain on the fringes of spaces in which global governance is typically negotiated are still able to “constitute, resist, subvert, and transform” (De Almagro 2018, 676) world politics even in situations where a norm is not clearly identifiable, or when credit cannot be easily attributed to one specific source. As Holzscheiter (2005, 725) puts it, “an understanding of the power of nonstate actors requires an understanding of the power of discourse.” This focus also allows for the possibility that such power will often be enacted not as part of a well-thought-out strategy geared toward normative change, but sometimes inadvertently or even unknowingly, leading to unintended effects. At the same time, I also pay attention to the power dynamics and trade-offs that accompany this participation. This practitioner-near component of my approach is compatible with most of the tools typically employed in discourse analysis. While discourse analysis is often presented as a method, it is best understood as an aggregate of “sub-methods” deployed in tandem. My discursive methodology draws from the core notions of genealogy, deconstruction, and intertextuality—respectively developed by Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva—and combines some of their key elements into a single framework that guides my analysis of a specific corpus of “texts.” Genealogy involves mapping a “history of the present” by retracing the discursive process through which a discursive commonplace has emerged. A genealogical approach makes it possible to uncover what alternative interpretations or courses of action have been delegitimized, marginalized, or silenced along the way. It can help show that a particular outcome currently taken for granted was in no way inevitable, by exposing how particular components of a discourse have developed over time, and how they came to take the meaning(s) they have today. I do not claim to rely on a strict Foucauldian form of genealogy. My approach might be better described as involving the reconstruction of a “discursive history” of the construction of ASEAN as a security community in the making. Yet

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I do draw from some elements that are also broadly characteristic of genealogy as a method for the study of IR (Vucetic 2011). First, I recover the discursive process and practices that led ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making to develop over time, which is the core focus of Chapter 3. Second, I reconstruct the competing discourse strands that sustain the formulation of each “version” of this security community, addressed in Part 2. Third, I pay special attention to the conflicts and discursive power struggles that led some alternative representations and courses of action to be silenced, sidelined, or marginalized, if only temporarily. In turn, deconstruction identifies degrees of differentiation—what Derrida refers to as différance (Derrida 1967)—between the Self and a spectrum of Otherness in a discourse. The identity of both subjects and objects of a discourse is constituted through a simultaneous process of linking and difference. This process takes form through the articulation of a set of positive attributes to a specific identity, which are linked together and put against depreciated opposites (Hansen 2006, 17–18). This method informs the process through which I reconstructed the different discourse strands I discuss in Part 2. It helps identify ways through which ASEAN defines both the meaning of security and the boundaries of the regional community—what lies within and is deemed part of the community’s Self, against the Other(s) positioned outside of it. Finally, intertextuality starts with the recognition that a text always refers to a prior text—sometimes explicitly, but often implicitly, for instance by using rhetorical commonplaces. Each text, whether it is in the form of a written document or verbal statements, can therefore be inscribed into a broader web of intertextuality, the pattern of which traces the relations between texts. Intertextuality allows the discourse analyst to expose links between texts by retracing the gap between an original text and its subsequent reformulations in other texts, therefore allowing her to uncover competing interpretations. When it comes to public documentation, an intertextual approach helps delineate a body of texts linked together in a broader discourse, and is therefore intrinsically tied to the process of text selection, to which I now turn. Discourse analysis ought to be based on a substantial body of material representing the variety of positions held in the discursive field under study, but there is no absolute rule about the actual number of texts that should be part of the final corpus, as this depends heavily on context. As Neumann readily admits, “The problem of which texts to use as source material [is] not an easy one to tackle” (Neumann 1996, 2). It is also rarely possible, if ever, to account for all texts addressing a particular topic. This is certainly the case for texts pertaining to security community–building in the context of ASEAN. Still, there are

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general guidelines that can be applied across contexts in the analysis of policy discourse. The most typical point of departure for discourse analysis in IR is official discourse. This discursive core can then be situated in a larger intertextual web that reaches out toward the margins of a public debate. Discourse radiates through a series of concentric circles, according to the degree of authority of positions advanced by speaking actors involved in the debate— defined as the capacity to legitimately speak about a particular issue, and therefore the power to define meaning. My approach to text selection draws from Hansen’s (2006, 53 –57) distinction between three intertextual models. Texts associated with the first model reflect official discourse (Track 1), and are produced by agents of the state—and in this case, a multilateral institution— endowed with the authority to sanction a particular policy, or at least have a central role in its design or implementation. Texts produced by senior members of the military, the diplomatic corps, civil service, and so on can therefore be included in this first model. The second model broadens the scope to include texts produced by the major participants of a public debate (Track 2), including members of the opposition, the media, the corporate sector, and so on. In the present study, texts produced by experts involved in major Track 2 diplomacy networks, mechanisms, and dialogues in the Asia-Pacific region are included in this model. The third model expands the corpus further to include texts concerned with policy, but of a more subaltern or marginal status (Track 3). These texts and the speaking agents that author them typically convey less discursive power than those of the second model, although their marginal status can sometimes act as a source of alternative authority if accompanied by enough visibility. Texts produced by NGOs that engage ASEAN on peace and security issues fit within this model. These texts are important to include as they can still have some incidence over a policy debate, even if this contribution cannot easily be traced in causal terms. As my discussion (see Chapter 6) of the discursive practices deployed by NGOs in the debate over ASEAN’s identity as a “people-centered” security community shows, elements of texts associated with the third model sometimes find their way into the vocabulary deployed by speaking agents in the other models. Even when these texts never reach official speech, they reveal what alternative interpretations of reality are being sidelined. Text selection in the third model is typically more difficult and less systematic than in the other models, especially in an illiberal context where they are harder for an outsider to find. Therefore, “it will often be a matter of selecting any material that might be available” (Hansen 2006, 74) to the researcher. The distinction between models is not absolute, and is adjusted to the case under study. Each of the models can also include a variety of textual “genres.”

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The first model typically encompasses public documentation issued by the government sector or international organizations. It expands to policy statements and speeches, which may also be present in the second model. The second model may also include a variety of interventions in the context of parliamentary debates, public campaigns, interviews, conferences, books, policy briefs, and so on that overlap with the third model. The third model is defined broadly, and therefore where it begins and ends is even more flexible. Furthermore, media texts can permeate all models as their position depends on the identity of the author— which can also range across different models. As Hansen also makes clear, while the corpus is structured around a decreasing link to official discourse, this does not mean that the first model is more important than the second or the third. Discourse analysis aims to study how official discourse is situated in a broader public debate, and how it is legitimized, reproduced, and contested across a variety of texts, sites, and genres. Following Hansen (2006, 73 –74), I assembled a corpus of relevant texts that met at least two out of the following three criteria. These texts (1) were clearly articulated, (2) asserted a position of authority in the debate, and/or (3) were broadly read/heard/seen by participants in the discursive field where security community–building takes place. The broader aim behind this model is to gather texts that reflect the current state of a debate while also providing information on the development of major discourse strands, how they become possible, and what sociopolitical effects they have (Vucetic 2011, 1296). These criteria help distinguish key texts from other, more minor texts that engage with a policy question but can be discarded without sacrificing a significant component of a discourse. What matters here is not exhaustiveness or representativeness, but making sure that the major constitutive elements of a discourse are apparent in a corpus that is manageable for interpretative analysis. The selected texts, therefore, ideally offer a clear articulation of the link between identity and policy, are widely read and attended to, and have the formal authority to define a political position. The corpus is deemed complete once the addition of new texts that meet these criteria no longer reveals new major elements in a debate, at least for the specific period under study. Finally, while the use of interviews as material for discourse analysis is still rare, it is entirely warranted as long as the researcher remains conscious of the specificity of this body of texts. In this case, the text is not only produced in dialogue, but the analyst directly contributes to its fabrication during a social activity that has its own set of codes, practices, and power dynamics. This material, as long as it is treated as representational practice and not the expression of “truth” in a specific context, is particularly rich in that it is uniquely placed to “draw

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attention not only to the stability and sedimentation but also to the potential mutability” of a discourse (Griffin 2009, 26). Furthermore, it shows very clearly how “a commitment to poststructuralism and a desire for methodological rigour need not proscribe personal engagement with the research environment” (Shepherd 2015, 890). The bounded nature of the interview, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, is also well suited to discourse analysis. Field notes on meetings as well as the verbatim transcripts of interviews are analyzed similarly to other documents. This kind of material is particularly useful in revealing the ambiguities, discontinuities, and contradictions that inevitably arise from the reproduction of a discourse in practice—what Foucault (1969) refers to as the “points of diffraction” of discourse—which are typically less apparent, when they are not erased altogether in polished speech and written documentation. This analysis allows me to map out the inherent “messiness” of discourse in practice, the broader context for the issuance of key documents, and their linkages to prior texts (Epstein 2008, 11). Because of the emphasis on language in discourse analysis, the knowledge of a particular language and its codes might be required in some contexts. Original texts should generally be prioritized over translations. Alternatively, the analyst may shift the focus to texts that were aimed at an international, usually Englishspeaking, audience (Hansen 2006, 76). Because English is the working language in all three tracks of Asia-Pacific multilateralism, this research focused on texts in this language. While there are certainly many texts addressing the role of ASEAN in security governance produced in the national languages of member states, they fall beyond the scope of this study, which seeks to map out a multilateral-regional discursive field, consisting of texts aimed at an audience that extends across the national boundaries of states involved. When it comes to the actual analysis of this corpus of texts, I worked to identify the textual mechanisms of presupposition, predication, and positioning as outlined by Doty (1993). Presupposition refers to the conditions of possibility of statements, or what needs to be held as “true” for the discourse to be enacted in practice. A discursive historical approach is well suited to uncovering this mechanism. Predication, in turn, constructs an object or subject in a certain way by affixing attributes (i.e., predicates) to it that specify its identity and distinguish it from other objects or subjects. It constructs the thing(s) named as “a particular sort of thing, with particular features and capacities” (Milliken 1999, 232). This is uncovered by applying the method of deconstruction, which also helps reveal a third mechanism: that of positioning. Positioning is about the relationships between subjects and objects, by which subjects are granted varying degrees of agency with regard to an object, and objects are put in relation to one another as

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“similar,” “identical,” “opposite,” “complementary,” and so on. While it is useful to distinguish them for the purpose of methodological transparency, they often overlap, are deployed simultaneously in practice, and are imbricated in the same discursive statement. Discourse analysis must be understood as “interpretative” in the sense that it extracts discourse from the text by “translating” it through the identification of these mechanisms in statements. The methods and textual mechanisms discussed here have been applied to the various types of “texts” mentioned above, gathered in a corpus of more than 1500 documents. These included public documentation, verbatim transcripts of interviews, field notes taken during participant observation, as well as some visual materials. By combining more traditional forms of discourse analysis with a practitioner-near approach to the study of discourse in situ, I was able to reconstruct the main discourse strands informing the debate on ASEAN’s security community. In Part 2, I show how these strands developed over time and work to support the various “versions” of the security community in practice. The framework outlined in this chapter allows me to grasp the polysemy and contestation of security community–building, and to look at the effects this has on ASEAN’s institutional resilience. That security community–building is an ambiguous and contested enterprise is increasingly apparent, following ongoing efforts of the grouping to delineate, refine, and transform its quest for ontological security. This is why the bulk of the empirical demonstration in Part 2 focuses on the more recent evolution of ASEAN’s security enterprise. Yet, as the following chapter shows, ASEAN’s security mission has been polysemic, at least potentially omnidirectional, and a terrain of contestation ever since the grouping’s inception.

3

Ghosts of the Past, Present, and Future ­ASEAN’s ­Approach to Regional Security

asean recently recognized the need to formalize a compelling “identity narrative.” Yet this does not mean that such a narrative is not already on display. It has, in fact, been gradually fleshed out over time in key declarations, commemorative publications, the memoirs of its leaders and diplomats, and the statements of policy makers and various commentators. Indeed, ASEAN typically narrates its transformation into a security community as the unavoidable result of a process taking root in the grouping’s inception. A key feature of this narrative is to present ASEAN’s security mission as essential despite being implicit at the time of its creation. Further, by describing this as a narrative, I certainly do not mean to suggest that it can simply be dismissed as fiction. ASEAN undoubtedly went through an incremental process in which security considerations on the part of those involved in its creation and development have played a major role. Nor is this narrative without effect. The story ASEAN tells about itself (re)produces the idea of a much more coherent, linear, and carefully planned project than what transpires from a closer examination of key debates shaping its institutional evolution. By the same token, the ambivalence and contestation that accompanied the gradual but deeply controversial process through which the contours of ASEAN’s security role have been defined are smoothed out of the canvas. These discursive curves and edges, however, offer a much richer source for understanding past and current developments in the making of ASEAN as we know it today. That security was “incontrovertibly the central factor underlying the formation of [ASEAN]” (Rolls 2012, 127), as is often suggested, is a powerful statement,

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commonly asserted by observers of regional affairs. But it does not tell us much about how ASEAN came to define security, and the institution’s role in its pursuit, in a certain way and not others. This process was the result not of fate but of social agents actively enacting discursive power in particular ways, at particular moments, in a particular sequence. It was accompanied by a great deal of constructive ambiguity. This does not mean that those involved in defining ASEAN’s security approach shied away from discussing key issues, as is commonly implied by critics of the organization’s tendency to sweep contentious matters under the proverbial carpet. To the contrary, the moving common denominator on which ASEAN’s agenda rests is the result of an active process of negotiation in which the enactment of discursive power plays a key role, by delineating the possible from the impossible. The outcome, at each step, is anything but predetermined, but is heavily informed by the discursive practices mobilized by practitioners. These discursive practices are not merely the transparent conduit of already formed material interests, or reducible to ideas rooted in cognitive priors. Instead, the process through which ASEAN came to embrace its identity as a security community in the making was more indeterminate than what is commonly claimed. As a counterpoint to teleological accounts of ASEAN’s coming-of-age story as a nascent security community, this chapter offers a (condensed) discursive history of the evolution of the organization’s security approach that pays serious attention to the ambiguity, incoherence, and tension that accompanied it. As such, it also provides the necessary background paving the way for a more in-depth analysis of each version of the security community to be undertaken in Part 2. The purpose here is not to produce the definitive, “true” history of ASEAN’s institutional development by falsifying alternative accounts, which would not only be unnecessarily redundant1 but run directly against the approach presented in the previous chapter. Instead, I aim to provide a relatively concise but open-ended account of the development of ASEAN’s approach to regional security as a gradual but ­dynamic—and messy—narrowing-down of the realm of possibilities, with a focus on the productive power of discourse. My analysis does not delve into—in fact, it remains theoretically agnostic about—the motives and beliefs of participants in this process. Instead, it focuses on how they positioned themselves as “speaking agents” of particular interpretations of ASEAN’s role, and competed against alternative interpretations. Doing so, they sketched up fault lines that had long-standing effects but that cannot be grasped through a state-centric approach. That the outcome of this process— the formal launching of ASEAN on the path toward the security community— is shaped by material and ideational factors exogenous to the discursive field in

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which it took shape is hard to deny. Yet, as this chapter argues, it would not have been possible without the structuring influence of discourse and its enactment in practice. The remainder of this chapter is organized into three roughly delineated chronological but overlapping periods in ASEAN’s institutional development as they relate to its approach to regional security: (1) a period of consolidation (~1967–1991), (2) a period of expansion (~1991–1997), and (3) a period of deepening (~1997–2015). It maps out how ASEAN came to envision its role in the pursuit of regional security, ultimately seizing the goal of becoming a (rather peculiar) “security community.”

Consolidating (1967–1991) The notion that “security has always been at the back of ASEAN’s mind”2 since its creation in 1967, if not before, is so consensual among practitioners and observers of regional affairs that it has become somewhat of a cliché. It also serves as a powerful feature of ASEAN’s self-narrative, which presents the grouping retroactively as an incipient security community–building institution right from its infancy. Security considerations were indeed a key driver in failed attempts to create a viable regional organization in Southeast Asia in the years leading up to ASEAN’s founding.3 At the same time, it is also widely accepted, and apparent in formal declarations, that ASEAN’s mission, throughout its formative years, was presented as anything but political and/or security cooperation. ASEAN’s founding document, the Bangkok Declaration of August 8, 1967, is a meager two-pager specifying a broad vision for economic and sociocultural cooperation among its founding member states: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The apparent paradox of ASEAN being both anything but and all about security continues to be justified through repeated invocations of the unspoken, implicit but “pretty obvious”4 ulterior security motives on the part of the founders of ASEAN, endowed with exceptional clairvoyance. These founding fathers are Indonesia’s Presidium Minister for Political Affairs and Minister of Foreign Affairs Adam Malik, Secretary of Foreign Affairs for the Philippines Narciso Ramos, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Abdul Razak, Singapore’s Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Rajaratnam, and Thailand’s Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman. Security as an “unspoken” (Thompson 2017) but crucial objective right from the start occupies a special place in ASEAN’s self-narrative about its creation and the years that followed, as exemplified in the memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister: “While ASEAN’s declared objectives were economic,

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social, and cultural, all knew (emphasis added) that [we] were banding together more for political objectives, stability and security” (quoted in Severino 2006, 163).5 While similar statements by the founders themselves have been referred to time and time again by their successors, other practitioners, and observers of ASEAN affairs, the extent to which “all knew” or were in full agreement remains unclear and debatable. Most interviewees speak of the founders as being “very cautious,” “farsighted,” and as having “something very clear in mind” when they created ASEAN. Yet some assert, sometimes in the same breath, that these great men were also in “denial” about the security underpinnings of the institution’s founding. As Adam Malik himself readily admits in his memoirs, “Although from the outset, ASEAN was conceived as an organization for economic, social, and cultural cooperation [. . .] consciously or unconsciously (emphasis added), considerations of national and regional security also figured largely in the minds of the founders of ASEAN” (in Acharya 2012, 156). Whatever actually transpired in key meetings in ASEAN’s formative years, established knowledge about what lay hidden behind its inception serves as the (unstable) basis on which the gradual affirmation of its security role rests. It also works wonders to reinforce the notion, in the words of the former ASEAN secretary general (1998 –2002), the late Rodolfo Severino, that “without being named as such until [many years later], an ASEAN Security Community has been ASEAN’s central purpose from the beginning” (2006, 164). As will become more apparent in the remainder of this chapter and the following ones, what realizing said community entails remains as ambiguous and contested as ever—which is also quite convenient for the reproduction of ASEAN’s self-narrative.

The Bangkok Declaration (1967) While the core text of ASEAN’s founding document is devoid of allusions to security, concerns over regional stability certainly loomed large in the lead-up to the organization’s establishment on August 8, 1967. The bulk of negotiations focused on the extent to which security considerations of individual member states were to be reflected in the declaration. Security is not entirely absent from the document but is found in its preamble. It stipulates that “the countries of South-East Asia are determined to ensure their stability and security from external interference in any form or manifestation” and, as such, that “all foreign bases are temporary and remain only with the expressed concurrence of the countries concerned” (ASEAN 1967). The matter of foreign bases proved especially contentious, with lasting effects on ensuing discussions among representatives of member states throughout the

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following years. It was the immediate sticking point of a broader fundamental disagreement that pertained to whether or not the grouping should take on an explicit security role, what the nature of this role would be, and whether and to what extent there ought to be room for some kind of collective defense scheme in its future. On various occasions in the years leading to ASEAN’s founding, many of the key players, including Malaysia’s Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman (hereafter the Tunku), President of the Philippines Carlos Garcia, and Indonesian General cum President Suharto, promoted the idea of a regional collective defense treaty or arrangement. The notion that regionalism would or should extend to defense had to be actively dispelled, on repeated occasions, by Thanat Khoman, Adam Malik, Narciso Ramos, and representatives of Malaysia’s Foreign Ministry, sometimes in direct opposition to their own government or the military (Tarling 2006, 128 –37). These efforts were part of a difficult balancing act. Defense cooperation among Southeast Asian states had to be excluded from discussions in the near term, while keeping the door open to the possibility and, in the meantime, allowing for the preservation of bilateral defense agreements with the big powers. These discussions structured diplomatic exchanges leading up to the creation of ASEAN. In the aftermath of Konfrontasi, a period of acute tension between Malaysia and Indonesia (as well as the Philippines over Sabah) that saw previous attempts at regional cooperation derailed, a formal proposal for a new grouping was circulated by Thanat Khoman to his counterparts in February 1967. The draft document spelled out a “primary responsibility” on the part of Southeast Asian countries for “ensuring the stability and maintaining the security” of the region against “subversion in any form or manifestation.” Drawing from prior language used in a series of arrangements adopted in the context of MAPHILINDO,6 it also explicitly stated that “foreign bases [were] temporary in nature and should not be allowed to be used directly or indirectly to subvert the national independence of their countries, and that arrangements of collective defence should not be used to serve the particular interest of any of the big powers” (in Tarling 2006, 125). The consensus that transpires in existing accounts ( Jorgensen-Dahl 1982; Haacke 2003; Tarling 2006) of preliminary discussions and the Bangkok meeting itself is that Thanat Khoman played an instrumental role in assuaging his counterparts’ reservations—the Tunku’s in particular—by developing careful phrasing that would allow the inclusion of a reference to foreign bases, thus ensuring the support of Indonesia. It is also broadly recognized that the negotiation of ASEAN’s founding document was conducted “very carefully, avoiding occasions for disputation and

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controversy” (Severino 2006, 11) that could impede the drafting process. However, a review of existing historical accounts quickly makes it apparent that ­controversy— over security in particular—in fact played a big part in the establishment of ASEAN. The final phase of discussions seems to have focused on finding a way to refer to security considerations in the Bangkok Declaration, with the excerpt on foreign bases, unsurprisingly, proving the most contentious (Haacke 2003, 43). As a result of the tabling of several drafts and counter-proposals, the most problematic passage of the initial statement, according to which “arrangements of collective defence should not be used to serve the particular interest of any of the big powers,” was simply deleted. The allusion to the temporary dimension of foreign bases was retained, however, as a way to compromise between Indonesia’s desire for a reference to the neutrality of the region as a long-term project and the recognition of other member states’ legitimate right to preserve existing defense links with external powers (Haacke 2003, 43 –44; Ba 2009, 60). This delicate balancing in defining what “neutrality” meant for the region would continue to feature prominently in discussions surrounding the adoption of the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality declaration in 1971 and its aftermath. While it did involve sweeping some differences under the carpet, this decision resulted from competing views clashing without resolution, instead of being made preventively. Contestation is often conveniently left out of accounts of ASEAN’s founding, but it plays a key role in explaining the outcome and future debates on its contribution to regional security. Comments by the Philippines’ Secretary of Foreign Affairs Narciso Ramos at the Bangkok meeting indicate that the final consensus on language was by no means a given: “The Declaration we have just signed was not easy to come by; it is the result of a long and tedious negotiation which truly taxed the good will, the imagination, the patience and the understanding of the five participating ministers. That [ASEAN] has become a reality despite all these difficulties only attests to the fact that ASEAN’s foundations have been well and solidly laid” (Severino 2006, 9). Interestingly, such comments not only serve to present the founders as exceptionally competent diplomats, but also reintroduce ASEAN’s coming into being as almost unavoidable and the result of a collective vision. Yet while Singapore’s Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam similarly described the negotiating process leading to the founding declaration as particularly tedious, he also stated after the fact that ASEAN founders faced “a very difficult problem of trying to say nothing” of substance while still producing a declaration. This is because “at the time, we ourselves, having launched ASEAN, were not quite sure where it was going or whether it was going anywhere at all” (quoted in Ba 2009, 69).

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Material factors and “shared understandings” surely played a part in the outcome. Yet discursive practices and the agency of key players is what ultimately made it possible to turn past failures into what would prove to be a remarkably durable security institution (Haacke 2003, 43). This included active efforts to sideline alternative courses of action that were well within the realm of possible action at the time. What was said, and how it was said, mattered in and of itself— not merely as the reflection of deeper motives or beliefs, which would in any case have remained indeterminate and without substance were it not for their enactment as meaning-in-use. Allusions to the extension of ASEAN’s mandate to security cooperation would continue to be raised and involve a great deal of ambiguity in the years that followed ( Jorgensen-Dahl 1982, 73; Ba 2009, 61– 62). While Rajaratnam later argued that the path spelled out in Bangkok had “dispose[d] of the early misunderstanding that ASEAN had military implications,” the possibility of Southeast Asian states coming together in a military pact would still be brought up fairly consistently in the following years by Indonesian and Malaysian officials (Tarling 2006, 137–38). For instance, Ismail bin Ambia, the head of Malaysia’s national ASEAN secretariat, disclosed to foreign diplomats that, despite its emphasis on economic and sociocultural cooperation, it could hardly be denied that ASEAN could one day form a defense pact. In turn, a counselor to the Indonesian embassy in Kuala Lumpur described ASEAN as “already a form of security organisation” (in Tarling 2006, 142 –43). At a minimum, these comments show that practitioners continued to feel a need to publicly portray ASEAN as carrying this possibility, for regional and foreign audiences. This need is also apparent in the following ASEAN meetings. Debate on an Indonesian proposal to extend the organization’s agenda to security cooperation at the third ASEAN meeting in December 1969 shows that the delineation of its security role was still highly contentious. While the possibility of a military collective defense system that would extend to the whole of Southeast Asia had by then clearly lost whatever traction it previously had, security cooperation itself was not out of the question. Thanat Khoman, in particular, opened up the grouping to a broader understanding of security that would later form a key component of its mandate. During a meeting in Malaysia, he phrased his position in rather enigmatic terms: “Security is different from a military alliance. What Thailand wants to develop is collective political defence” (quoted in Tarling 2006, 148). Comments by Adam Malik at the time exhibit a similar ambivalence, in the context of renewed attempts by the Indonesian Army to push for a collective defense scheme. Instead, Malik would emphasize what would become a core discursive feature of

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ASEAN’s security project, “regional resilience,” and describe Indonesia’s contribution to the security of the region as “diplomatic defence,” as opposed to “military defence” (quoted in Tarling 2006, 148). It is therefore clear that the language used to refer to the security undertones of ASEAN remained very much in flux.

The Declaration on ZOPFAN (1971) The growing emphasis on “regional resilience” in regional discourse certainly accompanied the gradual sidelining of militarized regionalism as an appropriate course of action for ASEAN. In no way did this mean that defense cooperation would no longer be discussed. To the contrary, regional resilience imbued member states with a direct responsibility in ensuring regional defense, despite weak military capabilities. In the words of Philippine Foreign Secretary Carlos Romulo, ASEAN states shared a “growing need to be self-reliant even in such matters as security and military preparedness” given the growing difficulty “to justify the continuing presence of military bases and military assistance programs” (quoted in Wurfel 1974, 450) by foreign powers. In turn, Tun Abdul Razak, poised to take over as Malaysia’s prime minister, emphasized a common responsibility of ASEAN states “to take decisive and collective actions to prevent the growth of intra-regional conflict” by filling the “vacuum” left by colonial powers by ASEAN’s own “collective power” (Ba 2009, 65). These statements, which were made in the years leading up to the adoption of the next major ASEAN declaration— on the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality—were part of a discursive process that defined self-reliance, autonomy, and protection from foreign intervention as a common, regional enterprise. They also left open the possibility for direct cooperation among Southeast Asian states toward this endeavor, at least on a bilateral basis if not necessarily through ASEAN itself. At the very least, such comments make clear that the formally apolitical and non-security character of the grouping was being gradually dispelled in the regional discourse. These discussions would continue to inform ensuing debates on neutralization. Building on the security elements that had made it into the Bangkok Declaration, a new phase of the debate around ASEAN’s regional security role was initiated by a Malaysian proposal, first spelled out in 1968 and refined in the following years, to develop a “policy of neutralization for Southeast Asia.” Tabled at the 4th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in 1971, the proposal was meant to protect small countries of the region from being used as “pawns by the Big Powers” (Suryanarayan 1975, 48). At the same time, its promoters underscored the need to obtain a guarantee by the major powers that the neutrality of the region would be respected. The

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proposal was also premised on existing defense agreements being preserved. This apparent contradiction and ensuing attempts by the Malaysian side to reconcile these competing demands were met with a great deal of skepticism, but also outright hostility. Adam Malik, for instance, described the idea of an external guarantee as an invitation to foreign powers to intervene, which Indonesia could not accept despite being in favor of the broader objective of neutrality (Alagappa 1991, 271–73). As a response to the concerns of his counterparts, Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Ghazali bin Shafie undertook a detailed defense of the proposal during a special meeting of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers in October 1971. The initiative was broken down into two steps: First, Southeast Asian countries would agree to “respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and not participate in activities likely to directly or indirectly threaten the security of another.” Southeast Asian countries would be responsible to ensure peace among themselves, and would be tasked to develop and present “a collective view before the major powers on vital issues of security” and the promotion of regional cooperation. Second, the big powers would recognize Southeast Asia as an “area of neutrality” and “exclude countries in the region from the power struggle amongst themselves” by devising “supervisory means of guaranteeing this neutrality” (Hanggi 1991, 14). By switching to the language of “neutrality” in lieu of “neutralization,” this iteration of the proposal put more emphasis on the special responsibility of ASEAN states to ensure regional security. It also made it compatible with the preservation of an external guarantee now portrayed as an “important ingredient” that Southeast Asian states were no longer required to embrace (Alagappa 1991, 274). These efforts would not suffice to quell disagreement, however. A less ambitious proposal in favor of an “ASEAN Declaration on Peace and Neutrality” was put forward by Thailand as a more prudent alternative, but still attracted nowhere near the necessary consensus (Ba 2009, 75). The next meeting, which took place in Kuala Lumpur in November 1971, was marked by “fierce debates” (Hanggi 1991, 17) pitting Malaysia most clearly against the Philippines and Singapore, whose representatives systematically took down the neutralization concept. This ongoing disagreement did not prevent the group from agreeing to declare the “neutralization of Southeast Asia” as a “desirable objective” (ASEAN 1971). As a result, the 1971 Kuala Lumpur Declaration on ZOPFAN ultimately took the form of an aspirational document, spelling out the aim of fostering a durable peace in the region by mitigating the risks of interference by foreign powers and the promotion of cooperation among Southeast Asian states. It included no definition of neutralization nor any reference to the

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means through which this objective ought to be implemented. Leifer accurately described the concept as a “political chameleon [that] appears in different hues” according to how the interests of the parties are defined by their representatives (Leifer 1973, 600 – 601). The ZOPFAN declaration is a clear manifestation of the constructive ambiguity that would become part and parcel of ASEAN’s approach to regional security. The result is not that ZOPFAN is meaningless, but that it holds several meanings simultaneously. There is no agreement on which interpretation prevails nor how its competing components—the desire for autonomy, the need for an external guarantee, and the preservation of existing defense arrangements— ought to be defined and reconciled. It is, in other words, polysemic, and this polysemy informs how future debates on these concerns take shape. At the very least, the document contributed to enshrine and partially stabilize the meaning of previously agreed-upon principles, such as non-interference, peaceful coexistence, and regional resilience. These phrases would from then on be part and parcel of ASEAN’s self-narrative in construction, and of how it would define its approach to security (Ba 2009, 75 –76). Since the ZOPFAN Declaration, in the end, made no mention of an external guarantee beyond a vague reference to freedom from “interference by outside powers” (ASEAN 1971), this unresolved question alone helped ensure a perennial space for ZOPFAN in ensuing discussions of ASEAN’s contribution to regional stability. In fact, clarifying the definition of neutralization and steps toward its realization would next be taken up at a meeting of senior officials in Kuala Lumpur in 1972. A number of proposals were put on the table at this meeting, starting with a detailed account by Malaysia of the steps to be taken, which included a draft treaty and its registration at the UN. In turn, the Indonesian delegation also had a paper outlining steps to ZOPFAN through “national resilience,” while Thailand had one focusing on existing examples of neutrality. A working group was also tasked with the responsibility of clarifying the ZOPFAN concept and its individual components—peace, neutrality, and freedom (Hanggi 1991). The meeting further resulted in the adoption of a general definition and final goal for ZOPFAN, which would be realized when the “national identity, independence and integrity of the individual States within such a zone can be preserved and maintained, so that they can achieve national development [. . .] and promote regional co-operation and solidarity [. . .] free from any form [. . .] of interference by outside powers” (in Hanggi 1991, 22). Key elements remained highly contentious, however, including the precise nature of an external guarantee—more specifically, whether it could be achieved

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without giving foreign powers a right to interfere—and whether a conflict resolution mechanism should be a prerequisite for ZOPFAN. As such, a great deal of confusion remained regarding the meaning of “neutralization.” To some it meant neutrality, to others self-reliance, while still others (e.g., Singapore) described it as a means to an end— demilitarization, denuclearization, and so on. According to Albert Tallala, the Malaysian official in charge of neutralization who had led the working group on ZOPFAN, “the concept of a neutralized zone had now been accepted by all the countries in the region” (Tarling 2006, 169). But there was still no consensus on what it actually entailed, despite a definition having been spelled out. The external guarantee remained a salient point of disagreement, beyond a basic recognition of the need to “limit foreign presence in the region to a level that was acceptable.” Whether or not this would mean “doing away with bilateral defence agreements” (in Tarling 2006, 166), and according to what time frame, was nowhere near being resolved. Furthermore, the expansion of ZOPFAN to the whole of Southeast Asia and not just ASEAN’s five member states was still a work in progress. Preliminary steps came in the form of a proposal put forward by Thailand. In his opening address to the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting of 1973, Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn called for a conference of the ten states of Southeast Asia that would allow them to discuss “the problems of security for one and all in this region.” Against concerns that this proposal would extend to the adoption of a military pact, a press statement on the meeting by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand had to clarify that security ought to be conceived in a broad sense, as “stability, general peace and tranquility in the region” (Tarling 2006, 173). This proposal would pave the way for discussions surrounding the elaboration of a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, formally taken on by the ASEAN Foreign Ministers in preparation for the first ASEAN Summit in 1976.

The Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (1976) and SEANWFZ The capture of Phnom Penh, Saigon, and Vientiane by communist forces in 1975 rid the region of direct foreign intervention. As such, it contributed to creating a more favorable context for the extension of ASEAN’s vision for regional stability, and the ZOPFAN concept, to the rest of Southeast Asia. At the 8th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, discussions on the implementation of ZOPFAN resulted in the spelling out of additional steps, including the elaboration of a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Repeated attempts by Indonesia to put military cooperation on ASEAN’s agenda led the grouping to further define the realm of possibilities, security-wise. While the prospect for a military pact was more firmly deemed outside the scope by then, the creation of a dispute settlement mechanism and

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the formal recognition of security cooperation between ASEAN states was also recognized as an appropriate course of action. The first ASEAN Summit was held in Bali in February 1976. It resulted in the adoption of two major initiatives that would have important implications for the further development of ASEAN’s approach to regional security. The Declaration of ASEAN Concord (Bali Concord I) included the first explicit endorsement by ASEAN of security cooperation between its member states, although it also specified that this cooperation ought to be undertaken “on a non-ASEAN basis” (ASEAN 1976a). In turn, the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), endorsed then by ASEAN leaders, formalized a distinct set of principles aimed to guide interstate relations to ensure peace and stability through “regional resilience,” including mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-intervention, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. It also established a conflict resolution mechanism, the High Council, by which the Foreign Ministers of ASEAN could provide good offices aimed at conflict resolution, bound by consensus. While the High Council has never been assembled in practice, TAC principles would serve as the “foundation for a strong and viable community of nations in Southeast Asia.” There is no reference to security cooperation per se in the TAC, yet Article 12 does spell out a common goal of parties to “foster cooperation in the furtherance of the cause of peace, harmony, and stability in the region,” to be undertaken in “all fields” pertaining to regional resilience. These fields, which are stated in Article 11, explicitly include security (ASEAN 1976c). The years following the adoption of the TAC would continue to see ASEAN embroiled in tensions among its members and with other Southeast Asian states in the context of the Cambodian conflict. Open criticism of ZOPFAN and rival alternatives put forward by the CLMV (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam) put a damper on earlier hopes for the realization of a community of all Southeast Asian states (Acharya 2012, 183). At that time, ASEAN was mostly preoccupied with developing a common position on the conflict—including Vietnam’s invasion of Phnom Penh in 1979 —and the negotiations leading to a peace agreement. In the midst of ongoing tensions on the Indo-Chinese peninsula, discussions on ZOPFAN would, however, be relaunched in the mid-1980s, and extend to a new component: denuclearization. In the 1980s, more positive signaling by the communist states led to a relaunching of discussions on ZOPFAN, with a new focus on the Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons–Free Zone (SEANWFZ). Building on earlier discussions among ASEAN senior officials on neutralization, Indonesia made a formal proposal at the Foreign Ministers Meeting in Jakarta in 1984, with the support of Malaysia. The proposal encountered significant resistance by the rest of the

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ASEAN membership for reasons similar to those that had continued to hinder discussions around ZOPFAN. The preservation of existing defense arrangements and the difficulty of securing formal recognition by nuclear-weapon states were especially contentious. The working group on ZOPFAN, formally resurrected at the Manila Summit in 1987, was the terrain of intense discussions on the contribution of major powers to the defense of the region. The presence of American bases in the Philippines, and agreements pertaining to the increase of the U.S. military imprint in Singapore were seen as a direct challenge to the realization of ZOPFAN. This led to semantic debates during which, interestingly, both sides drew heavily from previously agreed-upon ASEAN language to make their case. On the one hand, the Philippines’ Secretary of Foreign Affairs Raul Manglapus and Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew emphasized the “temporary” nature of foreign bases to justify their ongoing presence as being compatible with ASEAN’s long-held vision for regional security. On the other hand, Malaysian and Indonesian officials pleaded that military “bases”—as opposed to other forms of foreign support, such as the presence of defense “facilities”—ran against the objectives spelled out in the ZOPFAN Declaration and, more broadly, the “ASEAN spirit of mutual trust and cooperation” (Ba 2009, 163 – 69). This process led ASEAN to further clarify its view on the acceptable limits of a foreign presence in Southeast Asia. A “refined consensus” emerged out of this “criticizing, defending, and reconciling” of competing interpretations of the language (Ba 2009, 169), leading to a gradual narrowing of options and the recognition of a need to “actualize ZOPFAN” (Alagappa 1991, 271). It also served as an opportunity to advocate for a more proactive security role by ASEAN, paving the way for the expansion of this role to the broader Asia-Pacific region. The SEANWFZ Treaty itself would be adopted in 1995, and enter into force in 1997, amid discussions about the expansion of ASEAN’s membership to include the CLMV. The relaunching of discussions around ZOPFAN—and the adoption of ­SEANWFZ—are closely intertwined with debates on the expansion of the TAC to the rest of Southeast Asia. Alternative views were defended by Thailand and Indonesia. The view defended by Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was that the TAC ought to support the affirmation of ASEAN’s security role in the broader region, while the Indonesians saw things differently. In the words of Ali Alatas, “the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation is meant as a treaty for Southeast Asian countries” (in Ba 2009, 187). Expanding it beyond Southeast Asia would run against ZOPFAN and invite foreign interference. These competing views were only reconciled by the careful phrasing developed in the 1987 protocol amending the TAC to allow for non–Southeast Asian states to join pending “the

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consent of all the States in Southeast Asia” that were already parties to the treaty. Furthermore, the document clarified the procedure for non–Southeast Asian participation in the High Council, restricting it to states directly involved in a conflict (ASEAN 1987b). These debates would serve as preliminary steps toward the expansion of ASEAN’s security role in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, first through the establishment of a security dialogue in the broader Asia-Pacific region, and second by the extension of its membership to all ten Southeast Asian states.

Expanding (1991–1997) At the beginning of the 1990s, imbued with a new aura of credibility after its contribution to the end of the Cambodian conflict, ASEAN was in a good position to undertake a new phase in drawing the contours of its approach to regional security. This expansion unfolded in two ways: (1) the establishment of a security dialogue for the broader Asia-Pacific region in which ASEAN acted as a “driving force” (the ASEAN Regional Forum) and (2) the enlargement of ASEAN itself to include other Southeast Asian states (i.e., the CLMV) in its membership. Neither of these developments has been a smooth process, and the enactment of meaningin-use is, again, key to understanding the outcomes.

The Establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum In the aftermath of its first summit, in 1977, ASEAN had instigated the practice of post-summit meetings with non–Southeast Asian “dialogue partners”— initially, Australia, Canada, the European Union,7 Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. This status was progressively extended throughout the 1990s to include South Korea (1991), China, Russia, and India (1996).8 In 1997, ASEAN also started convening ASEAN Plus Three meetings with China, Japan, and South Korea to advance East Asian cooperation. As a result of the development of “ASEAN Plus” relationships, which would lead to larger formulas in the following years (i.e., Plus Six, Plus Eight, . . .), the grouping would have to cope with a repeated influx of proposals from its dialogue partners to ameliorate the state of regional governance. These include some that explicitly aimed to enhance the security of the broader region through the creation of new fora. The adjudication between these different proposals, and ensuing attempts from Southeast Asian actors involved in this debate to retain the initiative, have been a core part of ASEAN’s security agenda since the 1990s. The inaugural episode of this ongoing saga (see Chapter 5) dates back to the establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).

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In July 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev had been the first of many state leaders to publicly call for the creation of an Asia-Pacific conference founded on the model of the Helsinki process. Indeed, this initiative was quickly followed, in August 1987, by an Australian proposal to develop confidence-building mechanisms among states in the Asia-Pacific region. For Gareth Evans, this ought to take form through the gradual development of an Asia-Pacific version of the Council for Security Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), based on the notion of “common security.” In turn, the Canadian secretary of external affairs, Joe Clark, played a leading role in pushing for a version of the CSCE suitable to the Asia-Pacific context, with support from the United States (Capie and Evans 2007, 60 – 61). All of these proposals were met with a great deal of skepticism in Southeast Asia, as they were reportedly viewed as “too structured and formalistic,” as going “against the grain of ASEAN’s diplomatic and security culture,” and as “eclipsing the role and significance of the Association to the advantages of major powers” (Haacke 2003, 78). The repeated invocation of the Helsinki model was a particularly contentious point. According to Ba (2009, 173), the CSCE “became kind of a bad word in ASEAN such that any reference to it practically guaranteed a proposal’s defeat (especially if initiated by Western powers).” As Chapter 5 discusses in more detail, similar fault lines would continue to inform ensuing debates over ASEAN’s position as the primary “driving force” in a broader regional community. Since 1990, ASEAN actors have actively tried to ensure that the grouping retained the initiative in devising such a dialogue. This process contributed to the further refinement of ASEAN’s approach to security and the resolution of divergences between participants in its elaboration. In 1990, during the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Raul Manglapus called for a general dialogue on the security of Southeast Asia. This proposal built on informal (Track 2) dialogues to delineate ASEAN’s contribution to regional security in the broader region, including on the South China Sea disputes. For Manglapus and others, like Ali Alatas, regional security ought to be “conceived in the region” instead of foreign capitals, and as such, ASEAN had to “produce its own response” to calls for the creation of a new platform for discussing security issues of common concerns or risk being bypassed (in Ba 2009, 173 –75). This would become a common refrain of ASEAN, including most recently in the debate surrounding the “Free and Open IndoPacific” and the adoption of ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. This response would be articulated by the ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS), a Track 2 network of Southeast Asia–based think tanks launched in 1988. A memorandum titled “A Time for Initiative” was circulated in 1991 to the ASEAN Foreign Ministers with the hope of having it

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tabled at the Fourth ASEAN Summit the following year. The document called for the ASEAN post-ministerial conferences (ASEAN-PMC) with dialogue partners to serve as a basis to expand discussions on security, building on an earlier suggestion by Alatas in 1989 (Katsumata 2006, 183, 191). While the ASEAN-ISIS proposal was under study by the foreign ministers, new proposals were also being touted by Canada, Australia, and Japan. Jusuf Wanandi, the ringleader of ASEAN-ISIS, refers to an “awkward moment” when Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama was the first to officially propose, at a meeting with the ASEAN Foreign Ministers, that the ASEAN-PMC be used as “a process of political discussions designed to improve the sense of security among us” (cited in Vatikiotis 1991, 11, as reproduced in Acharya 2009b, 233; see also Chalermpuntusak 2012).9 In Wanandi’s (2006, 40) rendition of the chain of events, Nakayama’s ASEAN counterparts were forced to “politely reject” the proposal in order to retain the initiative (see also Kerr 1994), before offering a glimpse of an ASEAN-grown version, drawing from the ASEAN-ISIS memorandum, in their joint communiqué. The statement conveyed that the ministers “took note”—a phrase typically used by ASEAN to graciously dismiss proposals it considers unsuitable— of the “increasing interest in issues relating to peace and security in the region.” The ministers were formally of the view that the PMC process, alongside ZOPFAN and the TAC, were more “appropriate bases for addressing the regional peace and security issues” of the post-Cold war era (ASEAN 1991). At the Singapore Summit (ASEAN 1992b), ASEAN leaders acknowledged that the grouping “could use established fora to promote external dialogues on enhancing security in the region as well as intra-ASEAN dialogues on ASEAN security cooperation. [. . .] To enhance this effort, ASEAN should intensify its external dialogues in political and security matters by using the ASEAN Post Ministerial Conferences (PMC).” This language offered the ASEAN-PMC as a first step, while leaving open the possibility of a new forum being developed as the natural prolongation of initiatives already in place at the ASEAN level. It also referred to previous Track 2 discussions, although it did not mention ASEANISIS by name. Finally, the summit also saw the adoption of a separate Declaration on the South China Sea (ASEAN 1992a), which would serve as a basis for future negotiations between ASEAN and China. The establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum was formally announced in 1993 at the 26th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting—which also adopted an action plan on ZOPFAN. This announcement built on the outcome of an earlier meeting of ASEAN-PMC senior officials (ASEAN 1993). It also formally recognized ASEAN-ISIS as a contributor. The inaugural meeting of the ARF was held in

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Bangkok in July 1994, where the foreign ministers of its (initial) membership of eighteen member states10 agreed to convene on an annual basis (ARF 1994). The ARF Concept Paper adopted at the second meeting in 1995 spelled out the nature of the process in clearer terms. It would be consensus-based and “move at a pace comfortable to all,” through an evolutionary approach in three stages: the promotion of confidence-building, the development of preventive diplomacy mechanisms, and the elaboration of approaches to conflict management (ARF 1995). The concept paper also formalized the integration of a Track 2 component into the ARF process, to be embodied by the newly established Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP)—an Asia-Pacific extension of ASEAN-ISIS. Differences over issues of “membership, process, and substance” (Ba 2009, 182), including ASEAN’s leadership role as a “driving force,” were already apparent at the time between the grouping and its dialogue partners. This divide would only intensify over the years, as discussed in Chapter 5. Yet this process of adjudicating competing demands and defending ASEAN’s unique role also contributed to gradually sharpening the contours of the grouping’s identity. ASEAN, as a regional security institution, was “non confrontational, inclusive, and ­dialogue-driven,” as opposed to practices privileged by its non–Southeast Asian (and mainly Western) “Others.” This model was presented as the only viable option given its “non-threatening” nature, which allowed it to convene all of the regional powers at its table (Ba 2009, 182 – 83; see also Stubbs 2014). This paved the way for the gradual affirmation of ASEAN’s aspired “centrality” in a broader institutional ecosystem. The process leading to the establishment of the ARF also contributed to further specify the distinct characteristics of ASEAN’s approach to regional security, particularly the twin notions of “cooperative” and “comprehensive” security. By developing a regional flavor that echoed but contrasted with other new security concepts circulating at the time, ASEAN was able to counter earlier suggestions that a regional dialogue on Asia-Pacific security should build on the CSCE and its “common security” approach. ASEAN proposed its own model as an alternative, and was mostly successful, despite giving rise to significant and sustained frustration at its tendency to evade contentious issues pertaining to “hard” security. While a cooperative security approach is often considered to be integral to ASEAN, the endorsement of this concept at the ARF was the result of a careful and incremental process. References to cooperative relationships, initiatives, mechanisms, and approaches to security abound in ARF documents right from the beginning, but the phrase “cooperative security” itself would take more time to make its way into official language.11 By contrast, “comprehensive security”

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was quickly endorsed as a central component of the ARF process, as spelled out in the 1995 Concept Paper. The “indigenous” character of “cooperative security” for the Asia-Pacific region, according to Capie and Evans (2007, 109), facilitated its diffusion in ASEAN language, while the contribution of Canadian and Australian champions of the concept would be conveniently played down. In a memorandum published in 1993, ASEAN-ISIS drew extensively on the definition of cooperative security put forward by Gareth Evans at the General Assembly of the United Nations to discuss the potential value of the concept for the ARF. Interestingly, the document begins by presenting “comprehensive security” as a Southeast Asian concept that is “identical” to regional resilience, before positioning both cooperative and collective security as secondary notions that comprehensive security can incorporate. There is certainly a lot of overlap between this definition and how the ARF’s approach to regional security was further refined in the following years. Indeed, comprehensive security was not only compatible with the definition of cooperative security provided above, but was already embedded, albeit sometimes in different terms, in the security doctrine of a number of individual ASEAN states since the 1970s (Alagappa 1988). The inaugural meeting of the ARF was held as part of a broader set of meetings related to the 27th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting. The presence of all ten Southeast Asian states at the meeting, for the first time in ASEAN’s history, was a good occasion to articulate a commitment to “a Southeast Asian community through common membership in ASEAN” (ASEAN 1994). Indeed, the grouping’s efforts in the years that followed would be primarily aimed at realizing the objective of making ASEAN the institutional embodiment of a region finally brought together as “One Southeast Asia.” Again, this process would be marked by a great deal of contestation over ASEAN’s identity as a regional security institution. As with the creation of the ARF, this contestation would also extend beyond intra-ASEAN dynamics to involve the grouping’s dialogue partners, although it would take a much more confrontational turn.

ASEAN at Thirty The formal conclusion of the Cambodian conflict in 1991 gave ASEAN leaders the momentum they needed to finally set the grouping on the path of membership expansion. A lot of these efforts were carried out through a strong aspirational rhetoric enacted by key players, primarily directed at outsiders, but which would also serve to quell resistance inside. This powerful rhetoric is well exemplified by Ali Alatas, for whom the end of the Cold War amounted to “the dawning of a new era in Southeast Asia history—an era in which for the first time

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Southeast Asia would be truly peaceful and truly free to deal with its problems in terms of its own aspirations rather than in terms of major-power rivalry and contention” (in Acharya 2012, 215). The Singapore Summit of 1992 was the occasion for the leaders to agree on process: the prospective members would first have to accede to the TAC—Vietnam and Laos did in 1992, Cambodia in 1995, and Myanmar in 1996. The signature of the SEANWFZ Treaty by all ten Southeast Asian states in December 1995, the same year Vietnam became a member of the organization, also paved the way for the realization of the “One Southeast Asia” vision. The treaty itself would enter into force in 1997. While often presented as the natural outcome of a vision spelled out long ago by its founding fathers, the expansion of ASEAN to its ten current members was not at all self-evident (Ba 2009, 115; Acharya 2012, 217). It was accompanied by a consistent airing of concerns and tense discussions, not only among ASEAN member states, but involving a great deal of interference from external players. Indeed, in the context of discussions leading up to the creation of the ARF, ASEAN’s dialogue partners had much more skin in the game of Asia-Pacific regionalism. Now that ASEAN was recognized as instrumental for the maintenance of regional peace and stability, the risk that it could become a “dysfunctional family” (Bangkok Post 1997, quoted in Acharya 2009b, 143), if not unravel entirely as a result of expansion, had direct implications for the fate of security cooperation in the broader region. The hurdles faced by ASEAN in its attempts to bring forth its “One Southeast Asia” vision also had an impact on its approach to conflict management. The admission of Myanmar into the ASEAN family posed a particularly vexing problem for the association, and it has since continued to affect the development of its approach to regional security (see Chapter 6). Severe human rights violations by the junta against political opponents as well as the Muslim population in Rakhine have significantly affected the organization’s credibility since the early 1990s. Ongoing critiques emanating from the international community and among the ranks of the grouping’s dialogue partners put steady pressure on the organization, leading to an important fracture within the membership around the principle of non-interference. On the one hand, a strict interpretation of non-interference had become a core principle of ASEAN’s approach to conflict management and its model of regionalism more broadly. It was also a key component of ASEAN’s attractiveness to its prospective Southeast Asian members. On the other hand, the realization that domestic problems could have transnational repercussions on the security of neighboring states and on ASEAN’s credibility as a group was becoming a matter of growing concern. Indeed, the inability of ASEAN to deal with the regional ramifications of domestic crises could

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potentially serve as a pretext to justify a return of intervention by foreign powers into regional affairs. Grasping with this particular conundrum would lead to a number of shifts and reversals in the positions advanced by individual ASEAN member states, including on the timing of Myanmar’s accession, planned for 1997. In fact, the plan privileged by the senior officials was to have ASEAN become “One Southeast Asia” on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, by having not only Myanmar but Cambodia and Laos join at the same time. The lack of consensus among member states on this timeline was not easily resolved. Two factors seem to have played a determining role, and both of them allude to the productive power of discourse in narrowing down the realm of possible action. First, the intensification of the “One Southeast Asia” rhetoric at that time made it increasingly difficult for partisans of postponing Myanmar’s admission to argue that this would be in the better interest of ASEAN. Second, the increasingly vocal opposition of Western dialogue partners had counter-productive effects that cannot be properly understood without the prism of ontological security. According to Thanat Khoman, such a “heavy handed, even brutal move [from Western actors] galvanized ASEAN members who balked at the unjustified interference” (Khoman 1998, 84, quoted in Ba 2009, 124). This allowed the accession of Myanmar to be framed no longer as a liability for the grouping, but as an act of emancipation, enabling the performance of ASEAN’s identity as the embodiment of regional autonomy. What had started as a highly contentious matter became the foundation of an intra-ASEAN consensus that coalesced against a Western-liberal Other. At the same time, this episode also opened the way for an extensive internal debate on the practice of non-interference, which would take a more concrete turn in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis.

The 1997 Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath While the immediate aftermath of the Cold War can be described as a “golden age” for Asia-Pacific regionalism, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 was a particularly rude awakening for ASEAN. The difficulty ASEAN had in fostering a collective response to the crisis and its repercussions on domestic and regional stability severely damaged its credibility, including in the eyes of external partners and observers. In this context, the expansion of ASEAN to Myanmar despite ongoing human rights violations by the junta also contributed to weigh ASEAN’s international standing down. Yet it is Cambodia, through a military coup led by Hun Sen in July 1997, that administered the coup de grâce to the plan of realizing the “One Southeast Asia” vision the same year ASEAN was turning thirty. While Myanmar still joined the grouping that year, Cambodia would only accede

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to the organization in April 1999. ASEAN’s embodiment of the whole community of Southeast Asian states would, however, be short-lived. In August 1999, Timor-Leste held the referendum leading to its formal independence in 2002. Its bid for ASEAN membership, made in 2011, is still pending a decade later. In the aftermath of the crisis, the organization was under severe strain, fostering a growing perception even within its ranks that it “had become bogged down by respect for its intramural norms” (Haacke 2003, 191), particularly noninterference. While this concern was not consensual across the ASEAN membership, the need to “reinvent ASEAN” was explicitly acknowledged in Track 2 circles (Tay, Estanislao, and Soesastro 2001) and clearly recognized among founding ASEAN members. According to Singapore’s Foreign Minister S. Jayakumar: “We may not like the perception of ASEAN as ineffective and a sunset organization. We may question whether they are justified. But they are political facts. Perceptions can define political reality. If we continue to be perceived as ineffective, we can be marginalized” (Ba 2009, 212). This reinvention had to start with a fundamental review of how principles that now form the bulk of the “ASEAN Way” of conflict management and interstate relations in Southeast Asia ought to be practiced under a new set of circumstances. Various proposals were put on the table. Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim suggested the adoption of a new principle of “constructive intervention” based on ASEAN’s (and before that Thailand’s) approach toward Myanmar, to support a relaxation of non-interference in practice. His proposal was not meant to contravene the principle, he argued, but to allow member states to invite each other to play a proactive role in preventing destabilization caused by political crises at the domestic level (Haacke 1999). Another, more direct challenge to non-interference came from Thailand’s Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan (later ASEAN’s secretary general) through the concept of “flexible engagement.” Surin broached this idea in the weeks leading to the 31st ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Manila, arguing that given the “stark reality of interdependence in a globalized world” and the new security threats ASEAN was facing as a result, the grouping needed to “prove [its critics] wrong” by being more “flexible” in its application of core principles. This flexible approach was “not a matter of interfering in the affairs of another country” but of “being open with one another on issues that impact on the region” (Pitsuwan 1998). He also distanced the concept from Anwar Ibrahim’s initial proposal by emphasizing how “flexible engagement” was in fact compatible with the preservation of non-­ interference as a principle as it better reflected the way it was actually practiced. A “non-paper” and ensuing statements by Thai diplomats framed “flexible engagement” as the logical follow-up to the ASEAN Vision 2020, adopted in

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December 1997, which set ASEAN on the path toward its transformation into a “community.” It was argued that the adoption of the concept would enhance ASEAN’s ability to respond to interdependence, to face new security threats of a transnational nature, and to help the grouping meet concerns about the impact of the crisis on the safety, well-being, and dignity of “the people.” As discussed in the following chapter, the contagious effects of the crisis would be repurposed to support the emergence of a regional security discourse emphasizing the “novelty” of transnational issues as security threats to ASEAN states and their populations. These rhetorical efforts would not be sufficient, however, to attract support beyond the Philippines. According to Haacke, “flexible engagement” was broadly interpreted as opening up a “Pandora’s box,” paving the way for a kind of involvement that representatives of most ASEAN states considered “unpalatable” (Haacke 1999, 584, 593). Detractors of the proposal invoked Southeast Asia’s past “Self ” to justify their rebuttal. Alatas, for instance, argued: “If the proposition is to now talk publicly about internal problems, we will be back to when ASEAN was not formed, when Southeast Asia was full of tension [and] mutual suspicion” (in Haacke 1999, 593). By calling forth this past Self, the risk that ASEAN would fall into disarray as a result was effectively presented as simply too great. The foreign ministers ended up rejecting Thailand’s proposal for the softer, less hazardous alternative of “enhanced interaction,” which formalized what was already common practice but provided additional leeway for individual member states to comment on each other’s affairs. This would prove handy in handling ASEAN’s recurring Myanmar problem (Haacke 2008; L. Jones 2008; Mahé and Martel n.d.). Given the extent of controversy, however, even this compromise would be left out of the Hanoi Plan of Action, which served as an implicit reaffirmation of the set of principles that, by that time, were then commonly referred to as the “ASEAN Way.”

Deepening (1997–2015) The debate over how ASEAN ought to adapt its approach to regionalism in the midst of new security concerns would continue well into the following years. Yet ASEAN’s quarter-life crisis also led it to embrace the objective of becoming a “Community” with a capital c. After a period of expansion, it was fairly consensual already at the time that ASEAN had to refocus inward, deepen the level of cooperation between its ten member states, and build further cohesion. This was clear in the language of the ASEAN Vision 2020, adopted in December 1997; in the Hanoi Plan of Action the following year; and in the launching of the “ASEAN Community” initiative, which saw ASEAN formally endorsing the “security community” concept as a major policy goal. This development is often

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presented as the natural prolongation of a long-standing vision of ASEAN being a force for peace and stability in Southeast Asia and the broader region. Yet it was actually the outcome of a process fraught with contestation, which was much more open-ended than the official narrative suggests, and driven by the enactment of meaning-in-use.

The ASEAN Vision 2020 (1997) The ASEAN Vision 2020 effectively launched ASEAN on the path toward the establishment of a Community. Interestingly, the declaration did so by claiming that such a community (at least in the lowercase version of the term) had already been realized: “We in ASEAN have created a community of Southeast Asian nations at peace with one another and . . . with the world” (ASEAN 1997a). This statement stands as one of the earliest attempts by the organization to explicitly talk ASEAN’s security community into existence, while simultaneously spelling out a path for it to be achieved “in full reality.” This path includes arriving at a community in which (1) disputes between and within Southeast Asian states are resolved peacefully, (2) Southeast Asian states cooperate extensively to meet transnational security challenges that cannot be addressed unilaterally, and (3) ASEAN stands as a “community of caring societies”—this would later be reformulated as the “people-centered” community. While the document’s structure already alluded to some of the elements that would later be broken down into three “pillars” (political-security, economic, and sociocultural), it also included a lot of moving pieces. Yet the incantation that saw ASEAN claim the community’s existence as both actuality and aspiration would prove remarkably durable. The Hanoi Plan of Action describes ASEAN as “a concert of Southeast Asian Nations, outward looking, living in peace, stability and prosperity, bonded together in partnership in dynamic development and in a community of caring societies” (ASEAN 1998a). It then spells out ten categories of (mostly functional) responses to the crisis, while also alluding to ASEAN’s role as a force for peace and pointing to ways through which it could enhance its contribution to regional security. These include the implementation of SEANWFZ through its formal endorsement by nuclear states, the enhancement of interstate cooperation on transboundary problems and other security challenges, and the continuation of efforts to develop a code of conduct in the South China Sea. The remainder of the document alludes to some issues that would later be integrated into ASEAN’s security approach but were not yet treated as such at the time of its adoption, including trafficking in persons, as well as environmental and health concerns. The internal debates over the reinvention of ASEAN also resulted in the adoption of other initiatives that firmed up its approach to security cooperation.

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First, the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting’s Retreat, inaugurated in 1999, allows the ASEAN Foreign Ministers to discuss sensitive matters privately. Second, participation by Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore in INTERFET, the multinational peacemaking mission in East Timor, in 1999 –2000 was the first concrete instance of “ASEAN” involvement in a peace mission conducted within one of its member states. While it was carried out on an individual basis and at the formal invitation of Indonesia, it opened the way for discussions about the gradual development of ASEAN’s peacekeeping capacity, which are ongoing. Third, in July 2000, ASEAN approved a proposal in favor of institutionalizing the “Troika.” This mechanism is aimed at enhancing the grouping’s ability to “address in a timely manner urgent and important regional political and security issues and situations of common concern likely to disturb regional peace and harmony” (ASEAN 2000a). The Troika’s ad hoc and non-binding character, as well as the prerequisite of a full ASEAN consensus before it is even convened, restrict its ability to make a difference in practice—in a fashion similar to the High Council. Despite their practical limitations, what these initiatives show, once taken together, is a convergence on a delicate compromise. This balancing act involved an acknowledgment of the need for reform to allow the grouping to act in times of crisis. It also entailed reaffirming principles that were considered essential to ASEAN’s distinct approach to security and the maintenance of internal cohesion, especially in the context of its enlargement to include the CLMV.

The ASEAN Security Community (2003) The project to transform ASEAN into a “Community” by 2020 was formally launched in Bali on October 7, 2003. The Declaration of ASEAN Concord II (Bali Concord II) stated that this community would be based on three pillars: an ASEAN Security Community (ASC), an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and an ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). The declaration called for a reconsolidating of ASEAN, while also reemphasizing the fundamental importance of non-interference and consensus (ASEAN 2003). It was aimed at reinforcing the grouping’s internal cohesion and the coherence of its mandate, in order to support the broader purpose of establishing a community that ought to be “open, dynamic, and resilient” in the face of an evolving and increasingly uncertain strategic environment in the twenty-first century. While the three-pillar structure of the ASEAN Community might seem like a self-evident institutional design choice, partly because it draws from the European model, it is the result of an aggregation of separate initiatives developed by individual member states. The ASEAN Security Community, in particular, was an Indonesian effort. It was spearheaded by Rizal Sukma, an eminent figure of

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the region’s Track 2 community who also served as Indonesia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) from 2016 to 2020, in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, led at the time by Hassan Wirajuda. While the security community was later incorporated as the “first pillar” of the ASEAN Community, it was elaborated after an economic community had already been proposed as a stand-alone initiative by Singapore in 2002. As the former foreign minister of Indonesia, then directorgeneral of ASEAN Cooperation, Marty Natalegawa (2018, 207) recalls, the reception of the ASEAN Security Community concept at the regional level “was not altogether enthusiastic.” Indeed, he argues, other member states needed a “reminder that a true ASEAN community cannot solely be anchored on a single economic pillar, but also rather on a political-security pillar [, which was] as critical as economic development in maintaining the region’s peace, prosperity, and stability.” The sociocultural community would later be promoted separately by the Philippines. According to Natalegawa, this reticence of some member states came from a concern that the development of a security community would “deal with issues that are internal in nature” (2018, 208). This concern was gradually alleviated by a careful argumentation by Indonesian representatives that stressed the value of the initiative as a way to “repel the intervention of powers beyond the region.” Such intervention would surely have been enabled, the argument went, if ASEAN did not prove itself capable of dealing with the security problems affecting Southeast Asia,12 a skill that could only be enhanced through the development of an ASEAN security community. The ASEAN Security Community, as spelled out in Bali Concord II, reiterated core “ASEAN Way” principles, including non-interference, consensus, regional resilience, respect for national sovereignty, the non-use of force, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. It framed the community as the prolongation of past initiatives, particularly the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, the High Council, ZOPFAN, and SEANWFZ. It also emphasized ASEAN’s contribution to regional peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region through the ARF which, in a deeply performative manner, the Bali Concord II declaration stated “shall remain the main forum for regional security dialogue” in the wider region. The declaration also gave central importance to the fight against transnational crime. Finally, it purported to explore the possibility of new mechanisms for cooperation on the prevention and management of armed conflict as well as post-conflict peace-building (ASEAN 2003). More generally, it put “comprehensive security” at the center of ASEAN’s approach, which per the 2004 plan of action (ASEAN

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2004b) now encompassed both “traditional” and “non-traditional” aspects of security. Relatedly, it emphasized the need to further develop ASEAN cooperation on non-military and transnational issues, including those pertaining to maritime security. The distinction between “traditional” and “non-traditional” security, in particular, had not been formalized as clearly by the organization prior to this moment. It was also still deeply contested in ASEAN policy circles at the time.13 Yet Sukma presents it as part and parcel of ASEAN’s approach since its inception: ASEAN has always approached security [. . .] in a comprehensive manner. For Southeast Asian countries, security has always encompassed a wide array of issues in social, cultural, economic, political, and military fronts, [which] are seen to have the potential to destabilize nation-states and regional peace and security. [Therefore,] ASEAN has always distinguished security in terms of traditional and non-traditional threats. (Sukma 2010, 1)

This statement showcases a number of discursive practices that are quite prevalent in ASEAN’s security discourse and reinforce the impression that the ASC is the prolongation of a vision spelled out since ASEAN’s inception. These include switching between ASEAN and Southeast Asia as if they were synonymous, pointing to signs that certain concepts had been fundamental to ASEAN’s approach even before they were verbalized, and linking distinct, and possibly competing, security notions together to emphasize coherence. Finally, as part of a broader initiative to reassert ASEAN’s role as the driving force in a broader regional architecture and palliate a range of critiques against the ARF, new institutions were created in ensuing years with a clear strategic focus, presented as the natural prolongation of an ASC (see Figure 2). The ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM), established in 2006, was later expanded into the ADMM-Plus. The East Asia Summit, launched in 2005, initially brought together the ASEAN Plus Three countries as well as Australia, India, and New Zealand, but was expanded to include Russia and the United States in 2011.

The ASEAN Political-Security Community (2009) The ASEAN Security Community initiative was further refined by the adoption of the ASEAN Political and Security Community (APSC) Blueprint (2009 – 2015), which served as the key programmatic document in the years leading up to the “accelerated” establishment of the ASEAN Community in 2015 (ASEAN 2007b; 2009). Its key elements have since been reiterated and slightly reformulated in an updated blueprint as part of ASEAN’s Vision 2025, which underlines their ongoing significance (ASEAN 2016).

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The blueprint (2009 –2015) spelled out three key characteristics of the APSC: (a)14 a rules-based community of shared values and norms; (b)15 a cohesive, peaceful, stable, and resilient region with a shared responsibility for comprehensive security; and (c)16 a dynamic and outward-looking region in an increasingly integrated and interdependent world.17 It also clarified the contours of ASEAN’s “comprehensive” approach to security, which “acknowledges the interwoven relationships of political, economic, social-cultural and environmental dimensions of development,” “promotes renunciation of [. . .] the threat or use of force,” and “seeks to address non-traditional security issues” (ASEAN 2009). It also expressed ASEAN’s will to act as the “driving force” of a broader regional security architecture in which it exercises “centrality,” simultaneously presented as fact and aspiration. In general, ASEAN’s approach to regional security involves three interrelated objectives that are conducted simultaneously: (1) enhancing interstate cooperation on non-military and/or transnational security challenges that affect Southeast Asia, (2) providing the conditions for the peaceful resolution of interstate disputes among regional states, and (3) contributing to the security, well-being, and dignity of the “people” of ASEAN. First, the blueprint states that a “key purpose of ASEAN is to respond effectively and in a timely manner [. . .] to all forms of threats, transnational crimes and transboundary challenges.” It then includes a range of more specific examples of what the grouping considers “non-traditional security” issues, among which transnational crime takes a particularly prominent place. Second, the APSC also expresses ASEAN’s will to project its model of regionalism beyond Southeast Asia by “maintain[ing] its centrality [. . .] as the primary driving force in an open, transparent and inclusive regional architecture” in the Asia-Pacific region, in support of the realization of its community by 2015. This architecture includes the ARF, the East Asia Summit, and the ADMM. All of these mechanisms are pieces of the same ASEAN-led architecture (see Figure 2). These are the institutional vehicles for the implementation of key initiatives that have structured the evolution of ASEAN’s model of security governance and ought to serve as a basis for interstate relations in the broader Asia-Pacific region: ZOPFAN, TAC, and SEANWFZ, as well as the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties (DoC) in the South China Sea. Third, the document includes a set of elements that open up the way for the gradual integration of a human dimension in ASEAN’s approach to security (postconflict peace-building, humanitarian intervention, and disaster relief ). This objective is somewhat intertwined with the introduction of elements pertaining to “political development” in the initial ASC proposal, which were momentarily

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figure 2.  The ASEAN-centric regional security architecture. Source: Adrien Vallat.

abandoned but reintroduced by the ASEAN Charter, adopted in 2007 (ASEAN 2008). More importantly, they also serve as the basis for ASEAN’s adoption of the objective to transform itself into a “people-oriented, people-centered” community (added to the 2016 –2025 blueprint). These three objectives continue to accompany ASEAN’s journey toward the realization of its security community, as reflected in the Bali Declaration on ASEAN Community in a Global Community of Nations (Bali Concord III) (ASEAN 2011a), the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the Establishment of the ASEAN Community (ASEAN 2015f ), and the APSC Blueprint 2025 (ASEAN 2016). Although these objectives are not fundamentally incompatible, reconciling

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them into a coherent approach to regional security governance is proving to be a difficult balancing act for ASEAN. More importantly, these objectives are anchored in competing interpretations of the “reality” of regional security that currently coexist in the discursive field of ASEAN security regionalism, as the following chapters show. They are also linked to different versions of ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making.

4

The Bogeymen Are Coming From Transnational Crime to “Non-traditional Security”

among the “versions” of ASEAN’s security community discussed in Part  2, the most stable and prevalent in official discourse frames transnational crime as a major source of danger. This version also receives significant support within the Track 2 community. There is therefore good reason for addressing it first, as the two other versions discussed in ensuing chapters directly contest key elements of the one discussed here. This chapter shows how transnational crime became a primary focus of ASEAN’s approach to “non-traditional security” (NTS), which stands as a key component of its “comprehensive security” agenda. First, in the section that follows, I track the discursive process through which “transnational crime” was constructed as a fundamental source of insecurity for the community of ASEAN member states. I show how this process allowed the institution to preserve the fundamentals of its approach to security while opening up to practical cooperation on NTS. Second, in the ensuing section, I show that while transnational crime, and NTS more generally, is widely understood as a major challenge to national and regional “resilience,” there is no consensus on the nature and source of the threat at hand, nor on the best way for the organization to address it. Constructive ambiguity informs ASEAN’s focus on transnational crime and its expansion to other matters under the umbrella of “non-traditional security.” In the context of ASEAN, transnational crime, at least, is more clearly defined than other NTS issues, although that definition has shifted over time. It is broken down into eight priority areas (or “bogeymen”): drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, sea piracy, terrorism, arms smuggling, money laundering, cybercrime,

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figure 3.  “Missing the Target” by Cartoonist ZACH. Source: Cartoonist ZACH. Reprinted with permission.

and economic crime (ASEAN 2015d). However, this definition is in the process of being expanded. By contrast, “non-traditional security,” in which transnational crime is now embedded, is an even more elusive category. As Capie and Evans (2007, 173) explain: “The fact that the very term designates what something is not rather than what it is has posed special analytical problems.” As the following chapters make clear, this constructive ambiguity allows NTS to travel to other versions of the security community, and to play a supporting role in the epic stories that underpin them. This chapter focuses on NTS more directly, and the second section shows that there is already significant potential for tension involved in the way social agents tell the epic story that supports this version of the security community. Third, the ambiguity that characterizes NTS opens this version of the security community to more direct and explicit forms of contestation from some corners. Indeed, while the dominant view portrays the set of challenges branded as NTS as having particular qualities that require security responses (as illustrated by Figure 3), which as the second section shows is not without problems, this broad consensus does not go unchallenged.

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As with the other two versions, ASEAN’s “non-traditional” security community in the making is subjected to both “internal” and “external” forms of contestation. Internal contestation is mostly indirect but renders ASEAN’s approach somewhat incoherent and therefore unstable under the guise of an apparent consensus over non-traditional security, with transnational crime as its core. External contestation is much more explicit, as social agents from all three tracks of Asia-Pacific multilateralism overtly question this focus of ASEAN for a variety of reasons. Yet this chapter also shows that the tension that accompanies the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a security community primarily focused on non-traditional security has important productive effects for the organization, despite its limited ability to provide concrete solutions to the elusive danger presented by its many avatars. Indeed, the deeply polysemic character of nontraditional security allows ASEAN to claim added—and in fact, infinite!—value in the heroic pursuit of regional security. In this case, ASEAN’s role is defined by aspirational—and highly unrealistic—initiatives, such as a Drug-Free ASEAN (to be reached by 2015, 2020, or 2025).

From Transnational Crime to Non-traditional Security Transnational crime has been gradually positioned at the center of ASEAN’s “non-traditional security” approach through a multi-step process. This process was initiated with the gradual discursive construction of drug trafficking as a security threat. It continued with the extension to transnational crime in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and then intensified via its association with terrorism post-9/11. Finally, this process resulted in the mainstreaming of “non-traditional security” in ASEAN discourse.

From Social Issue to Security Threat: ASEAN’s Discourse on Drug Trafficking Drug trafficking is the first issue now associated with transnational crime in ASEAN discourse to have made it onto the organization’s agenda. It was initially considered a mere functional cooperation issue and given low priority. It was, however, gradually reconstructed as one of the most pervasive regional security issues faced by the community of ASEAN states. This reconfiguration of ASEAN’s approach to drug trafficking was nothing but straightforward, initially marked by a lot of ambivalence over how the issue ought to be qualified. This ambivalence dissipated, however, once drug trafficking was integrated into a broader category of transnational crime following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, alongside terrorism and other issues.

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The integration of drug trafficking in ASEAN’s agenda is not a new development. It dates back to the Declaration of ASEAN Concord I, when ASEAN committed to intensify interstate cooperation in “the prevention and eradication of the abuse of narcotics and the illegal trafficking of drugs” (ASEAN 1976a). Drug trafficking was first labeled as a societal issue, not a security one. This was not surprising given ASEAN’s cautious approach to security cooperation at the time. This form of cooperation was only encouraged as a potential focus of bilateral relations among its member states, thus falling outside the institution’s purview (see Chapter 3). Yet this first mention of drug trafficking as an issue of common concern for “regional resilience” would later be reinterpreted as proof of ASEAN’s clairvoyance in articulating its “comprehensive” approach to security. A few months later, ASEAN adopted its Declaration of Principles to Combat the Abuse of Narcotic Drugs, which framed drug use as a “danger to mankind” (ASEAN 1976b). The reliance on a predicate that has a strong security connotation served to justify the creation of a new dedicated initiative, the Meeting of ASEAN Drug Experts, the first edition of which was held in Singapore in 1976. At the same time, however, the ASEAN Foreign Ministers still described drug trafficking as a matter of functional cooperation, alongside issues pertaining to social, scientific, and technological development. This framing would hold for a few years. A shift in tone, however, was clearly observable during the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) of 1980. The joint communiqué of the AMM included a separate section on the “Drug Problem,” which was explicitly described as a security threat (ASEAN 1980). Yet the years that followed saw significant ambivalence in how to describe the issue, alternatively framed as a “social development” issue or, at times, as a “serious danger” on the rise, necessitating immediate intervention. The broader international context is obviously of relevance here. The War on Drugs launched by the United States in the early 1970s, and growing concerns surrounding the opium and heroin trade in the Golden Triangle, can certainly help explain why drug trafficking suddenly appeared on ASEAN’s radar at this time. Yet its gradual re-framing as a security threat was not as self-evident as an exclusive focus on exogenous material conditions, and ASEAN’s own rhetoric, would suggest. Indeed, ambivalence about what kind of problem drug trafficking was for the grouping would steadily continue to inform ASEAN’s approach until 1997 and the emergence of a new focus on “transnational crime.” The emergence of a “transnational” attribute in ASEAN’s language is of key importance here. In 1985, the AMM issued a joint statement on the “international problem of drug abuse and trafficking” that, for the first time, framed the issue as having “serious security implications.” The document further argued that

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it “should not be seen only as a social [. . .] problem” but as a “menace” that “transcends national boundaries” and “threaten[s] the stability of states” (ASEAN 1985a). This focus on state (and in fact, regime) stability is in direct line with Southeast Asian states’ understanding of security as a quest for “national resilience,” which underpins a “regional resilience” variant as a central purpose of ASEAN. The ministers’ new concerns were presented as the latest iteration of a longstanding awareness by ASEAN of the danger posed by the “drug problem,” which now required a higher level of priority. On the same day, yet again, the ambivalence was on full display in the AMM joint communiqué, which referred to drug trafficking as a “social challenge,” before describing the heroic efforts undertaken by ASEAN member states in the “global war against the drug menace” that undermined the “security [. . .] of all mankind” (ASEAN 1985b). These alternate, incoherent framings would continue to characterize ASEAN’s approach in the following years. The Manila Declaration of 1987 consisted of another important step in the securitization process surrounding drug trafficking. For the first time, ASEAN named specific, incarnate “bogeymen,” that is, criminal organizations, as the source of the drug “scourge.” It also called for the “eradication” of the threat from the region. This document set the stage for the adoption of ASEAN’s “Drug-Free ASEAN” objective in 1998, aimed at repositioning drugs where they belong, namely, “outside” the regional community (ASEAN 1987a)— quite an unrealistic target. Beyond these momentary, erratic surges of dramatic language to describe the regional “drug problem,” it was only in 1997 that ASEAN durably repositioned it in the grouping’s security agenda by embedding it into a broader category of “transnational crime”—alongside human trafficking, “illegal migration,” terrorism, arms trafficking, and sea piracy (ASEAN 1997b). It is not a coincidence that this transition happened at a particularly challenging time for the organization.

The Securitization of Transnational Crime in the Aftermath of the 1997 Financial Crisis The repositioning of drug trafficking as part of a broader regional agenda to combat “transnational crime” and the bad agents engaging in it built on earlier efforts by the organization to respond to what it presented as the rise of “transnational” issues. The ASEAN Ministerial Meeting of 1996 devoted an entire section of its joint communiqué to such concerns, including drug trafficking, among other issues considered to be of crucial importance for ASEAN’s long-term viability

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(ASEAN 1996). The security undertones would become much clearer in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, however. ASEAN convened its first Conference on Transnational Crime in December 1997, which resulted in the creation of a new ministerial mechanism to deal specifically with transnational crime. The ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime would later come to form a leading agency under the political-­ security pillar of the ASEAN Community. The conference also produced an ASEAN Declaration on Transnational Crime, which underlined the “pernicious effects” of transnational crime on “regional stability” (ASEAN 1997b). This category of issues included concerns that had already made their way into ASEAN’s agenda, and drug trafficking featured prominently among them. It also encompassed “illegal migration,” which had become a key regional concern in the context of waves of refugees fleeing the Cambodian conflict, and sea piracy, addressed in more ad hoc fashion before then. Yet this declaration also marked the introduction of terrorism, trafficking in persons, and arms trafficking as new issues of concern for ASEAN. These issues were grouped together under the same umbrella because of their “transnational” character, facilitated by their being carried out by identifiable, flesh-and-blood bad agents that could potentially be stopped by the incipient community getting its act together. Such varied challenges would thus be addressed through similar regional cooperative means and become an integral part of the ASEAN Vision 2020 —the grouping’s heroic response to the Asian Financial Crisis. The security implications of the 1997 financial crisis were also acknowledged at the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in July 1998 as being rooted in its transnational character. ARF documents of that time argued that growing interdependence among states as a result of globalization required more emphasis on non-military security threats within the Forum. According to one working group report, for instance, the crisis had made it clear that “the region’s security interests can[not] be seen exclusively in terms of potential military threats or conflicts” (ARF 1998). Given that ASEAN had always been careful not to address “traditional” security challenges directly, this kind of statement is important because it suggests adaptation of the regional approach to security to meet new circumstances. Yet in effect, focusing on the non-military and transnational dimensions of security is what made it possible for ASEAN to extend to security cooperation in the first place. Invoking this necessary transition from traditional security to a non-traditional approach was a powerful discursive move. It allowed ASEAN to claim both current relevance while simultaneously re-framing its past by suggesting that its security forum was meant to handle traditional/military issues all along, and had somehow succeeded. This interpretation conveniently neglects

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the fact that the grouping’s contribution in these matters had been previously defined in abstract, indirect, and limited terms. A few ASEAN-specific declarations contributed to firmly entrench this transition in ASEAN’s security approach and its broader Vision 2020, and to further ground transnational crime into a regional “discourse of danger.” The Manila Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Transnational Crime of 1998 included a lengthy description of the “creativity” of the bogeymen, criminal organizations in this case, in developing regional alliances and destabilizing states. It detailed various cooperative responses ASEAN planned to undertake, such as encouraging the adoption of extraordinary measures and the enactment of new laws by member states. It also called on external partners of ASEAN to provide new resources to the institution to support implementation, linking ASEAN’s own agenda to broader efforts spearheaded by the United Nations (ASEAN 1998c). In addition, the Joint Declaration for a Drug-Free ASEAN doubled down on this request for financial support in “solving this menace,” which in the framing of the joint declaration amounted to nothing less than to “eradicate illicit drug production, processing, trafficking and use in ASEAN by 2020.” Without such a radical plan, “the illicit drug trade [. . .] could escalate to such a level [that] perpetrators [could] pose serious political and security threats to the region” (ASEAN 1998b). The alleged possibility to escape a threat that had yet to fully materialize but that, left unaddressed, could have dire consequences for regional stability, served as a powerful driver for the future reproduction of ASEAN’s newly assumed identity as a security actor. The adoption of the ASEAN Plan of Action to Combat Transnational Crime in 1999 further ensured that these issues would form a set piece of future ASEAN meetings. It described transnational crime as “increasingly pervasive, diversified, and organized” and as threatening to erode the foundations for peace and stability that ASEAN had contributed to setting up. It also re-inscribed previous efforts into a continuous, coherent approach initiated in 1976 on the nefarious effects of drug trafficking on regional security as “the prevalent transnational crime then,” which seamlessly expanded to additional issues over time. At the same time, transnational crime was also tied to more general and deeply ambiguous statements about how the “evolving regional security environment” of the post– Cold War era had “given rise to new forms of security challenges for ASEAN” (ASEAN 1999). Transnational crime would continue to be featured under “functional cooperation” sections in general ASEAN statements spelling out the organization’s broader agenda. Yet the increasing reliance on a language of security to describe transnational crime helped support its inclusion into the mandate of the ASEAN Regional Forum. This move would then pave the way for the formal

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repositioning of transnational crime into ASEAN’s political-security agenda in 2001. This transition was facilitated by the intensification of security concerns over the threat of terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. The increasingly intricate relationship between transnational crime and regional security in ASEAN was again advanced at the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime (AMMTC) in October 2001. The meeting firmly condemned the attacks, and used the opportunity to explicitly frame transnational crime as a fully fledged threat to regional security (ASEAN 2001b). In the context of an increasingly common identification of Southeast Asia as the “second front” in the War on Terror (see Mustapha 2019), the ASEAN Declaration on Joint Action to Counter Terrorism (ASEAN 2001a ) tied ASEAN’s previous efforts in the fight against transnational crime to this emphasis on a new instantiation of the elusive bogeyman threat, terrorism, as a demonstration of ASEAN’s heroic clairvoyance on not only regional but global security. The AMMTC was also presented as ASEAN’s leading regional agency on terrorism matters. This link between the two issues was further reaffirmed by the Chairman Statement of the 2002 ARF, which referred to a “nexus between terrorism and transnational crime” (ARF 2002).1 The connection would become even firmer in the aftermath of the Bali attacks of October 2002. In this context, and for the first time, terrorism was the subject of a separate ASEAN statement, which came in the form of a Leaders Declaration at the November 2002 ASEAN Summit (ASEAN 2002b). This summit coincided with the adoption of the Joint Declaration of ASEAN and China on Cooperation in the Field of Non-Traditional Security Issues, based on a proposal circulated by Beijing at the ASEAN Regional Forum of May 2002. The link between terrorism and transnational crime having been maintained as opposed to being addressed by distinct responses arguably more tailored to the specificity of each issue, their integration into the even broader category of “nontraditional security” appeared all the more commonsensical. As the following makes clear, it was not.

Mainstreaming Non-Traditional Security The Joint Declaration of ASEAN and China on Cooperation in the Field of Non-Traditional Security Issues, adopted in Phnom Penh in November 2002, is the first mention of the concept of “non-traditional security” (NTS) in ASEAN’s official language (ASEAN 2002d). That said, NTS was already part of the regional security lexicon by the end of the 1990s as a result of a combination of developments (Capie and Evans 2007).

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First, a research network on NTS initiated in 1999, spearheaded by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore with the support of the Ford Foundation, had already played a key role in mainstreaming the concept among the region’s expert community and governments.2 Second, that China was the instigator of ASEAN’s formal adoption of NTS as a core component of its emerging security cooperation agenda at the time was no coincidence. It reflected a growing interest on the part of the Chinese strategic and policy community in non-military dimensions of security, a central feature of China’s “New Security Concept.” Third, the mainstreaming of NTS in ASEAN was facilitated by the prevalence of an important “discursive prior” in the notion of “comprehensive security.” Comprehensive security had already been part and parcel of the national security and defense policy of some ASEAN member states—­Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore in particular—since the 1970s (Alagappa 1988). This notion, which makes room for non-military (social, economic, political, etc.) aspects of security, had also been featured in the ARF since its inception (ARF 1995). As the next section makes clear, there is a strong—but complicated— connection between NTS and “comprehensive security.” As demonstrated by the definition used by NTS-Asia (2021), non-traditional security is quite broad a category. Yet the one featured in the 2002 declaration between ASEAN and China matched ASEAN’s definition of transnational crime to the letter, referring to the eight “priority domains”: drug trafficking, ­people-smuggling and trafficking in persons, sea piracy, terrorism, arms-smuggling, money-laundering, economic crime, and cybercrime (ASEAN 2002d).3 The declaration spoke of a deep concern over “the increasingly serious nature of non-traditional security issues [. . .] which have become important factors of uncertainty [. . .] and are posing new challenges to regional and international peace and stability.” It referred to NTS as having a “deep rooted background” in the region, which again contributed to stabilizing the linkage of this new term with ASEAN’s ongoing fight against transnational crime. The use of NTS to refer to transnational crime signaled a significant shift in the way ASEAN treated such issues, but not without considerable debate. According to a former director at the ASEAN Secretariat, the regional officialdom was already well aware of the prevalence of the phrase “NTS” in the Track 2 community. Still, “ASEAN hesitated a lot in using that term” because of the connotation of threat carried by the language of security, and the implications of affixing it to issues that were arising from the domestic realm but had transnational implications. In his words, member states “did not want to be seen as a threat to a neighbor [or] label [their] neighbors as [. . .] threats.” Some of that initial

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resistance was also due to a perception of the term being of foreign—Western, not Chinese— origin. In his recollection of what transpired, the rationale for making the shift, in the end, was that NTS made these issues of shared concern “sound a little more urgent for the member countries to attend to” and, more importantly, served as a “good opening” for the development of multilateral security cooperation among them and with dialogue partners.4 From this moment on, the transition of transnational crime into the security realm would be complete. Never again would it be associated with functional cooperation. The ambivalence took a long time to recede, but with the adoption of NTS by ASEAN, it was fully lifted. The conceptual tension that comes with the term, however, would continue to affect the regional security debate and ASEAN’s security ­community–building process, formally launched a year later, in 2003. The integration of NTS into ASEAN’s emerging cooperative security agenda is the culmination of a messy, incoherent process marked by significant ambivalence. This process started with the discursive construction of drug trafficking, and the broader category of transnational crime in which it became embedded, as a security threat for ASEAN member states and the region’s stability. Today, transnational crime remains woven into ASEAN’s discourse on NTS, even as this category has expanded to encompass additional issues, including pandemics and disasters, as part of the organization’s claim to transform into a “security community.” The fight against transnational crime continues to form a core component of ASEAN’s security approach. In fact, the grouping recently committed to “step up” its fight against transnational crime, which according to officials has reached a “critical level” and “continues to be one of the main security threats in the region” (Parameswaran 2015a). To reflect this prioritization, ASEAN also adopted a new declaration on transnational crime in 2015. The declaration and its ensuing plan of action for 2016 –2025 are meant to ensure “continued vigilance” and “expand[ing] its scope of responsibility” in tackling “new” forms of crime as a key contribution to the ongoing process of implementation of the security community (ASEAN 2015e; 2017a). Recommended measures to “enhance and improve” ASEAN’s approach include the establishment of new task forces, laws, and investigative and surveillance techniques, as well as the criminalization of additional activities at the national level. These measures are exclusively framed through a law enforcement lens; there is no mention of demand reduction (ASEAN 2017a). ASEAN is going against the tide in this respect, having explicitly rejected decriminalization of drug use as a possible course of action. In 2018, the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Drug Matters stated that the grouping remained resolute in its “zero-tolerance approach towards illicit drugs,” despite a global shift toward

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“liberal” objectives of decriminalization and legalization. ASEAN presented this shift as running “against ASEAN’s longstanding commitment to achieving [a] drug-free communit[y]” (ASEAN 2018b). The following section conducts a predicate analysis of the use of NTS in ASEAN and among the broader community of practice that arises from the interaction between the three tracks involved in the regional security debate. This analysis brings to light significant ambiguity, tension, and contestation that accompanies the prevalence of the concept in the region.

The Predicates of Non-traditional Security As the previous section shows, transnational crime, and NTS more broadly, is now widely understood in ASEAN as a major challenge to national and regional “resilience.” However, there is no consensus on the nature and source of the threat(s) at hand, nor on the best way for the organization to address it. This section shows that a great deal of ambiguity and potential for tension informs ASEAN’s focus on NTS as a predominant danger for its member states. Although ASEAN does not have a fixed definition of NTS, a series of attributes, or “predicates,” in discourse analysis parlance, are commonly attached to it in official discourse. Tracking these makes it possible to identify the contours of this otherwise elusive notion which, as will become clear, nonetheless remains porous and in flux. These predicates are also employed beyond ASEAN’s official language and are featured in the broader discursive field in which regional security debate takes place. As such, they form an integral part of the way in which social agents of various “tracks” describe—and thus produce—the reality of the regional security environment. Many of these predicates directly derive from the discursive practices surrounding the concept of transnational crime in ASEAN since the early 1990s. They are repurposed as transnational crime becomes conflated with the broader NTS category despite various levels of priority associated with the specific issues involved. By making them part of the same securitized NTS category, their individual security nature is reinforced by association. The adjective “non-traditional” also introduces a distinction with “traditional” security concerns that serves to highlight how these categories are two sides of the same coin. It also conveys a sense of novelty, complexity, and therefore urgency to the development of collaborative responses to the danger posed by NTS specifically. The predicates deployed are manifold, but most can be grouped into five distinct but interrelated components of the regional discourse on NTS. First, NTS is an open-ended category of issues that centers transnational crime but can potentially extend to an infinite set of challenges. Second, NTS is dangerous because

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it is transnational. Third, NTS is novel— either the issue itself, or the way it is currently manifesting because of globalization. Fourth, NTS makes salient a shared vulnerability across the community of ASEAN member states, which do not pose a threat to one another through NTS but are all in the same boat. Fifth, NTS is, first and foremost, a threat to the security of the state. The security of “the people” derives from the ability of the state to insulate itself from the threat and to reassert control over the national territory—in collaboration with fellow member (and/or regional) states. These predicates work in tandem to reposition ASEAN as the appropriate solution to regional insecurity and reproduce its identity as a security community in the making. I unpack the predicates individually below.

Non-traditional Security as an Ever-Expanding Category The discursive power that surrounds NTS stems, first and foremost, from its conceptual elasticity. NTS can thus be used to refer to any non-military and/or transnational challenge that is either already broadly recognized as a security issue or discursively produced as such by its association with NTS. According to a former ASEAN secretary general, Ong Keng Yong, this characteristic of NTS serves as a useful means to flatten variations in national security policy and foster at least the appearance of consensus within the grouping. The expression “NTS” is used to describe “what is topical at that time or what is [currently] on the radar” of ASEAN member states. Yet it remains vague and ambiguous: You ask everybody in the ASEAN membership, you get ten different answers. [. . .] there was no effort made to converge [on a single] understanding or definition or anything like that. But it is a good [. . .] line to say: OK, now we agree on [nontraditional security]. What is [it]? A, B, C, or everything as long as you fully agree on something [. . .] we go with it. [. . .] The only thing that I can say is that it is very [. . .] contingent [. . .].5

The flexibility that comes with relying on NTS therefore leaves the door open to the inclusion of a new issue considered a priority by ASEAN member states on an ad hoc basis. Whereas transnational crime continues to form the common denominator of this category in ASEAN today, additional issues have since appeared in the list of NTS challenges or, more specifically, transnational crime. Some newly branded “NTS” issues, like pandemics and disasters, have also been incorporated into security cooperation and policy in a durable if uneven fashion (see Chapter 6). The definition of NTS in official documentation typically takes the form of an open-ended list of issues. There is also a great deal of variation in the specific

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issues that are important enough to be mentioned. This open-ended character is on full display in the ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint 2025 (ASEAN 2016). After reviewing different action lines on transnational crime, with special emphasis on drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, as well as terrorism, arms smuggling, and cybercrime, the document includes a dedicated section on disasters as a non-traditional security issue. It then stipulates a need to support initiatives that seek to “identify new and transboundary challenges arising from nontraditional security issues,” listing haze pollution, pandemics, hazardous waste, oil spill incidents, and trafficking in wildlife and timber as examples of new areas of concern (ASEAN 2016). A 2018 leaders’ statement on the “resilient and innovative ASEAN” likewise mentions a need for the grouping to address “emerging non-traditional threats such as climate change, cyber threats, pandemics, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing” (ASEAN 2018a). In a similar vein, in 2015, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia Ahmad Zahid Hamid also raised concerns about “new types of crime.” These include many of the aforementioned “threats,” but also extend to illicit trade in cultural heritage, electrical and electronic waste, ozone-depleting substances, counterfeit goods, and fraudulent essential medicines. This listing exercise supported calls for bolder moves by ASEAN to combat transnational crime and extend its approach beyond its eight priority domains to respond to what he referred to as a “critical juncture” (Daim and Mohd 2015). This trend is also observable in documents that do not specifically focus on transnational crime, but address NTS in general. Indeed, the Memorandum of Understanding between ASEAN and the PRC on Cooperation in the Field of Non-Traditional Security Issues (2017–2023) refers to transnational crime among “other NTS issues,” thus making the ever-expanding character of this category very clear (ASEAN 2017c). Vague allusions to NTS threats that remain unnamed work best to preserve constructive ambiguity. In turn, variation in the practice of enumerating specific NTS issues does introduce some tension over what counts as key issues. According to the director of NTS-Asia and an authority on the subject, Mely Anthony, this is “not something to quibble about.”6 Yet many interviewees underscore that the framing of issues as NTS and, therefore, their repositioning under the political-security pillar of the ASEAN Community leads to member states granting them a higher level of priority. According to a former director at the ASEAN Secretariat: There is a benefit to it, being part of the security agenda because of the urgency that it creates. [. . . I]t’s getting the attention of the member countries [. . .] while if they remain with[in] functional [cooperation], they would hardly be [prioritized]. [Putting them in the first pillar means] the Foreign Ministry people are involved [and] it [will be discussed] at the Summit level.7

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As a result, issues branded as NTS can also be the target of pledges of assistance from dialogue partners who are “very interested in these issues.”8 This repositioning would not have been possible without the issues’ association with NTS, which allows them to be stamped with the seal of “security.” This process is not self-evident, nor can it be reduced to the objective characteristics of specific issues. A number of predicates pertaining to the transnational character of NTS need to be mobilized for this transition to occur, to which I turn next.

Non-traditional Security as Transnational Danger The transnational dimension of NTS is arguably its most fundamental attribute. It is this adjective that most clearly distinguishes NTS from “comprehensive security.” Comprehensive security links internal and external aspects of state security, while considering its non-military dimensions. Yet if NTS issues are considered “non-traditional,” it is mainly because of their transboundary nature being emphasized, with the porosity between the international and the domestic making them all the more elusive and therefore dangerous. Despite a long-standing tendency of ASEAN member states to treat transnational crime issues as a domestic problem, according to the instigator of ASEAN’s security community project, Rizal Sukma, “they can’t anymore.”9 The transnational dimension of NTS is invoked by many other interviewees to describe what they present as a fundamental transformation of the regional strategic environment in the post–Cold War era, rendered more uncertain, complex, and volatile as a result. A key advantage of the emphasis placed on this transnational dimension for ASEAN is that it also presents actors with an opportunity to circumvent risks that “bogeymen” arising out of the domestic realm could result in a state being constructed as a source of insecurity. The repositioning of the origin point of the threat into an elusive interstitial and de-territorialized space, neither inside nor outside, allows actors to avoid ascribing responsibility to their neighbors. The threat in question being made singular by its uniform transnational character, instead of merely replicated in multiple domestic contexts, makes it possible to refocus on “transnational” non-state actors as the actual villains in this epic story. These villains are themselves repositioned outside the “we” of both national and regional community. As a result, the obvious solution for states is to join forces tackling this unified ensemble of threats that affect them all equally and are not tied to concerns pertaining to non-interference. A pooling of individual states’ sovereignty, instead of its infringement, is portrayed as the way forward in protecting the region from the bogeymen. ASEAN is meant to play a leadership role in making this happen. Thus, for one security policy expert from the Philippines, “ASEAN get[s] to have [its] cake and eat it too! They don’t really put states on

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the spot [and] ASEAN’s sacred principles [are preserved] even if [. . .] these [issues have direct] implications on state sovereignty.”10 According to an Indonesian expert, ASEAN states typically consider NTS as the product of some external predation, situated outside their own boundaries, but without any responsibility attributed to another state. This liminal status of NTS is facilitated by the “non-state” quality ascribed to individuals holding this responsibility for transnational crime, in particular. Terrorists, criminals, and pirates, despite operating within a permissive domestic context and escaping the purview of state control, are “non-state”—they are not members of the national community but evilized outsiders, stripped of any affiliation to the “us.” They form the common menace that states of ASEAN must come together to fight. This special, elusive quality of NTS appears clearly in an educational video circulated by the ASEAN Secretariat to raise awareness of the ASEAN Community among the “people of ASEAN” (ASEAN 2007a). As the narrator states confidently that “we won’t let pirates, terrorists, and drugs come to ruin our countries,” a smiling character proudly wearing a cap with the ASEAN logo kicks the bogeymen—represented as a pirate, a suicide bomber, and a syringe— off the screen, in the opposite direction of the arrow on a signpost that reads, “to ASEAN countries” (see Figure 4). The argument that the porosity of borders that has always characterized Southeast Asia leads to additional vulnerability as a result of the regional integration process is made quite consistently by officials of ASEAN member states. According to this foreign affairs official, for instance: The possibilities of [. . .] misusing such integration to engage in movements of illegal products or human trafficking [are] more important. [The importance given to NTS is] mostly in response to a growing [. . .] recognition that [. . .] our borders are becoming more and more [porous].11

The natural conclusion of this emphasis on the transnational dimension of NTS is that borders need to be made “not” porous, stabilized in the concrete, but that national responses alone cannot possibly be enough in making this happen. According to a defense policy adviser of Thailand’s deputy prime minister, “without working with neighboring countries [. . .] you cannot be successful” on NTS.12 Similar comments form a common mantra in the regional expert community, leading to ASEAN being repositioned as the only possible vehicle for such cooperative pooling and reinforcement of state sovereignty.13 Bilateral, trilateral, or mini-lateral solutions were rarely invoked as a possibility, up until very recently, by ASEAN officials14—although some experts, such as Jusuf Wanandi, have argued in favor of “coalitions of the willing” carried out through an “ASEAN minus X” formula that should be extended to security matters.15

figure 4.  “The ASEAN Community by 2015,” captures of promotional video by the ASEAN Secretariat, 2007. Source: ellekuruda, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YrnK5UQDdO0.

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The twin discursive move of identifying regional integration as creating renewed transnational porosity while simultaneously providing the most appropriate response to it makes NTS the pretext of a wild rush forward in cooperation. Regional community-building is made to be both cause and solution to insecurity, thus needing to be constantly reinforced to meet the very vulnerabilities it creates. Putting this another way, if the bogeymen are coming for you, it is after all the result of your own actions. Security community–building needs to be properly advanced, supported, and strengthened to avoid such a dire outcome. The bogeymen are invoked as a warning, too. The notion that ASEAN’s emphasis on NTS is a sign of preventive clairvoyance transpires quite clearly in the comments made by one Indonesian official: “We are living in an interconnected world. No country, no region can sustain the development of these nontraditional security issues alone. We need to cooperate. As a matter of fact, this has been our agenda to deal with [this]. We have mechanisms and regimes in place [already] to address non-traditional security issues.”16 The adoption of ambitious objectives, such as the “eradication” of drug trafficking, ensures the unlimited reconduction of initiatives pertaining to the fight against transnational crime, in particular. The acknowledgment of the flaws of ASEAN’s approach and the many gaps in implementation only serves to reinforce the central place of NTS in the security community–building project, presented as necessary to prevent the region from this imminent, ever-present, but elusive danger that keeps coming, and to justify additional support from dialogue partners for the institution in this fight. Non-traditional Security as a New Form of Insecurity  The “transnational” character of non-traditional security challenges is closely linked to another set of predicates that emphasize its “novel” character, portrayed as arising from the intensification of globalization. The fact that NTS covers a wide spectrum of issues also makes this possible. Trafficking, smuggling, and piracy have a long history in this region, and have been common ever since the movements of goods and people they involve were first deemed “illicit” by colonial powers (Tagliacozzo 2001). Yet linking them with other issues, including cybercrime and challenges that were not conceived through the prism of security until quite recently (pandemics and disasters) helps to support this framing. The notion that NTS issues are characteristic of the twenty-first-century regional security environment is well established among practitioners of ASEAN multilateralism. According to one official, “When we’re talking about security issues [in ASEAN], it’s no longer traditional security issues. The new challenges are coming from the non-traditional ones.”17 Here, the term “non-traditional” itself, especially when put against old “traditional” issues, holds significant discursive

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power. It also helps add to the novel character of NTS issues by presenting them, in the words of a Malaysian diplomat, as “not the normal security threats.”18 Branding these issues as NTS does a lot of work in positioning them as new and exceptional, despite their staying power in this region and beyond. Specifying what, exactly, is new about the ways in which they manifest in the twenty-first century is not deemed necessary, and appears self-evident. Presenting NTS as a “new” form of insecurity has clear advantages for ASEAN’s claim to the security community status. This move is helpful in justifying the lack of efficiency of ASEAN in responding to specific crises and the notion that support from dialogue partners is crucial in building a response—which is necessarily new as well, thus requiring new resources. According to a former director of political and security cooperation at the ASEAN Secretariat: “Since these are new, then everyone has to learn and adapt, so we cannot expect ASEAN to foresee these security threats and then prepare. And even if we prepare [. . .], we need resources.”19 One Malaysian diplomat suggests that while these issues are “new” to ASEAN, dialogue partners have more experience dealing with NTS, and therefore, are well positioned and interested to support this kind of capacity-building.20 Another form of predication that emphasizes the “novel” character of NTS, which comes with its share of ambiguity, is used when these issues are described as “growing” or “increasing” in either quantity, quality, or both. This is common in official documentation. One ARF (2005c) workshop report on “Evolving Changes in the Security Perceptions of the ARF Countries” refers to NTS as “becoming more prevalent.” This growth justifies the sudden importance given to NTS in the Forum from then on, as the “increase of non-traditional security threats” is linked to these issues becoming “more diversified,” “propagat[ing] more rapidly than traditional ones,” and having “increasingly complex” effects (ARF 2005b). The importance given to NTS by ASEAN member states specifically is conveyed by then ASEAN Secretary General Le Luong Minh in the 2013 ASEAN Security Outlook, in which he stipulates that “ASEAN Member States are aware of the fact that non-traditional security threats [. . .] are increasing in complexity and require enhanced cooperation among themselves as well as with ASEAN’s external partners” (ASEAN 2013). Such predication is also widespread in how individual ASEAN member states represent their security priorities, as NTS is typically described as “increasing” and becoming “more serious.” This idea that the threat is growing is also often combined with other predicates, such as when NTS threats are portrayed as “increasingly transnational,” as for Singapore, or as characterized by an “increase in emerging security issues,” as for Cambodia (ASEAN 2013).

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No evidence or data are provided to support these assertions in ASEAN documents, where vague references to ever-growing yet immeasurable risk and insecurity typically suffice. In fact, the vagueness of these statements reinforces the self-evident and unquestionable character of ASEAN’s NTS mission and collaboration from its partners. This is especially convenient given the inherent difficulty in measuring illicit cross-border movements that, by definition, remain hidden and go unreported. The partial, non-standardized, and therefore highly unreliable and speculative data currently made available by member states based on seizures makes it impossible to quantify increase with certainty, let alone come up with objective indicators of a security threat on the rise. The emphasis on NTS also allows ASEAN to justify its status as the “core” of a broader regional architecture in which it is entitled to “centrality.” According to an AMM joint communiqué, to remain relevant, the ARF needs to become “more efficient and effective in providing [a] meaningful contribution to address the increasingly complex regional non-traditional security challenges” the AsiaPacific region faces (ASEAN 2015d ). The space given to NTS in the forum is much debated and often seen by dialogue partners and in expert networks as a pretext to avoid dealing with traditional, more sensitive, but more pressing concerns (see Chapter 5). Emphasizing the novel, increasingly complex character of NTS, and cooperation on these issues as an end in itself, helps ASEAN in reasserting its otherwise challenged role as a “driving force” of Asia-Pacific regionalism. Finally, the novelty of NTS is often contrasted with traditional concerns as if these belonged in the past. As the typical argument goes, ASEAN has been able to establish itself as a force for regional peace and stability, given that its member states have not waged war against each other since the founding of the organization. Because that accomplishment is now a given, in this view, and out of the way, ASEAN can now turn to dealing with “the proliferation of non-­traditional security threats” that are more representative of the post–Cold War security environment.21 According to a Malaysian official: “Since the establishment of ASEAN, the fact is that the possibility of conflict between ASEAN member states is very minimal, quasi null, which is why the focus is moving towards, more and more, how we [can] cooperate to address non-traditional security issues.” This new focus is also made possible, in this official’s view, because the “trust” between ASEAN member states is stronger than before.22 As Chapter 5 discusses further, this argument directly contradicts the view that cooperation on NTS, which is much less sensitive than dealing with “hard” security issues, is a confidence-building measure meant to gradually move toward conflict resolution at a pace comfortable to all. The only way that other officials

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can reasonably argue that “traditional security issues in terms of actual border conflicts are no longer there” or that ASEAN has “passed that stage” is by invoking a regional community that only extends to ASEAN states and by adopting a highly restrictive definition of “conflict” that conveniently plays down or ignores persistent militarized tensions among them (see also Glas, forthcoming).23 Non-traditional Security as a Shared Priority  The use of a single “non-­ traditional” adjective also helps to emphasize its “shared problem” quality among ASEAN member states, despite important differences in specific threat representations from one state to another. Many interviewees from the government sector and the expert community rightly point out that the sense of urgency attributed to specific NTS issues will vary across the ASEAN membership. For example, it is not surprising that a landlocked state like Laos tends to worry less about sea piracy than Indonesia— except perhaps for sensationalist reports of incidents of river piracy linked to drug trafficking on the Mekong (Fawthrop 2011). The term “NTS” allows ASEAN to play down differences in the hierarchization of the security threats it groups together. According to an Indonesian expert, for instance, ASEAN states “share the same [security] issues at the same time so they realize that they have to collaborate [. . .] with each other [. . .], they sense this commonality.”24 There is some tension here, as one official from Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggests: “Each [ASEAN member state] will have different views. But I think non-­traditional security [is] something that is a win-win.” A U.S. diplomat concurs, stating that “certain countries focus on certain issues because this is more important to them. But they’re all in it together.”25 For former secretary general Ong Keng Yong, ASEAN states are “fighting the same enemy.” When one state sends troops after “traffickers [. . .], we have the other guys across the border, the [Burmese], the Thai, and the Vietnamese, they all face the same problem! So we synchronize our respective moves. [. . .] There will be no problem [. . .] because ASEAN is a group, [and] we [stick] together.”26 Non-traditional Security as State Security  The definition of NTS promoted by the NTS-Asia (2021) Consortium emphasizes the need to consider the security interests of both states and peoples. Indeed, NTS is often considered to involve a recognition of the “human dimension” of insecurity (see Chapter 6). However, in the “non-traditional” version of the security community, it is precisely because NTS is hindering states’ control over their national territory that it warrants a security response under the political-security pillar of the ASEAN Community. Other issues sometimes described through the prism of “human” or “societal” security that do not fit under that pillar can remain positioned within the other two

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pillars (economic and sociocultural). As noted by others (e.g., Mustapha 2019), the security frames and narratives that dominate expert discourse on Southeast Asian security play a key role in ensuring the perpetuation of this state-centric approach to various NTS issues. This is reflected, for instance, in the view shared by a security adviser to Thailand’s deputy prime minister, according to whom NTS issues might have initially been perceived as “threatening to human security, human well-being” but have now become so “serious to the state” that the level of priority allocated to them has been lifted as a result, and “quite appropriately” so.27 This is also how Rizal Sukma justifies the heightened focus on transnational crime in ASEAN, in contrast to “other non-traditional security issues.” This is because transnational crime threatens “national resilience” and its regional extension most directly. In his words, it “undermines state authority in a direct sense, right? [. . .] Governments still basically think [about these issues in terms of ] national interest [. . .] rather than quality of life” for their people.28 His Thai colleague and the former director of ISIS-Thailand, Pranee Thiparat, agrees, despite her otherwise critical views of ASEAN’s state-centric approach to security. This is a good illustration of how hard it is to escape a statist frame. Contrary to the views expressed by some of her other Track 2 counterparts and collaborators in the NGO community, according to whom these issues might be more effectively addressed if they were not securitized, she argues that NTS is first and foremost the responsibility of the state, and its security actors. This is because NTS issues threaten the state’s control over national borders and its ability to act as the main purveyor of security: “They are [security issues], it’s security first! [. . .] it’s really clear!” Because NTS issues involve illicit movements across borders, “if you let it happen [. . .] without intercepting them, this means something to your security [as a state]. This is so important! [. . .] You need [. . .] security actors to deal with it! It’s not [for the] Ministry of Human Security29 to deal with all this. That’s later.”30 Interestingly, one argument commonly used to frame NTS as a threat to the state is the fact that it might lead to increased tension between neighboring states. While some interviewees use this to question the “shared” or “common” character of NTS issues among ASEAN states, most see it as an additional justification for ASEAN to take this danger seriously.31

Productive Tension in ASEAN’s Approach to NTS Beyond internal contradiction that arises from the use of various predicates to promote a greater role of the organization in tackling “non-traditional” security,

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there are more explicit points of tension within ASEAN’s security discourse. ASEAN’s approach to NTS is often the object of direct critique that questions the relevance of this focus—and the use of the concept itself. These critiques, which destabilize the “non-traditional” version of the ASEAN security community, zoom in on three main elements: (1) the distinction between NTS and the more entrenched notion of “comprehensive security,” (2) the “shared” or “common” attributes of NTS for ASEAN member states, and (3) the relevance of a security approach to crime issues. Because such critiques draw from conceptual debates around the notion of security, they are mainly mobilized by actors affiliated with the Track 2 community. However, actors from other tracks sometimes echo these views.

NTS and Comprehensive Security: A Troubled Relationship The notion of NTS is closely linked to the “comprehensive” approach to security privileged by many ASEAN member states since the 1970s, then explicitly adopted by the organization itself in the 1990s (see Chapter 3). ASEAN presents NTS as one side of the comprehensive security coin, which includes both traditional and non-traditional issues. Given ASEAN’s indirect approach to traditional security, actors engaged in the regional security debate often have difficulty distinguishing the two concepts, treating them as interchangeable. According to Tan See Seng from the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies) in Singapore: “Few [. . .] see any significant difference between the NTS concept and that of comprehensive security, since both comprehend security holistically” (Tan 2013b, 141). On the one hand, governmental actors typically dismiss the need to distinguish between them as an academic obsession with conceptual clarity that has no bearing on policy. Former ASEAN secretary general Ong Keng Yong, for instance, expresses both uneasiness and disinterest in differentiating between the two, while admitting that they are, in fact, different, despite having no precise meaning: There was no big appreciation [in ASEAN] of what is comprehensive security and now how to shift to [these] new security [issues that] cannot be defined as traditional. [I] cannot give a very straight and easy answer [as to what the difference is]. The ASEAN countries are smarter, they know that when you talk about comprehensive security, this concept, it means something. When you talk about non-traditional security, it means something else.32

For another ASEAN official, the exercise is simply futile: “As far as I’m concerned, [. . .] non-traditional security, comprehensive . . . they’re just terms! [. . .] I don’t think there’s a difference. [. . .] These are [. . .] issues that have a transnational nature. [. . .] To me, it’s not very important what the label [is]. The higher

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question is [. . .], is there a change? I think [there has been a] change in the label, but [not] as to how ASEAN addresses these issues.”33 These comments confirm the centrality of the transnational dimension of NTS, which is a major distinction from comprehensive security. This transnational dimension allows ASEAN member states to move to a cooperative security approach, by which unilateral responses from a single state to a non-military security issue, even as it unfolds within its domestic jurisdiction, is deemed inadequate. It is what allows a shift of emphasis toward multilateral cooperation as an inevitable solution. The disinterest and skepticism of officials toward conceptual issues is understandable and to be expected. Yet the practice of using both terms interchangeably, dismissing how their meanings differ and change, suggests a continuity in approach that is useful in asserting the relevance and clairvoyance of ASEAN member states and the organization in how they seek to provide security. On the other hand, although “comprehensive security” is considered by some interviewees from the Track 2 community as outmoded, others position themselves as going against the tide and resisting the rise of a new, fashionable, but problematic NTS concept. This view is particularly prevalent within the Malaysian expert community.34 According to a senior fellow from the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS-Malaysia), NTS only makes sense as a concept for states that did not already embrace the non-military dimension of security: [I]f you have “comprehensive security” as your working concept from the start, you would not need to have “non-traditional” [security]. [. . .] Comprehensive security is the most relevant especially when you talk about non-traditional threats. [. . .W]ith comprehensive security we cover everything[:] drug trafficking, terrorism, maritime piracy, [. . .] human trafficking, [etc].35

Another security expert from Malaysia is more severe in his assessment of NTS, which he defines as a “fashionable claptrap” and a “slavish acceptance of Western concepts” tailored to policy-motivated funding opportunities. Meanwhile, comprehensive security remains much better suited to the region’s security reality and practices because it is more intimately and directly tied to national resilience. It refers to “what ultimately affects the security and stability of the state. It doesn’t sound nice, but that’s what it is.”36 These comments indeed also speak to how both NTS and comprehensive security conflict with a human security framework, despite many claims to the contrary (see Chapter 6).

The Novelty and Commonality of NTS in Question The allegedly novel character of NTS conflicts directly with the discursive construction of transnational crime as danger, covered in the first section of this

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chapter. Emphasis on the novelty of NTS issues creates a clear dissonance with official ASEAN documentation as well as with comments by individual practitioners. This “point of diffraction,” in Foucauldian parlance, is apparent when actors seek ways to justify the importance ASEAN gives to NTS, which is often presented as especially and objectively suitable to the strategic landscape in Southeast Asia. Doing so, interviewees often draw from historical particularities of the region as a way to stress the inevitability of a security approach that focuses more on NTS than on traditional concerns. Such comments clash with the typical description of NTS as a “new” form of insecurity in the twenty-first century. More often than not, NTS is described as simultaneously old and new by social agents who promote the “non-traditional” version of ASEAN’s security community. Here the ambivalence and fluid boundaries of NTS as a category of issues come in quite handy. In this case, actors typically readjust their assessment based on the issue invoked to explain why ASEAN centers NTS in the security community–building project. The way one foreign affairs official recalls the process that led to ASEAN’s embrace of NTS is a good example of how this tension between older and newer elements merged together manifests in the discourse as enacted by individual practitioners: “Terrorism became an issue, [. . .] transnational crime issues became more important, [. . .] the problems of human trafficking and drug trafficking, which [have] always been there, [have been] changing shape. [There is also] increased piracy in some areas.”37 The reconciliation of this tension between the old and the new in NTS is done here, as is often the case, by suggesting that while the issues have deeper roots in Southeast Asia, they are both transformed and on the rise. For others, the notion that NTS is a new problem is nothing but absurd. According to one ASEAN diplomat: “Non-traditional security issues [. . .] are all issues that have impacted ASEAN member states for a long time [. . .] so it’s not as if [. . .] suddenly they have popped out. [. . . T]hese non-traditional security issues [. . .] have always been on our radar screen [and] ASEAN [has] been addressing [them for many years].”38 An official from the Philippines underscores how transnational crime, and sea piracy in particular, “is a historical thing [in Southeast Asia]. It goes way back, to time immemorial. [So] these are more important issues for us.”39 Similarly, according to his Indonesian counterpart, NTS cooperation has been a fundamental component of ASEAN’s approach to security since its very inception.40 In other words, at least according to these practitioners from a range of ASEAN states, tackling the issues that fit under the NTS umbrella is quite “traditional” for the grouping. This view is echoed by Thailand’s contribution to the ARF 2010 Annual Security Outlook: “Non-traditional security threats have always

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been an important part of the security picture in the region” (ARF 2010a, 85). Again, the importance paid to the historical embeddedness of such issues into the region’s security environment serves the same functions as the emphasis on its “novel” character by others: justifying the central importance given to NTS by ASEAN in its security community–building project, and reasserting the relevance of the grouping as a regional security institution. Another source of tension that accompanies the enactment of ASEAN’s “nontraditional” security community stems from actors who question the tendency of ASEAN to use the NTS concept to stress how its member states face common security challenges. According to Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of ISISThailand, the all-encompassing NTS category is an important source of constructive ambiguity for an organization seeking to develop a coherent, multilateral approach to regional security. It helps to circumvent the political sensitivities and trust issues that prospects of security cooperation necessarily invoke for individual member states. It is, however, a clear demonstration of its artificial and disparate character: “Who’s in favor of non-traditional security? Everyone. What non-­ traditional security? It depends.”41 His colleague Pranee Thiparat shares this view: If you ask individual [ASEAN] countries [about] the [most] serious threats [for] the organization, [. . .] I don’t think they are going to [focus on] the same [one]. [I could] say, of course non-traditional security [. . .]! That covers everything, right? [. . .] I [could] give a beautiful answer [by saying “non-traditional security”], but I [would not] believe in what [I’d be] saying, [because each] country still perceives threats differently.42

Because it encompasses such a varied set of issues that affect individual member states differently, the notion of NTS works to overemphasize the presence of a shared understanding of regional insecurity among member states, while playing down differences in the social construction of security issues at the national level. As a result, its constant re-enactment as a core focus of ASEAN’s security ­community–building enterprise is useful in asserting the coherence of the region as an objective strategic reality, mainstreaming the idea that member states share the same security challenges, and constructing multilateral cooperation with ASEAN as its vehicle as a necessity for the realization of their common regional security destiny.

Transnational Crime: A Security Threat? ASEAN has been consistent in projecting the notion that transnational crime must be addressed through the prism of national security. Yet this understanding of transnational crime as a national security threat is not as consensual as ASEAN officials typically make it to be, especially within a Track 2 community where

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securitization is such a popular concept. Many experts interviewed underscore that a law enforcement approach might be much more suitable to the handling of such issues than putting the defense sector in charge of policy responses. Others call for treating some of the challenges associated with transnational crime as development issues instead of security ones. As one expert from ISIS-Malaysia argues, “[W]hen you label something [. . .] security, you [sometimes] empower the wrong subsets of people.”43 Other interviewees describe the interest of security forces in NTS as a textbook case of mission-creep, allowing them to hog a significant share of state budgets despite decreasing risks of interstate conflict. Some invoke a desire on the part of the defense sector to “find stuff to do”44 or “make use of their own existence”45 as a primary driver behind governments’ interest in NTS, which then naturally feeds into the way ASEAN defines the regional agenda. This view contradicts the allegedly self-evident reorientation of security policy at the national level. It also questions the portrayal of ASEAN as a clairvoyant and current security actor striving to assuage long-standing concerns surrounding progress in security cooperation on the part of recalcitrant and distrustful member states that need to get on with the times.

Non-traditional Security: A Means to an End? The internal tension that arises from the re-enactment of the “non-traditional” version of the security community is also accompanied by external contestation. Such contestation not only directly challenges this representation of ASEAN’s project but involves throwing support to alternative versions. These alternatives put into question the notion of NTS cooperation as an end in itself in ASEAN’s pursuit of regional security. There are competing interpretations of the endgame of ASEAN’s NTS objectives, and the nature of the threat holds different meanings for social agents. The following chapters unpack this in further detail, tackling the other versions of ASEAN’s security community, in which NTS is also featured, despite being much less central. It is through NTS, first and foremost, that ASEAN asserts its relevance as a regional security institution, and its identity as a security community in the making. Therefore, other versions cannot but engage with this notion as well, albeit to challenge it as an appropriate focus for the organization. In a second version of ASEAN’s security community, which centers on a “traditional” conceptualization of security as the absence of interstate war, NTS is not presented as an end in itself, nor is it the subject of a discourse on danger. Instead, it serves as a low-hanging fruit of security cooperation for ASEAN member states, but also the broader community of states in the Asia-Pacific. NTS is often portrayed as an intermediary step of secondary importance in the development of

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an ASEAN-led approach to conflict resolution given the non-sensitive character of the issues it brings together, which also leads to attempts to destabilize ASEAN’s approach as inadequate. This version of the ASEAN security community is covered more extensively in the next chapter (Chapter 5). A third version of ASEAN’s security community is in turn grounded in the gradual recognition of a “human dimension” to regional security and the performance of ASEAN’s identity as a “people-centered” community. In this version, NTS also comes in as a regional (i.e., non-Western) variant of “human security,” which is not without problems and does not go uncontested either. In sum, NTS is often presented as a self-evident object of ASEAN cooperation. Yet the ambivalence that characterizes its usage within the discursive field in which ASEAN’s identity as a security community is (re)produced also leads to significant tension. Whether this ambivalence is strategically motivated, accidental, or otherwise, is not what matters here. In any case, it does have productive, useful effects for the grouping’s quest for a recognition of its relevance and credibility as a security institution. This is not to say that this focus comes unchallenged. Indeed, beyond official discourse, social agents from various tracks of ASEAN multilateralism put NTS into question on both conceptual and practical grounds, underscoring the existence of significant tension simmering beneath the surface of ASEAN’s security community–building enterprise. Such tension becomes even more apparent when other versions of ASEAN’s security community are brought forth.

5

Here There Be Dragons Managing Interstate Conflict in the Asia-Pacific Region

with the creat ion of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN took its first decisive step in projecting its approach to security to the broader region, which has since expanded to new institutions—the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus. The position of ASEAN at the core of a broader set of institutions making up an Asia-Pacific security architecture is justified by the organization’s champions as the best and most realistic way of ensuring peaceful interaction among states in this region. ASEAN’s claim to centrality is founded on the notion that its approach to conflict management in Southeast Asia can act as a model for the Asia-Pacific and extend to major power relations. As ASEAN entered the twenty-first century, growing concerns about a regional power vacuum, as well as prospects of a new surge in major power competition and a “back to the future” scenario, quickly picked up steam. The debate around ASEAN’s role as an honest broker in Asia-Pacific security governance went through a number of phases over time, the most recent of which is focused on the grouping’s position in an emerging “Indo-Pacific” regional order characterized by heightened tension between the United States and China. The indirect approach to interstate conflict resolution privileged by ASEAN, which seeks to foster conditions for constructive dialogue between regional states on issues of common concern, has been continuously put into question since the turn of the twenty-first century. Doubts about ASEAN’s ability to exercise “strength in weakness” (Stubbs 2014) has led to a constant stream of proposals, from dialogue partners but also the Track 2 community, for a fundamental reconfiguration of the web of overlapping institutions that make up the regional

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figure 5.  ASEAN and the big powers, by KhunPhol ขุนพล. Source: KhunPhol ขุนพล.

security architecture. The ARF, in particular, has been a prime target of calls for reform, but these efforts have since begun to reverberate onto other ASEAN-led institutions deemed at risk of reproducing its flaws. There have been growing concerns over the stability of the “rules-based” regional security order and the resurgence of traditional security issues that ASEAN has typically shied away from addressing head-on. China’s so-called new assertiveness in the South China Sea has been a focal point of this debate over ASEAN’s contribution to regional stability for the last decade. This chapter focuses on how social agents (re)produce and disrupt the organization’s self-narrative as a security community in the making that helps mitigate interstate conflict in the Asia-Pacific region. It starts by looking into key elements that make up ASEAN’s indirect, gradual, and dialogue-based approach to conflict management since the launching of an Asia-Pacific security dialogue in the form of the ARF. Non-traditional security (NTS) is prominently featured in this approach, but in a way that is markedly different and in clear contradiction to how it is put forth in the version of the security community discussed in Chapter 4. In what I refer to as the “traditional” version of the security community, the main purpose of ASEAN is to put states on the path toward addressing the “real,” “important,” “hard” security issues that pertain to defense policy and

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cooperation. The chapter reviews various waves of external proposals for reform and how ASEAN has responded to these attempts to disrupt its self-narrative. Finally, I zoom in on how ASEAN’s approach has been mobilized in the management of the South China Sea disputes, as the issue-area par excellence against which ASEAN’s contribution to “traditional” regional security is assessed and debated up until today.

Reforming ASEAN’s Approach to Conflict Management ASEAN has formally embraced the role of “driving force” in Asia-Pacific security regionalism in the context of the launching of the ARF in 1994. However, the difficulties experienced by the Forum to move beyond confidence-building to preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution has fostered serious doubts about the suitability of the ASEAN model for the broader Asia-Pacific region. To assuage these doubts, ASEAN has developed a practical cooperative orientation on issues of shared concern, in the hope that a more results-oriented approach could help address “traditional” sources of regional instability. NTS, in this context, forms a big portion of the list of “non-sensitive” security issues that can be tackled through concrete initiatives supporting interstate dialogue and cooperation on more vexing strategic issues. This approach is premised on a regional variant of the spillover effect hypothesis, despite the lack of evidence in favor of it, repurposed in the context of ASEAN to apply to different facets of security cooperation. It is also deeply contested.

Prospects for Reform in the ARF The absence of all-out war between members of ASEAN since its inception has been a key emphasis of the organization’s champions in asserting the potential of the ASEAN model for shaping the broader Asia-Pacific security environment. The non-confrontational, consensus-based “ASEAN Way” of conflict management stands at the core of this model, which has been transposed to the ARF and sets the terms for how regional states ought to interact in this broader multilateral context. The ability of ASEAN to socialize great powers, and China in particular, to its diplomatic norms, and to foster cooperation “at a pace comfortable to all,” has been a core concern of constructivist scholarship on the ARF ( Johnston 2003; Katsumata 2009). Yet the loss of credibility experienced by ASEAN in the midst of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, characterized by states’ reliance on unilateral responses outside the scope of ASEAN, exacerbated doubts about its model. These doubts have also informed criticism of ASEAN’s role as the driving force of a broader Asia-Pacific regionalism. In this context and still today, ASEAN and

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its security forum have often been characterized as “talking shops” of limited consequence and ability to tackle pressing common problems. Too broad a membership, too slow and formal a process, and the non-binding character of decisions are common critiques aimed at the ARF. In the words of a U.S. diplomat posted in Jakarta: “The ARF is biiiiiig. It’s 27 countries. [. . . H] ow much progress can you make [. . .] when North Korea is at the table? [. . .] It’s difficult to sit through an ARF meeting, let alone make progress on a specific issue. The meetings are just painfully boring.”1 This is not new criticism. During the 1998 edition of the Forum, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had already expressed this fatigue quite directly: “[The] ARF must move forward if it is to remain vital and relevant [, and the] traditional security challenges the ARF was created to address must still be met” (quoted in Goh 2004, 60). The persistent character of this challenge is quite clear. Such fatigue is commonly expressed by diplomats of other dialogue partners (Western and Asian) and is even echoed by some ASEAN practitioners themselves. According to a former director at the ASEAN Secretariat, for instance, “nothing [is] happening” in the ARF, which is stuck on “autopilot cruising.”2 The inability of the Forum to progress along its three-step process, from ­confidence-building to preventive diplomacy and then conflict resolution, is a recurring concern for practitioners of Asia-Pacific regionalism. The problem has also been raised on many occasions in semi-formal and informal diplomatic settings. The ARF, like ASEAN itself, has been continuously chastised for its inability to respond effectively to traditional security concerns, and these concerns have only grown over time. As a result, the fear on the part of ASEAN actors that dialogue partners would lose interest in the ARF has increased over the years, especially as new initiatives are touted as better alternatives for addressing traditional security issues. As early as 2002, the United States expressed a clear preference for the newly established Shangri-La Dialogue, led by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Described by its organizers as “Asia’s premier defence summit,” it contrasts quite sharply with the ARF given its clear strategic, defense focus. The Dialogue’s V.I.P. guest list features defense ministers, senior defense officials, and military top brass from Asia-Pacific states, while the ARF is a foreign ministers meeting. While the main program at Shangri-La is structured around plenary sessions and keynotes, equally important are the opportunities for bilateral ­discussions— one analyst refers to this as “speed-dating for defence ministers” (Dobell 2019). It is hosted by Singapore and attracts significant Southeast Asian participation from both Track 1 and Track 2 milieux, yet ASEAN certainly does not take central stage in this venue. Indeed, a set-piece of Shangri-La

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is a much-awaited, indirect face-off between the U.S. secretary of defense and China’s delegation head,3 who take turns as the leading protagonist of each day’s main session. This brings a degree of sensationalism to the event that stands in sharp contrast with the boredom many ASEAN and non-ASEAN practitioners report experiencing when subjected to the litany of empty rhetoric of formal statements delivered at the ARF. The growing lack of interest (and frustration) in the ARF, publicly expressed by the Bush administration in the context of its larger review of U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacific region, had already underscored a need for reform in the early 2000s. In 2001, Barry Desker, a Singaporean diplomat and leading voice in the regional expert community, commented on the many “criticisms” addressed to the Forum as proof that it was facing a “major test.” Accordingly, “the argument that an alternative to the ARF should be sought and a new regional military and political alliance should be created needs to be addressed” (Desker 2001). A few months earlier, drawing heavily from recommendations from the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP), the 8th ARF had adopted a concept paper outlining a path for the Forum to transition to preventive diplomacy as the next step in its three-stage process. The inability of the ARF to make any clear progress toward conflict resolution has remained a key concern in ASEAN policy circles ever since.4 It is no coincidence, therefore, that the Declaration of ASEAN Concord II (Bali Concord II), adopted in 2003, further committed the organization to improve the ARF so that it could “remain the primary forum in enhancing political and security cooperation in the Asia Pacific region, as well as the pivot in building peace and stability in the region (emphasis added)” (ASEAN 2003). This was the first time ASEAN had described the ARF that way. The similarity with earlier characterizations of the Shangri-La Dialogue is striking, and clearly performative. In fact, ASEAN would systematically refer to its Forum as such from then on. In a sharp departure from earlier iterations, which were much more prudent, the ARF Chairman Statement, in turn, made sure that the ministers acknowledged  the role of the ARF as nothing less than “the main multilateral political and security forum in the region” and committed to further strengthening it (ARF 2005a). Despite these (limited) efforts to reassert the added value of the ARF, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s decision to skip the 2005 edition was a clear signal that superficial adjustments would not do to fix its fading reputation among key dialogue partners. A comprehensive review of the ARF was thus taken on as a way to develop concrete solutions to problems limiting its effectiveness. Cooperation on “soft,” “non-sensitive,” and “practical” security issues, supported by

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the shift of emphasis to NTS in ASEAN occurring in this period, proved particularly useful in this regard.

Soft Issues, Low-Hanging Fruits, and the Spillover Effect The shift to practical security cooperation has been a key part of efforts to reform the ARF. The rationale behind the initiation of this gradual transition was to find ways for the ARF to produce concrete results in the short term. Fostering practical initiatives focused on non-sensitive issues of shared concern among member states could facilitate progress from confidence-building to preventive diplomacy. In 2005, an ARF report refers to a “general agreement among [ARF participants] that non-traditional security challenges present some of the best opportunities to strengthen cooperation [and] are among the most amenable issues for the application of preventive diplomacy in the ARF context.” Here, the lack of a clear definition of preventive diplomacy is a good illustration of constructive ambiguity. It allows the ARF to claim that the long-awaited transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 is finally under way, while ensuring that the preference of its members for “a pace comfortable to all” is not threatened. As a former director of the ARF unit at the ASEAN Secretariat explains, this move was “very handy” to ensure that officials would not “run out of [things] to talk about”5 and that the Forum could still claim progress. From this point on, meetings among defense officials at the ARF would also give growing importance to NTS. Reports of ARF meetings describe NTS as a “common ground to build concrete cooperation” (ARF 2004) or as “less sensitive and more suitable for new cooperation initiatives” (ARF 2009b). According to an Indonesian expert, “nobody has a problem with [. . .] non-traditional security issues. [. . .] It’s one of the easiest things to deal with and everybody is very willing to cooperate on this.”6 In this perspective and context, NTS is a low-hanging fruit of security cooperation. Its main purpose is to serve as a catalyst for ASEAN to ultimately move to what really matters. For one Indonesian ambassador, nontraditional security is “easier to reach, [. . .] so that is why [we] pursue it, and [try to] finish it as early as possible [so we can] think about other things.”7 The ARF Vision Statement, adopted in 2009 to guide a more fundamental reform of the Forum, put NTS at the core of its rejuvenation (ARF 2009a). The U.S. government’s contribution to the ARF Security Outlook (ARF 2008a), which recognizes NTS cooperation as an effective way to develop interoperability and hold joint exercises, shows that ASEAN was somewhat successful in its attempt to reaffirm the added value of the ARF for regional security, if only temporarily. Presenting NTS as a low-hanging fruit is an implicit but direct reference to the possibility of a spillover effect in security cooperation from “soft” to “hard”

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issues. This logic manifests in how ASEAN approaches its role in managing the South China Sea disputes. According to one foreign affairs official involved in the coordination of negotiations over a “code of conduct” in the South China Sea: [O]ne of the ways to build confidence in the code of conduct is to enhance cooperation to deal with non-traditional security issues. [We] leave [the] questions of who owns what aside, keep that [on] the shelf [for the] moment [and focus on] nontraditional security [to] increase [the] comfort level [among parties] rather than going directly into the traditional security issue[s that] will take decades to resolve.8

This view is echoed in common references among practitioners to “early harvest” measures on “non-sensitive issues” in the context of these negotiations. The focus on “soft” issues also forms a key component of the development of defense cooperation in ASEAN. The ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM), established in 2006, aims to promote peace and regional stability through practical and concrete initiatives focused on transnational security issues. Similarly, the ADMM-Plus, inaugurated in 2010, includes maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), and counter-terrorism among its priority domains (ADMM 2007). According to an expert on strategic affairs from ISIS-Malaysia, the interest of NTS cooperation, which he describes as “nonsense agenda,” is merely to serve as official varnish for informal discussions on what really matters: “[NTS is] a pretext, mostly. [. . . I]t’s done because [it’s] far too premature to talk about [hard issues in a formal setting], we’re just not there yet.”9 In the “traditional” version of ASEAN’s security community in the making, the end game is traditional security, although it is still a long way to get there. This view is common within the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP), among other semi-formal and informal diplomacy settings. An ARF working group report also refers quite directly to concerns that NTS leads to not talking about sensitive but ultimately more pressing issues (ARF 2008b ). The report notes that “nontraditional security issues provided a good starting point [. . .], but [. . .] should not serve to avoid tackling the really important traditional security issues [that] remai[n] in the Asia-Pacific region.” A similar warning was made at a meeting of the ARF Experts and Eminent Persons Group, where “[s]ome participants [remarked] that military-related security issues could pose serious security problems and therefore must not be set aside” (ARF 2008c ). NTS, in this context, is not an end in itself, but low-­hanging fruits and “soft” issues used for target practice, to boost confidence-building, to serve as the next best kind of practical cooperation, or to act as some kind of work-around, indirect route toward the “real” and the “hard” security matters. This approach stands in sharp contrast with the urgency attributed to NTS in

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the “non-traditional” version of the security community, and the argument that traditional issues are in the past (Chapter 4). In 2010, the resurgence of traditional security concerns in the context of what is often described as China’s “new assertiveness” in the South China Sea and the American “pivot” to Asia further contributed to unsettle ASEAN’s indirect approach to regional stability. Growing rivalry among regional powers has continued to exacerbate doubts that the organization’s gradual and, by many accounts, calcified approach to conflict resolution can still be tenable. In this context, pressure for tipping the balance of ASEAN’s “comprehensive” view of security in favor of traditional concerns has intensified. Reports of discussions leading up to the adoption of an ARF action plan on maritime security refer to this debate. The final draft only mentions that the extent to which the ARF should “balance its work between conventional and non-traditional security issues” remains a “key issue,” while acknowledging that NTS issues are “useful early building blocks” (ARF 2011). Yet an early draft tabled in 2010 also states that “this does not mean [conventional issues] should be neglected” (ARF 2010b). This excerpt was deleted from the final version, and the issue remained contentious. Indeed, similar views were expressed in a 2013 report stating that “the ARF [should] move toward a discussion of more traditional security challenges [since they are] more likely to be a cause of instability” (ARF 2013a). This hierarchization of issues occurs through an assessment of their urgency based on predetermined criteria that favor conventional, state-centric, and “hard power” aspects of security. It is typical of statements enacted to support the development of the “traditional” version of the security community, in which such concerns are considered paramount. They also appear comparatively much more pressing and dangerous than NTS issues, here treated as benign, if not as a remnant of naïve assumptions about a regional peace dividend that never materialized. The priority given to transnational issues of common concern, and the need to avoid discussing sensitive issues in multilateral settings, has nonetheless been reaffirmed in many documents issued by the ARF since (ARF 2013b; 2014). Yet the impression that security cooperation is circumscribed to NTS by default, because ASEAN is not yet ready to tackle “real” security problems, continues to affect the Forum’s credibility. Practical cooperation on NTS or other soft issues was initially meant to foster renewed commitment from dialogue partners to the ARF process, but it is now treated as “a tacit admission that meaningful cooperation [. . .] over ‘hard’ security concerns is likely beyond the ability of the ARF” (Tan 2013a). This distinction between “soft” and “hard” security issues is common in the way in which social agents enact the “traditional” version of ASEAN’s security

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community. As stated in a policy brief prepared by the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (2014) on the East Asia Summit (EAS) to suggest a change in approach at this key ASEAN-centric forum: The EAS focuses on topics that are often considered “soft issues,” such as disaster relief and global health, and not on the “hard issues” of security [. . .]. These “soft issues,” which are often non-contentious, are useful for the purposes of confidencebuilding. But tabling the discussion of some “hard issues” [. . .] may have its advantages, as this draws more attention to the EAS and gives weight to discussions at the summit.

In this instance, the call for a change of focus away from “soft issues” to traditional security is not only justified by the danger of ignoring these concerns, but as a way to ensure ongoing commitment of dialogue partners to the ASEAN-led “architecture” amid proposals for alternatives. Yet the distinction does convey a specific position on what and where the danger “really is” that runs against what is typically favored by ASEAN officials. Indeed, the hesitation with which one analyst from the Philippines hierarchizes different clusters of security issues is telling because it questions the “realness” of NTS as a security matter: “[We have] to consider if we [are] doing the right thing [by] prioritizing non-traditional [issues] at the expense [of ] real . . . I mean, more difficult, intractable issues.”10 These comments make it quite clear that the “real” source of danger lies first and foremost in “traditional” security. In the context of the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting, the pressure to transition from NTS to traditional concerns, which again points to the ill-fitting character of this dichotomy in the first place, is even clearer. A report produced by the Singapore-based S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) on the ADMM-Plus credits some success to ASEAN’s approach when it comes to ­confidence-building and the development of practical security cooperation on transnational security issues. Yet it also laments the fact that such efforts continue to be circumscribed to NTS, which hampers the ability of ASEAN to engage its strategic partners “in a meaningful way” and to convince them of the added value of “ASEAN centrality” (Teo and Singh 2016). The report also states that the “cooperative atmosphere” in both ADMM and ADMM-Plus in “non-traditional security areas” has “yet to have positive spill-over effects in other domains” because of lingering sensitivities on “traditional security,” particularly the South China Sea disputes. NTS is described in this report as “functional cooperation,” not as a priority area in its own name. That this view comes from the RSIS, which carried the brunt of efforts to mainstream NTS as an end in itself (see Chapter 4), also points quite clearly to the ambivalence and tension that surrounds the use of this notion within specific ASEAN countries, and in this case within the same institution.

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Outside of Singapore, many other Track 2 experts have also questioned the spillover assumption, particularly when it comes to managing the South China Sea disputes. According to Rizal Sukma, the practical problem with the spillover effect, when it comes to maritime disputes, “is quite fundamental: in which area [do] you want to cooperate [. . .]?” Indeed, any agreement to cooperate over what is shared would imply recognizing that the area in question is in fact contested. This “not in my backyard” problem between ASEAN and China is compounded by the fact that “nobody knows who owns what,” which obstructs the implementation of such “great ideas.”11 That the much-awaited spillover effect of NTS cooperation, despite having bought ASEAN some time, continues to fail to materialize is not lost on the dialogue partners. According to a U.S. diplomat, “the problem in ASEAN [is that] you keep going for years and years and years on the [soft security] cooperation side and never quite break into the more controversial issues.”12 From this perspective, NTS cooperation does not stand on its own in demonstrating ASEAN’s value added in the pursuit of security, which is conditional on tangible effects defined as interstate conflict resolution. This regional variant of the spillover approach is also plagued by internal contradiction. On the one hand, it is premised on the idea that the delineation between traditional and non-traditional security challenges is porous, and therefore that cooperation on one category of issues can positively affect the other. On the other hand, ASEAN’s approach to the negotiation of a code of conduct in the South China Sea with China also works under the assumption that these issueareas can be insulated from each other. According to one foreign affairs official involved in the coordination of the negotiation process, the approach favored by both sides is to bank on the maintenance of a clear separation when it comes to negative feedback effects, and make sure that a problem in “one issue doesn’t affect another,” more sensitive domain of ASEAN-China relations.13 This is arguably another example of ASEAN wanting to, in the words of an expert from the Philippines, “have its cake and eat it too” (see Chapter 4) when it comes to security cooperation. Many interviewees who participate in the challenging re-enactment of ASEAN as a “traditional” security community in the making suggest that the relationship between traditional security and other concerns, whether they are described as “non-traditional,” “soft,” or “functional,” is actually a zero-sum game. Focusing on one means losing ground on the other “kind” of security. As they acknowledge this trade-off, it is not always entirely clear for practitioners where ASEAN should focus its energies. Rizal Sukma expresses this ambivalence quite clearly when he speaks of a loss of momentum of NTS as a result of growing tensions in the South China Sea: “[T]hat worries me a little bit [. . .]. When

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everybody is talking about great power relations, the rise of China, [its] implications for the regional order and so on, even the policy makers [of ASEAN might become less] interested to discuss [NTS].”14

Debating ASEAN’s “Centrality” in the Regional Security Architecture As ASEAN was working on a plan to reform the ARF, proposals in favor of new initiatives designed to overhaul the regional security architecture were being touted by the dialogue partners, starting with Australia and Japan, but rapidly expanding to others. In response to these proposals, ASEAN moved its focus away from the ARF by developing and expanding other institutions under the “ASEAN Plus Eight” formula. These efforts have met with some success but have not been sufficient to rein in external initiative, which continues to affect ­ASEAN’s claim to institutional “centrality” in the broader region to this day— the revival of the “Quad,” discussed later in the chapter, is a good example. Ongoing debates on the value of ASEAN’s position at the core of an incipient Asia-Pacific cum “Indo-Pacific” community continues to disrupt the organization’s self-narrative as the driving force of regional multilateralism, all the more so because it takes hold at the intra-ASEAN level as well. Yet as this section makes clear, with every new challenge to its approach, ASEAN has proven able to respond through the mobilization of discursive power and the re-enactment of a security community self-narrative that reaffirms its “centrality” as the most appropriate solution to traditional forms of insecurity in the broader region.

A Post-ASEAN Regional Community? Views from Australia, Japan, and Indonesia In June 2008, Australia’s then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sent a shock wave across ASEAN policy circles by declaring the current regional security architecture inadequate to ensure regional stability in the Asia-Pacific region. Rudd floated the idea of a new, overarching multilateral institution, better equipped to tackle the whole spectrum of strategic issues of concern for the region. In what would soon become a common refrain among ASEAN’s dialogue partners, he further stated that “none of our existing regional mechanisms as currently configured are capable of achieving these purposes.” His proposal for an “Asia Pacific Community” (APC) was aimed to support the development of a new regional architecture by 2020. In Rudd’s view, this call for action was justified because of a resurgence of the risk of militarized conflict stemming from major power rivalry: “The danger in not acting is that we run the risk of succumbing

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to the perception that future conflict within our region may somehow be inevitable” (Rudd 2008). Rudd’s proposal was not especially well received in ASEAN nor within the Australian expert community. Long-time defense policy and strategic affairs analyst Hugh White, for instance, criticized its improvised character: “If it was a serious policy proposal, we would have seen evidence of deep thought, careful preparation, detailed exposition and patient diplomacy [. . .]. It looks [. . .] as if none of this happened.” The creation of a new institution as the latest ingredient in the “alphabet soup” of existing mechanisms was, in his view, wildly misguided (White 2008). The lack of consultation of the ASEAN diplomatic milieu was a faux pas that most regional analysts found themselves at a loss to explain, especially coming from Rudd. Barry Desker described the initiative as “dead in the water” for this reason: “[T]he problem [is] that this came out of the blue. [. . .] It would have been [better received] if it had been thought through and [discussed] with [ASEAN] leaders before it was presented as a bright new idea from Australia” (quoted in Dobell 2008). Thai academic Pavin Chachavalpongpun (2009) went a step further in an otherwise similar critique, by describing the APC as a “dangerous concept” meant to “belittle” and “mash” ASEAN for the sake of Rudd’s “own foreign policy ambitions.” Some experts were more generous. For instance, a well-respected Indonesian expert, Hadi Soesastro, described Rudd’s initiative as “an invitation to other leaders, policy makers, and thinkers in the region to join him in a serious discussion” about how the Asia-Pacific region could be reorganized (Soesastro 2008). The Australian government would use this gracious re-framing to correct course. In his address at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Rudd (2009) alluded to his critics, as well as ASEAN’s “special role” in regional security, before announcing a conference aimed at fostering in-depth discussion on his idea with interested parties. This spin would not be sufficient to assuage the widespread impression that ASEAN’s claim to “centrality” had been explicitly challenged. Indonesian policy makers and experts were quite adamant about the need for ASEAN to rise to the challenge. Jusuf Wanandi (2009), longtime facilitator of Track 2 diplomacy in the region and founder of ASEAN-ISIS, actively promoted the idea of an “East Asian G-8,” which shared many similarities with Rudd’s proposal. Rizal Sukma (2009), in turn, called for the adoption of a “post-ASEAN” foreign policy by Indonesia, directly targeting the failures of ASEAN to make a tangible contribution to regional stability: ASEAN seems unable to change and adapt to present conditions, therefore its role as the architect of regional security [is coming] to an end. [. . .] The region needs an architecture that will guarantee that [the] relationship among major powers [. . .]

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Such calls certainly ruffled ASEAN feathers too, yet they also show that Rudd’s suggestion that some radical change was urgently needed was not merely the expression of outsider naïveté or as “out of the blue” as Desker (in Dobell 2008) suggested. Indeed, such considerations would be paramount in Indonesia’s (and Japan’s) push for a new “Indo-Pacific” concept, meant to contribute to a “dynamic equilibrium” in the region. The resemblance with earlier discussions surrounding the creation of the ARF (see Chapter 3) is also striking: who the messenger is, and the origin of the proposal for change, often matters at least as much as its substance. ASEAN’s response to another proposal, promoted by Japan’s prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, is also noteworthy in this regard. In August 2009, Hatoyama called for the creation of an East Asia Community (EAC) to support a reconfiguration of the regional order. The proposal (Hatoyama 2009a; 2009b ) was aimed at fostering multilateral resolution of interstate conflict, particularly on maritime disputes, as the only way to mitigate regional power rivalry. Hatoyama’s initiative placed a strong emphasis on functional cooperation on maritime security, and was officially presented to ASEAN at the East Asia Summit in October 2009 (EAS 2009). Despite some important similarities between Hatoyama’s and Rudd’s proposals, ASEAN’s reaction to Hatoyama’s can be characterized by a prudent, non-committal overture (Bangkok Post 2010). The double standard was not lost on Australian commentators. According to one analyst, Rudd’s APC was “quickly pilloried [. . .] for not paying enough deference to ASEAN’s self-appointed role as the driving force in regional community building.” While Hatoyama’s EAC did “much of the same,” there was “little backlash from ASEAN circles” by contrast (Cook 2009). Still, the EAC was widely interpreted as an additional dent into ASEAN’s claim to “centrality” in the Asia-Pacific regional architecture, as it was no longer needed to provide the space and conditions under which the conduct of a trilateral dialogue between China, Japan, and South Korea could proceed (Mulgan 2009; Chongkittavorn 2009a). While there is still no consensus among the “Plus Three” countries on the appropriate membership for the regional community, nor on the institutional platform that should embody it, Hatoyama’s proposal did add to ASEAN’s embarrassment and made fundamental reform appear increasingly unavoidable. It is in this context that the conference announced by Rudd at the ShangriLa Dialogue was finally held in Sydney in December 2009. The event gathered over 140 participants around the theme “The Asia-Pacific: A Community for the 21st Century.” One of the outcomes of the meeting was to firm up an already growing consensus on the need to strengthen existing institutions. The event

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effectively booted a tabula rasa approach firmly outside the realm of possible solutions (Drysdale 2009). The meeting’s report is a good indication of the nature of the debate that unfolded among participants, which clearly pitted ASEAN champions and skeptics against one another. The report described the context of the conference as involving “an uneven and, at times, decreasing confidence” in ASEAN-led multilateralism’s ability to deal with “anticipated pressures and guarantee peace.” While some rejected the view conveyed in the report that the region faced a “crisis of institutional failure,” other participants argued that “current regional institutions had a poor record of anticipating challenges, had not dealt effectively with crises, and would not necessarily be up to the task of dealing with future challenges” (Parliament of Australia 2010). More specifically, an Australian proposal in favor of the creation of a “regional concert” led by an Asia-Pacific “G8” within which the role of ASEAN remained unspecified seemed to have been met with heightened concern, if not outright indignation, among Southeast Asian participants. Singaporean diplomat Tommy Koh apparently conveyed the most vocal opposition to this idea by describing the proposal as a clear rupture with ASEAN’s approach, and by offering a strong defense of the institution’s track record (Acharya 2009a). In the context of these tense exchanges, the need for a summit-level institution that would include the “relevant players” (no more and no less) in supporting regional order in the Asia-Pacific, and would cover the full spectrum of key strategic issues, was confirmed as a new necessity. As the following section makes even clearer, what this outcome would look like in practice was not at all selfevident at the time—in fact, it still is not. Indeed, neither can the ways in which the debate unfolded nor the outcomes it led to be understood without paying attention to the rhythm of various positions expressed in the discursive field. These positions are conveyed through the enactment of authority in defining what insecurity consists of, and what the appropriate response ought to look like as an expression of a regional community with unstable borders. The discursive power deployed by ASEAN here is impressive, as it effectively turned around the direction of a debate that initially seemed to be leading toward its inexorable marginalization. Indeed, that ASEAN ended up being granted the last word in this story is a strong testament to this power. This outcome was in no way the only or even predominant option on the table despite being presented as such in retrospect. Whatever the intent behind specific proposals, the effect, nonetheless, is a familiar one: to prompt ASEAN into some form of light, adaptive response that would appear all the more sensible and uncontroversial by contrast with more radical alternatives. In this phase, the sound of authoritative ASEAN voices actively contributed to the crystallization of this sense of inevitability. Kavi

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Chongkittavorn’s (2009b) summary of the Sydney meeting, which he attended, is a good example: “[W]hatever shape this [will take] is anybody’s guess [but] ASEAN no longer has the luxury of time.” This is a key discursive mechanism by which the “traditional” version of ASEAN’s security community in the making is “talked into existence,” lives on, and proves able to gather external support, even on the part of its skeptics. This happens despite ASEAN having not much more tangible to offer than a convenient yet contested correlation between its existence and Southeast Asia’s relative “long peace,” which coexists with “pervasive levels of violence short of war” (Glas, forthcoming, 5). The re-enactment of this version of the security community is the product of past practice, crystallized in the organization’s self-narrative as being the reason for regional peace. It is carried out through the agency of specific speaking agents with various stakes in the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a “traditional” security community in the making. For the pieces to fall together the way they did, someone had to speak out, in a particular way, and in a particular sequence that was to a considerable extent indeterminate despite being shaped by prior events. Whatever “shared understandings” were involved, they do not hold explanatory power in and of themselves, independent of their articulation in text and context.

ASEAN’s Response: The “Plus Eight” Formula In 2010, the stage was set for the development of a fully fledged ASEAN counterproposal on the regional security architecture. After a first wave of proposals from the dialogue partners, the prevailing view in ASEAN policy circles at the time was that, as a Jakarta Post editorial puts it, “dilly-dallying for the sake of diplomatic courtesy” toward external “initiatives that will not fly” was no longer an appropriate course of action for the grouping, and that a more decisive approach was required (Suryodiningrat 2010). Barry Desker (2010) certainly agreed: “ASEAN has always prided itself on its inclusive character [and] has tended to be reluctant to give a negative response to initiatives from outside the region. The time has come for ASEAN to do so.” The Hanoi Summit of April 2010 formalized this change in tone. The Chairman’s Statement mentioned that “any new regional framework or process should be complementary to and built upon existing regional mechanisms and the principle of ASEAN’s centrality” (ASEAN 2010a ). A new ASEAN Plus Eight formula, expanding the Plus Six membership of the East Asia Summit,15 was put forward as a temporary common ground given diverging perspectives on which institutional platform ought to embody this “framework or process,” which remained unspecified, but would have to include both the United States and Russia. The ASEAN Summit of April 2010 in Hanoi also confirmed the establishment of

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the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus, which follows the same Plus Eight formula (ASEAN 2010a ). In July 2010, the ASEAN Foreign Ministers formally recommended the expansion of the East Asia Summit to Russia and the U.S. (ASEAN 2010b ), who joined the sixth summit in November 2011. The adoption of this new formula, and the recognition it elicited among dialogue partners, was presented by the ASEAN officialdom as a triumph of ASEAN centrality. According to Singapore’s Foreign Minister George Yeo: “All the major powers in the world now accept that the regional architecture for Asia as a whole should be built around ASEAN at its core, and [that] ASEAN should play a leading role.” Yet comments by Tan See Seng show that such “self-congratulation” ought to be taken with a great deal of salt, and that ASEAN was not out of the woods: “ASEAN’s default position in the ‘driver’s seat’ of Asian regionalism is safe—for now.” This symbolic victory could not hide the fact that the ASEAN-centric security architecture remained “woefully inadequate for addressing Asia’s most serious security problems” (Tan 2010). That the East Asia Summit still needs to prove itself on traditional security issues and avoid reproducing the flaws of the ARF has been a prevailing view among regional experts and officials alike since then.16

Ordering the Indo-Pacific Region: What Role for ASEAN? A new wave of initiatives aimed at supporting a profound reform of the regional security architecture that circulated from 2013 onward shows that the momentum surrounding the expansion of the EAS could very well be short-lived. While “ASEAN centrality” has become a set piece of dialogue partners’ statements on Asia-Pacific regionalism, it typically looks like lip service, and is often followed by suggestions to the contrary. Indeed, diplomats from dialogue partner countries tend to reduce ASEAN’s centrality to the role of platform where (nonASEAN) relevant players converge. According to a South Korea diplomat, for instance, ASEAN representatives, despite holding their weight in numbers, rarely speak up on significant matters at the EAS and other ASEAN-led meetings. This weakens ASEAN’s standing in the eyes of its partners. ASEAN’s leadership being exclusively nominal is a key area of concern for the regional expert community as well. For Carolina Hernandez, this is a “crucial time” for ASEAN. With “so many” outside initiatives being touted, it seems quite clear that ASEAN is “under siege.”17 Many new initiatives have indeed been promoted by dialogue partners over the last few years. China’s Treaty of Good Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation, for one, was met with considerable suspicion in the region. In May 2014, during the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia

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(CICA), Xi Jinping also announced China’s “New Security Concept,” aimed at sustaining the creation of a new security architecture centered on Asia—which would exclude the United States. During his address, Xi stated that “it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia” (Burgman 2016). He also called for the expansion of CICA to the whole ASEAN membership, which unsurprisingly remains a work in progress given a long-standing aversion of Southeast Asian states to external pressure to pick sides.18 In turn, Russia started, at about the same time, to promote the adoption of a Framework for Principles for Security and Development Cooperation in Asia and the Pacific, which would include a collective security treaty, jointly elaborated with China. Japan also doubled down on earlier efforts with a new proposal, promoted in various informal meetings in 2015, for the creation of an Asia Maritime Organization for Security and Cooperation (AMOSC) explicitly modeled on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) but aimed specifically at maritime conflict resolution (IIPS-Japan 2015; Parameswaran 2014). Finally, India was also promoting its own version of a proposal for reform (Chongkittavorn 2015). While none of these proposals have gotten off the ground, nor do they explicitly spell out clear alternatives to the ASEAN model, they clearly indicate that the challenge to the grouping’s claim to centrality is a persistent one. In fact, this centrality never quite stabilized as more than a relatively recent and mostly reactive discursive construct. Despite being typically presented as a long-standing fait accompli that the region cannot realistically do away with, the “reality” of ASEAN’s centrality is debated. It is also mostly reducible to its mantra-like rearticulation in official speech and the ability of the organization to maintain some control of the terms by which multilateral security dialogue in the Asia-Pacific region ought to be conducted. One official from an ASEAN member state in charge of regional cooperation makes it clear that centrality is a performative default option that benefits from the absence of a counterfactual: “People criticize ASEAN for being this and [that], but do you have a better solution [. . .]? No! [. . .] If [we] had no ASEAN today, would we try to create it? Yes, we would.”19 Yet the continued ability of ASEAN to reposition itself convincingly, through the enactment of meaning-in-use, as the unavoidable kingmaker of Asia-Pacific regionalism is a testament to the resilience of its discursive power. This reaffirmation of the added value of ASEAN in this context, however, is often presented as conditional on the ability of the grouping to assert its centrality actively, in more than nominal terms, especially within the East Asia Summit. As Jusuf Wanandi puts it, in terms that echo misgivings articulated by the South Korean diplomat quoted above:

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We have that beautiful institution at the Summit level, [. . .] able to get all the big powers [. . .] to sit down and then work out something together. And instead we are not doing anything! [ASEAN] only organize[s for] them to meet and [then they talk about what] they want to talk about. [. . .] We have to change [that] because there is a danger. [Our dialogue partners] are making their own [initiatives] because they cannot depend on us. [. . .] We are so worried every time that ASEAN will be overrun [. . .]. Of course we are going to be overrun! Because we don’t do anything.20

This frustration is shared by Carolina Hernandez, who also expresses her worry about ASEAN’s future resilience: “[ASEAN is] not going to disappear, [. . .] it will muddle through. [. . .] But these are times when muddling through will not be enough.”21 These concerns also extend to the diplomatic community. As one ASEAN diplomat puts it, the grouping’s centrality is “not a given, it’s not a . . . birthright. It is something that we have to continually nurture, [that] we have to earn. [. . .] Otherwise, ASEAN [will] lose its relevance to the world.”22 The growing awareness of ASEAN officials that more needs to be done is apparent in discussions on the reform of the EAS initiated in 2015. It is also reflected in a non-paper titled “ASEAN’s Centrality and Strategic Approach to the Future of Regional Architecture,” circulated by Thailand and endorsed by the ASEAN Foreign Ministers in April 2015 before being incorporated into ASEAN’s Revised Work Plan on Maintaining and Enhancing ASEAN Centrality in November 2015. The non-paper aimed to specify the constitutive elements of ASEAN centrality and initiate concrete measures to affirm it in practice. As the document states, “ASEAN is under huge pressure from major powers wanting to spread their influence at the expense of others” (ASEAN Information Center, Government of Thailand 2015). It emphasizes major power rivalry as a cause of primary and urgent concern for the grouping, stipulates a need for internal consolidation of ASEAN, proactive leadership in agenda-setting of ASEAN-led meetings with dialogue partners, and the strengthening of the ability of ASEAN to “speak with one voice” on important issues, including by asserting itself as “the only acceptable balancing wheel” between the U.S. and China. The latest wave in ASEAN’s ongoing struggle to assert its centrality in a broader security architecture is currently unfolding in the context of various proposals for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP). This new phase was again initiated by Japan, drawing from an earlier proposal first put forward by Shinzo Abe before his resignation as prime minister in 2007, and later reframed by Indonesia under the leadership of the then Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa (2011; 2013). The strain on ASEAN, however, has markedly intensified since the revival and adaptation of the concept during Abe’s second mandate, and following the reappropriation of the FOIP concept by the Trump administration in a much more overt, antagonistic attempt to counter China’s growing influence in the

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region. Ongoing discussions around the revival of the “Quad”23 as FOIP’s main strategic offshoot, which after much speculation led to a virtual summit in March 2021, further contribute to the impression that, in contrast to earlier proposals, this new momentum will prove more sustainable. The speculation around what form an expanded “Quad 2.0” could take has not yet led to tangible outcomes, however, nor is there a clear consensus among its core participants on who would be included and what it would do. It is still provoking acute discomfort within ASEAN policy circles given the strong strategic undertones of discussions and the fact that it also stands as a clear disavowal of ASEAN’s role in providing concrete solutions to “hard” security concerns. The possibility that the Quad could lead to some kind of “Asian NATO” has been raised on a few occasions recently (e.g., Heydarian 2021). While the prospect is easily dismissed when put against the context of prior debates, the staying power of this idea among dialogue partners creates considerable uneasiness among ASEAN practitioners. The Biden administration has reaffirmed the essential character of a free and open Indo-Pacific, and U.S. commitment to it. Indo-Pacific visions, frameworks, and strategies are also proliferating among ASEAN’s dialogue partners. As such, current debates around FOIP and the Quad have, once again, jolted ASEAN into devising a response. This response, at least for the time being, has not been especially innovative, which arguably indicates that key figures in ASEAN policy circles are not yet convinced of the reality of this latest attack on ASEAN’s centrality. Indeed, in spelling out their approaches to the “Indo-Pacific,” dialogue partners continue to reassert commitment to ASEAN’s unique role. The grouping’s response has, however, been accompanied by a shift in the language used by individual ASEAN members, which conveys more confidence. In June 2019, an Indonesian initiative led to the adoption of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (ASEAN 2019) amid a general—and familiar—sense that the grouping was once again at risk of losing the initiative. The document, in typical ASEAN speak, reiterates previous consensus on the guiding principles of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) when it comes to regional order, including ASEAN centrality. It is also very clear that this latest ASEAN initiative is “not aimed at creating new mechanisms or replacing existing ones; rather, it is [. . .] intended to enhance ASEAN’s Community building process and to strengthen and give new momentum [to] existing ASEAN-led mechanisms to better face challenges [. . .] arising from [. . .] regional and global environments.” Against other proposals on the market at the time, and in sharp contrast with the U.S. version of FOIP, the goal is to foster an inclusive approach to the strengthening of a regional order with ASEAN at its center.

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While the Outlook has been criticized for its vagueness and lack of innovation, it has been accompanied by a change in tone, apparent in statements from representatives of individual member states, and their participation in meetings with dialogue partners. Lee Hsien Loong’s speech at the 2019 Shangri-La Dialogue is widely recognized as a prime example of a broader trend in the affirmation of ASEAN voices in the midst of heightened concerns around the toxicity of major power rhetoric. These voices are not necessarily in unison, but they do show more willingness to boldly assert the value of an ASEAN-centric architecture. Those who do not abide by prevailing terms of regional dialogue, in veiled references to the United States and China in particular, are now openly chastised for “deepen[ing] fault lines or forc[ing] countries to take sides” (Mahmud 2019). This shift in tone has been well received among other dialogue partners, who share ASEAN’s concerns about being “caught in the middle” (Strait Times 2020), although many struggle to build domestic consensus on how to approach these matters. Notwithstanding the current hype around a new “Indo-Pacific” order, the need for ASEAN to exercise a role of “honest broker” of major power relations more confidently and effectively is not a new concern for the grouping. It has been a mainstay of intra-ASEAN discussions since 2010. Prior debates were a major driver of initial proposals for a new Indo-Pacific regional order. These concerns have also led to steady calls for ASEAN to take up a more direct approach to traditional security matters in general, and the South China Sea in particular. Indeed, ASEAN’s claim to centrality in the broader regional architecture is now directly linked to its ability to assert a clear contribution to regional stability through conflict management, extending to big power relations. The South China Sea disputes are the issue par excellence where ASEAN’s role in this regard is most severely and directly under stress.

ASEAN and the South China Sea Disputes After years of relative calm, tensions in the South China Sea have been flaring up again since 2010, and have peaked in 2012 –2016, leading to unprecedented pressure on ASEAN to come up with a solution to ensure the peaceful management of disputes among parties. The South China Sea disputes directly oppose China and four ASEAN member states (Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam) with overlapping maritime and territorial claims in various contested areas. As such, many of the region’s observers share the view that these disputes are “[w]ithout a doubt, ASEAN’s main security challenge” (Acharya 2015). Beyond the deterioration of the situation on the ground, a crucial concern for ASEAN is internal division and the sustained diplomatic tension it creates, with direct

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repercussions on its claim to “centrality.” Negotiations for the adoption of a code of conduct (CoC) of parties in the South China Sea are ongoing. They are also facing many hurdles since they were revived in the context of growing major power rivalry, which manifests most concretely on this strategic terrain. This section looks at this recent phase in the disputes, the impact on ASEAN’s evolving position on this issue, and how it ties in with the enactment of the “traditional” version of its security community.

Relaunching ASEAN-China Negotiations on the South China Sea Following a period of relative calm after the adoption of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea between ASEAN and China (ASEAN 2002a), concerns over China’s “new assertiveness” in contested areas have risen in the context of Beijing’s transition to a more “active” foreign and defense policy. In March 2009, reports that Chinese vessels had engaged in aggressive maneuvers against the USNS Impeccable within China’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) led to a significant rise in diplomatic tensions between the two big powers, soon pulling ASEAN into the crossfire. In March 2010, conflicting accounts of high-ranking Chinese officials asserting in private that the South China Sea was a “core interest” (a term previously reserved for Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang) during a meeting with their U.S. counterparts led to significant regional disquiet (Wong 2010). In this context, Hanoi reportedly used its prerogative as ASEAN chair to ensure that the issue would be discussed in ASEAN-led multilateral fora (Goh 2013, 106). During the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum, twelve ARF member states including the United States raised the issue against China’s position that it should not be “internationalized.” In addition to pledging U.S. support for the ASEAN-China negotiation process toward the implementation of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the United States “has a national interest (emphasis added) in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea” (U.S. Department of State 2010). These remarks were widely interpreted as a clear sign that the United States meant to be more firmly involved in efforts to curb China’s attempts to enhance its regional position through power projection. They were unsurprisingly received by Beijing as an “attack against China” (China Daily 2010). This narrative would be reproduced in a steady stream of hardline commentaries in Chinese state-controlled media in the following years (Global Times 2010; 2011; Wu 2012). In this context, ASEAN’s position on the issue has been met with increased international scrutiny, which shows no signs of receding. While the grouping

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cannot take sides in disputes that pit some of its members against others, it is no longer in a position to remain silent without a severe impact on its credibility. The need for ASEAN to “speak with one voice” on this issue has simultaneously become unavoidable and more difficult to do, particularly given China’s economic influence over Laos and Cambodia. Indeed, ASEAN member states have been increasingly subjected to attempts from the two big powers to actively influence the organization’s stance, including on language—the U.S. pushing for stronger and more direct references to an expansive definition of the freedom of navigation and condemnation of China’s behavior, while China presses for the opposite (Ghosh 2014; Chongkittavorn 2014).24 The potential for division is exacerbated by differences among ASEAN formal parties, interested parties, and non-parties to the disputes on the nature and extent of insecurity, and how the South China Sea ranks among other issues on the regional security agenda. There has since been sustained concern in ASEAN quarters that major power rivalry would shift attention away from Southeast Asian security priorities to the concerns of external actors. In this context, ASEAN has been repeatedly called upon, including internally, to “get its act together” to avoid letting the South China Sea issue derail its agenda and harm its centrality (The Nation 2010). Taking up this task as 2011 ASEAN chair, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa put in considerable effort to foster the re-launching of ASEAN-China negotiations after almost a decade without significant progress, leading to the adoption of Guidelines for the Implementation of the Declaration of Conduct on the South China Sea as a basis for the “eventual realization” of a code of conduct (ASEAN 2011b). Cautious optimism regarding an “early conclusion” of negotiations would quickly be disappointed, however.

The “Phnom Penh Fiasco Despite low expectations, the 2012 Cambodian chairmanship of ASEAN was, by all accounts, a setback the scale of which the grouping had never seen before. The chair’s decision to remove the issue from the agenda following an impromptu visit by People’s Republic of China (PRC) President Hu Jintao a few days before the April 2012 Summit led to publicly aired allegations of conflict of interest followed by denial by a “fed up” Hun Sen (Hunt 2012). Frustration in ASEAN, especially on the part of the Philippines, against attempts by Beijing to interfere in intra-ASEAN discussions was also palpable (Chanco 2012). A few days after the summit, a standoff between the Philippines Navy and Chinese maritime surveillance ships around Scarborough Shoal led to further complications. During the July 2012 AMM, the Philippines, but also Vietnam, at loggerheads with China over its activities in the Paracels, both insisted that the

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meeting’s joint communiqué ought to make explicit mentions of specific incidents having taken place within their EEZs. The Cambodian chair, Foreign Minister Hor Namhong, firmly opposed this on the basis that such references would go against ASEAN’s past practice and would require the grouping to take a position on claims.25 As a result of the impasse, the 45th AMM concluded with no joint communiqué being released, for the first time in ASEAN’s history (Ghosh 2012). The gravity of what is commonly referred to as the “Phnom Penh Fiasco” should not be underestimated. The joint communiqué is a negotiated document among the ASEAN Foreign Ministers, the language of which is carefully worded to reflect consensus among the group to the letter. This confers upon it a symbolic importance that distinguishes it from other ASEAN statements, including chairman statements issued after ASEAN summits, where the chair has more room to maneuver. As former secretary general Ong Keng Yong explains, the absence of a joint communiqué effectively “paralyzed” the organization.26 Confusion has never completely been lifted over what exactly transpired behind closed doors in Phnom Penh. While leaked minutes of the Foreign Ministers Retreat bring some clarity, discussions have also led to further debates on the “facts” that are the subject of competing narratives from Cambodia, the Philippines, and other actors. The dominant view, advanced by the Philippines with the support of officials and experts from other ASEAN member states, is that Hor Namhong cut discussions short unilaterally before a consensus could be reached, thus failing to uphold the chair’s responsibility in fostering consensus. According to Singapore’s Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam, for instance: “There is no point in papering over it. There was a consensus among the majority of countries. The role of the Chair in that context is to forge a complete consensus amongst all. But that did not happen” (Ghosh 2012). The outcome of the meeting was at least partly rescued, in extremis, by shuttle diplomacy conducted by Marty Natalegawa, resulting in ASEAN’s endorsement of its Six-Point Principles on the South China Sea (ASEAN 2012). The document reiterated consensus reached prior to the Phnom Penh meeting on the need for parties to exercise restraint, not use force, and respect international law and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in addition to calling for the “early conclusion of a regional code of conduct.” Yet the polemic surrounding the 2012 AMM was still carried over through vitriolic “megaphone diplomacy” by officials from the Philippines and Cambodia in regional media (Basilio 2012). According to the Cambodian ambassador to the Philippines:

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Cambodia has always been mindful of the need to secure full consensus [. . .] before ASEAN could issue any statement, especially on the sensitive issue of the South China Sea. [However, it soon became] clear that [. . .] Cambodia would have violated [ASEAN’s] consensus-based decision-making [by issuing a statement. To] try to blame Cambodia [for] the inflexible [. . .] positions of [two other] countries [is] dirty politics [and] should have no place in ASEAN. (Sereythonh 2012)

This episode is a clear instance where alternative representations of ASEAN’s role in the pursuit of more traditional forms of security clash in direct and explicit ways within the grouping itself. This incident cannot be reduced to a mere difference in security preferences. At its most basic level, what happened in Phnom Penh is a prime example of internal contestation regarding the very nature of regional insecurity. The South China Sea is depicted by some as an urgent ASEAN matter requiring a collective response in order to ensure the credibility and resilience of its security community–building project. For others, it is merely one security issue among many and only a priority for a few individual states. Therefore, it ought to be resolved through discussions among the parties directly involved. Yet this issue also reveals significant internal disagreement on what counts as appropriate and competent rendering of consensus in language for the diplomatic community of practice when it comes to handling sensitive security matters, and who among the community’s membership holds authority in determining this. Explanations that reduce this episode to conflicting material interests or a breach in ASEAN norms are missing an important part of the story, which has to do with how supposedly “shared” understandings are not only dependent on their enactment in text and context, but deeply contested (see also Martel and Glas n.d.). This internal contestation was very apparent at the following ASEAN Summit, during which Philippine President Benigno Aquino III directly contradicted Hun Sen’s rendition of the ASEAN consensus. Aquino warned that when it comes to the South China Sea, “[t]he ASEAN route is not the only route for us” (Porcalla 2012). Indeed, the Philippines would soon take a different path through its pursuit of an arbitration procedure against China under Annex VII of UNCLOS (Philippines v. China). The 2012 AMM and Cambodian chairmanship of ASEAN is generally seen as a major setback for the organization on the South China Sea issue but also regarding its broader claim to contribute to regional peace and stability on traditional security matters. As a response, a collective ASEAN narrative soon emerged that spun the episode as ASEAN’s rock bottom, a “never-again” moment, and a

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much-needed “wake-up call” for the organization. According to one diplomat, the Phnom Penh fiasco “was the low point [for ASEAN] and that is a lesson that is now at the back of every ASEAN member state. Everybody is determined to avoid the same mistake that Cambodia made.”27 Former secretary general Ong Keng Yong echoed this sentiment by referring to the Cambodian argument that there was no consensus, confident that “at least this particular excuse cannot be used again the next time.”28

ASEAN’s “New Assertiveness” on the South China Sea In the aftermath of the 2012 Cambodian chairmanship, ASEAN’s approach to the South China Sea disputes was gradually affirmed as the grouping sought to show unity and find an appropriate balance between a collective response and the actions of individual member states, particularly the Philippines. In January 2013, in what was widely interpreted as a clear break with ASEAN’s careful approach to the issue (Thayer 2014b),29 Manila filed its arbitration case against China in an attempt to get clarification on the (in)compatibility of China’s “nine-dash line”30 with international law, as well as the legal status of eleven features claimed by both countries. China disputes the legality of the procedure and refused to take part in the arbitration process, which moved forward without it, leading in 2016 to an award that is highly favorable to the Philippines. In parallel, the 2013 Brunei chairmanship was able to foster a new stance of unity among the ASEAN membership and impose a return to normalcy by reasserting the grouping’s pre-2012 position. Yet ongoing developments in disputed areas and their vicinity,31 aggressive rhetoric in Chinese state-sponsored media, and additional strains on ASEAN’s collective stance have continued to affect ASEAN’s ability to move past its “never again” moment. While the Philippines continued to play on both international law and ASEAN fronts, using meetings to secure what one official described as “tacit giving of mutual moral support”32 from other ASEAN parties, other developments have also led to a gradual adaptation of the grouping’s formal stance. While Malaysia had typically maintained a quiet diplomacy approach in dealing with Chinese incursions into its EEZ, it also actively worked behind the scenes to consolidate ASEAN’s position in preparation for assuming the ASEAN chairmanship in 2015. In turn, Vietnam formally requested the international tribunal to take its position into account during the arbitration process, and has since stepped up its game, raising the issue publicly in multilateral settings. Recent reports show that Vietnam is now openly considering taking China to court (Dutton 2020). Adjustments to non-parties’ approaches to the issue have also been observable in the context of the international arbitration. In March 2014, breaking against

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past practice of refraining to take a public stance, Indonesian officials publicly reminded the international community that the “nine-dash line” potentially overlapped with the country’s EEZ near the Natuna. They also denounced “the aggressive stance of the Chinese government,” leading to much speculation among regional analysts. In May of the same year, Singapore circulated a statement referring to concerns about recent developments in the South China Sea. Indeed, a new wave of tensions pitting China against the Philippines and Vietnam, which presented a united front against Beijing, ensured that the South China Sea remained a central agenda item of ASEAN meetings. These developments have led to additional calls from individual member states that a firmer collective position needed to be clearly expressed. As K. Shanmugam put it, ASEAN has to be neutral but “neutrality is not the same as keeping quiet” (Wong 2014). This position has since crystallized into a new consensus in the grouping. Indeed, not saying anything of consequence would mean that ASEAN’s “desire to play a central role [and] to have a peaceful region [would] be seriously damaged” (Bangkok Post 2014). Through such claims, speaking agents within the diplomatic community have been able to push for a more direct and proactive stance on the South China Sea issue that reaffirms ASEAN’s self-identity as the core, and institutional embodiment, of a “traditional” security community. Doing so, however, has required ASEAN to walk a tightrope between a firmer stance and the respect of informal language codes deemed fundamental to its community of practice. For instance, and despite ongoing criticism to this effect by observers of regional affairs (e.g., C. Koh 2020), ASEAN still refrains from naming and shaming specific states—in this case, China—in formal statements, which systematically attracts outside disapproval (e.g., BBC 2016). In the context of the formal establishment of the ASEAN Community in 2015, the urgency of significant progress on the CoC was becoming more apparent. This has led ASEAN to increase the frequency of meetings with the hope of addressing a widespread view in the region’s policy circles that China was deliberately stonewalling diplomatically to “trap ASEAN in these endless talks” while scoring further gains through aggressive moves on the ground. This interpretation is reflected in media commentary, which often features cartoons depicting a Chinese dragon (a favorite among other animalistic representations of the big powers, as seen in Figure 5 at the beginning of the chapter) holding on to rocks while some tiny ASEAN characters everyone else ignores brandish a draft code of conduct (as in Figure 6). The frustration on the Philippines’ side, in particular, was clear at the time. According to one foreign affairs official, “the [minute] China wants a code of

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figure 6.  “South China Sea Troubles” by Paresh Nath. Source: The Khaleej Times, UAE.

conduct, a code of conduct will happen.” Recent developments in the pace of negotiations seem to prove this official right. China began to actively push for an early conclusion of the negotiations by 2021, possibly before less conducive conditions and a stronger ASEAN collective stance, bolstered by new international endorsement of the 2016 arbitration award rendered on Philippines v. China, can emerge on key issues that remain unresolved. The Single Draft Negotiating Text of the CoC was planned to resume with its second reading after having been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, COVID-19 also served as a good pretext for ASEAN to postpone negotiations that it is not confident can effectively be pursued virtually and without it ceding more ground to China. The outcome will likely hinge on how Brunei — or ­Cambodia — ­approaches the ASEAN chairmanship, including in language. Of course, a key factor is also how the U.S. will approach the issue moving forward, including through potential adjustments of rhetoric and other forms of posturing in response to what the then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to as China’s attempts at establishing “a maritime empire” in the South China Sea (U.S. Department of State 2020).

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ASEAN-China negotiations remain a painstakingly slow work in progress, but ASEAN has been able to maintain a somewhat coherent position that continues to develop incrementally. How this position is framed in official language is subject to the whims of the member state in charge of the rotating ASEAN chairmanship, and the extent to which they are amenable to pressure from outside (China’s, in particular). Yet ASEAN’s position has proven resilient. The Phnom Penh Fiasco and its aftermath, which involved some setbacks under the 2016 chairmanship of Laos, and then the 2017 Philippines chairmanship, have led to the expression of competing stances on how this position ought to be portrayed. As a product of these exchanges within the diplomatic community, the possibility of ASEAN remaining silent or backpedaling on this issue has not been entirely removed from the realm of possibilities, but is still broadly understood as being untenable. Often, ASEAN’s voice is expressed through individual member states while others remain silent. For instance, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines have all recently submitted notes verbales to the United Nations formally rejecting China’s claims to “historic rights” in the South China Sea and underscoring the inconsistency of the nine-dash line with UNCLOS. ASEAN’s collective language has become firmer as well, setting new precedents that will be harder for subsequent chairs to reverse. Indeed, the “new normal” in ASEAN statements on the South China Sea and other sensitive security issues is to openly refer to the absence of consensus by expressing the concerns of “some” leaders, ministers, or officials on troublesome activities. When the representation of the collective stance is seen as too weak, informal leaks or even public disavowals happen. These developments have been portrayed as a sign of disunity within ASEAN ranks. They are also framed by officials as a “progress in maturity” (Tan 2015), allowing the grouping to address disagreement on contentious issues instead of sweeping them under the carpet, a change that for many years ASEAN’s detractors have called for. What looks like a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario for the grouping also works to its advantage in some ways. The effective reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a security community–­ building institution is now inexorably tied to the grouping’s ability to claim progress in managing the South China Sea disputes. This continues to be the case despite the unavoidable limitations that stem from the power asymmetry between parties involved in the negotiation process—asymmetry from a material standpoint, surely, but which is not necessarily all that large where discourse is concerned. ASEAN’s centrality in the regional security architecture remains deeply contested. So is the grouping’s approach to conflict management and traditional

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security. ASEAN’s contribution to peace and stability, particularly in the context of heightened major power rivalry in the region, has been actively affirmed by speaking agents from various trades calling for adjustments. ASEAN’s approach was initially indirect, characterized by a focus on non-traditional security as a “low-hanging fruit” in a step-by-step but stalled progression based on expectations of a spillover from “soft” to “hard” issues. It has now shifted to a careful but more direct, explicit process driven by new or expanded ASEAN-centric institutions where hard security concerns like the South China Sea disputes are part of formal discussions. This transition would not have been possible were it not for the careful unfolding of proposals and counter-proposals, criticisms and responses, steady debate within the grouping and with its partners, and the active participation of experts. Through this process, ASEAN’s claim to exercise centrality in a broader Asia-Pacific security community in the making is linked to the grouping’s ability to sustain the impression that it brings added value to the peaceful management of conflicts that cannot possibly be borne by anyone else. This claim continues to be challenged, but it remains a status quo position for the time being. The risk of ASEAN becoming irrelevant, being sidelined, or even being replaced by alternative frameworks is raised not only by its critics but also by its champions. Indeed, speaking agents invested in the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a traditional security community in the making have also been actively involved in the reproduction of a distinct discourse of danger. According to this discourse, the very existence of ASEAN as such a community is constantly under threat, requiring more decisive action. This discursive process plays a significant role in ensuring ASEAN’s institutional resilience through adaptative responses, including on issues that were not so long ago considered antithetical to how it does things. It is through this process, and the crisis narrative that sustains it, that ASEAN’s identity as a “traditional” security community that stands at the core of a broader Asia-Pacific institutional ecosystem continues to be talked into existence. As the next chapter shows, similar observations can be made when it comes to ASEAN’s approach to radically different, human security concerns.

6

Sirens Are Calling The “People-Centered” S ­ ecurity Community

the performance of ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making has been increasingly tied to the organization’s commitment to become a “people-oriented, people-centered” community since the adoption of its Charter (ASEAN 2008). This broad objective can be unpacked into two specific aims. On the one hand, ASEAN has aimed to increase its relevance to “the people” by contributing more actively and directly to the improvement of the security, wellbeing, and dignity of the population of its member states. On the other hand, ASEAN has sought to raise public awareness of, and participation in, its regional project. As the “people-centered” rhetoric was gradually becoming more central to ASEAN’s communitarian discourse, its scope has also extended. As a result, it has seeped into all domains of regional cooperation, including ASEAN’s approach to security. In this context, another version of the security community has now taken hold in the discursive field, coalescing around claims that the most fundamental sources of regional insecurity, in “essence,” originate in the pervasiveness of daily challenges to the security of “the people” of ASEAN. This relatively recent addition to ASEAN’s agenda, which takes root in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, was accompanied by significant controversy given the complicated story of “human security” in this region. A fair deal of suspicion still surrounds this notion in the context of ASEAN. Yet the grouping has also opened the door to the recognition of, as Rizal Sukma puts it, a “human dimension” of security (Sukma 2012). While it has not been taken up in official ASEAN parlance,

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figure 7.  “Charity Begins at Home—My Home!” by Harn Lay. Source: The Irrawaddy, 2008. Online: https://www.irrawaddy.com/from-the-archive/charity-begins-home​ -home.html.

the term “human security” has been formally incorporated into national security and development policy in some of its member states, in addition to being more openly discussed in official circles. The “people-centered” version of ASEAN’s security community in the making portrays “the people” as a central referent object to security, in conjunction with the state. This version does not operate in a vacuum but, rather, interacts closely with other versions. It echoes some of the concerns raised through the enactment of the “non-traditional” version (see Chapter 4). For instance, the “people-centered” version also gives special attention to non-military and transnational challenges to security and portrays cooperation on these issues as an end in itself. Yet these concerns are addressed here from a fundamentally different angle. In the “people-centered” community, domestic sources of insecurity are portrayed as paramount, and a much firmer distinction is made between victims and perpetrators of violence in various forms. Given that this version also considers cooperation on non-military challenges to be crucial, that it centers on Southeast Asia, and that it tackles intra-state conflict, it is also distinct from the “traditional” version of the security community (see Chapter 5).

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Because of the relative overture of ASEAN to this “human dimension” of security, the impression that the organization now recognizes the importance of human security in (almost) all but name has taken root among practitioners.1 Within this version of the security community, many practitioners across diplomatic tracks (see Chapter 1) suggest that ASEAN’s approach is premised on a more benign, less controversial, and context-sensitive application of human security in which the state is treated as part of the solution. Other actors actively taking part in the enactment of ASEAN’s “people-centered” security community, however, challenge this view head-on, and in so doing, they develop a counterdiscourse on regional security that destabilizes the organization’s self-narrative. Such internal contestation is a by-product of increasing participation of civil society, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)2 in particular, in the regional process, including, more and more, on peace and security. In this chapter, I zoom in on this “people-centered” version of ASEAN’s security community. I unpack how it took shape in ASEAN’s recent evolution, and how it became a prime terrain of internal contestation among actors from different tracks. In this version, contestation takes a distinct form, as it is spearheaded by agents who stand in a much more marginal and liminal position in the discursive space. This position comes with unsuspected sources of discursive power that allow for the enactment of practices that, despite the asymmetries involved, unsettle, disrupt, and re-politicize key elements of official and elite narratives on regional security. I also pay attention to the trade-offs that this engagement entails for the NGOs involved. I first discuss how the “human dimension” of security has developed within ASEAN’s official discourse, and how it is bounded. Second, I shift the focus onto the process through which civil society, and NGOs in particular, have penetrated the discursive space where ASEAN’s security community is talked into being, and the various forms, places, and limitations of this engagement. Third, I reconnect the distinct government and non-governmental foci of the first two sections into a closer examination of discursive practices by which NGOs simultaneously unsettle and reproduce the organization’s identity as a “people-centered” security community in the making, in relation to specific security issues.

The Integration of a Human Dimension into ASEAN’s Security Approach While ASEAN is still a long way from taking on “human security” as a concept in its approach to security, a number of elements pertaining to the “human dimension” of security have made it into the community-building project. These elements serve to reinforce the impression among practitioners of ASEAN

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regionalism that human security features prominently, albeit implicitly, in this project. In addition, the term itself is certainly not alien to the regional security debate. It is now fully part of the lexicon speaking agents draw from to position themselves in the field where ASEAN’s identity as a security community is reproduced and contested. This outcome is a product of a discursive process that originates in the 1990s but became especially salient in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.

“Human Security” and ASEAN The adoption of the concept of “human security” by the United Nations Development Program in 1994, and the active role played by Asian personalities3 in its promotion, have led to considerable debate, including in Asia, on its definition and applicability in various locales. In this context, prominent voices in the regional security debate began advocating for embedding “human security” into ASEAN’s agenda. A key discursive entrepreneur in these efforts was the late Surin Pitsuwan, who was serving as Thailand’s foreign minister at the time.4 During the ASEAN Summit of July 1998, in Manila, Surin proposed the creation of a human security caucus to respond to the impacts of the crisis on the security of Southeast Asian populations. The proposal was met with a fair deal of resistance given that it was couched in the sensitive language of security. It was ultimately rejected in favor of the creation of an ASEAN Task Force on Social Safety Nets. The 1998 ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, in turn, recognized the “social” impacts of the crisis, but similarly resisted attempts to securitize these concerns. This form of predication still resulted in the positioning of ASEAN as a protector of vulnerable segments of the population, opening up the way for the recognition of less controversial elements of human security embraced by the UN—well-being and dignity. This new mandate was embedded into ASEAN’s raison d’être through the adoption of the Hanoi Plan of Action and the aspirational rhetoric surrounding ASEAN’s claim to form “a community of caring societies,” which emerged during the development of Vision 2020. This language would later morph into references to a “caring and sharing,” “people-oriented, people-centered”5 community, in the context of the adoption of the ASEAN Charter (ASEAN 2008). While calls in favor of ASEAN formally embracing the concept of “human security” have not been heeded, human security did not disappear from the regional security dialogue; to the contrary. Sustained interest in the concept from certain segments of the regional expert community throughout the 1990s ensured that human security would continue to form an integral part of the agenda of major Track 2 events, such as the Asia-Pacific Roundtable, and be a regular, if

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somewhat controversial, topic of discussion within the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP). In parallel, human security also quickly became a key focus at the ASEAN People’s Assembly (APA). APA was initiated by the think tank network ASEANISIS in 2000 to foster dialogue between ASEAN and civil society. It brought together, on an annual basis, around three hundred participants from the government, academia, and the NGO community before its dissolution in 2009. In these spaces, leading experts from across the region played a central role in the mainstreaming of human security (Thiparat 2000; Hernandez and Kraft 2012) and actively encouraged ASEAN and its member states to “place the well-being and dignity of the people at the center” of regional security cooperation (Sukma 2012). Human security has also been a core theme of discussions occurring within “alternative regionalism” spaces where NGOs are more centrally featured. After the dissolution of APA in 2009 as a result of disagreements between ASEAN-ISIS and regional NGOs, the ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum (ACSC/APF) became a key venue of alternative regionalism. Human security concerns continue to be abundantly discussed in this space, and increasing room has been made for the language of security in NGO statements and activities over recent years. The concept of “human security” continues to face significant resistance, as it is viewed as a foreign, controversial concept serving as a pretext for intervening in the internal affairs of states.6 Yet as a result of sustained efforts carried out by nonstate actors involved in Track 2 (e.g., CSCAP), Track 2.5 (e.g., APA), and Track 3 (e.g., ACSC/APF) processes, it is now firmly part of the regional security lexicon (Capie and Evans 2007). As a result, the recognition of the “human dimension” of regional security has also made significant inroads in the governmental sector over the years. Track 1 settings in ASEAN are not entirely devoid of references to human security either (ASEAN 2000b; 2002c). As early as 1999, human security was explicitly endorsed as the “ultimate goal” of ASEAN by the Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) in charge of developing recommendations for the elaboration of Vision 2020. The final report of the East Asia Study Group, which involves officials from ASEAN Plus Three, also underscored, in 2002, the existence of a direct link between human security and regional stability. Furthermore, the concept has also been employed by individual ASEAN member states in a Track 1 context. According to some interviewees privy to these discussions, this is due to preferences from specific governments whose representatives are much more comfortable using “human security” in comparison to “human rights” when it

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comes to certain issues. The former is apparently considered less intrusive on their domestic affairs.7 Further, some member states, including Thailand (see Chapter 4) and the Philippines, explicitly use the concept in the context of national security and development policy. This practice is useful to justify curtailing civil liberties through the adoption of extraordinary security measures coated in human security language. For instance, the Philippines’ primary anti-terrorist law, before its replacement by the— even more controversial—Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, was referred to as the Human Security Act, to the great displeasure of NGOs involved in attempts to mainstream the human security concept in ASEAN.8 Interviews with ASEAN diplomats and officials from various countries also suggest that there is a growing consensus, at least among representatives of the founding members, about the need to continue to develop a “people-centered” approach to regional security.9 Whereas some ASEAN officials remain quite uncomfortable with the human security concept given its controversial character, others claim that the organization has fully embraced it—at least implicitly. According to one official: “Human security [has] always been part of our way of doing things [even if ] the word ‘human security’ is not accepted in ASEAN.”10 The careful wording used by Rizal Sukma to describe developments in the political-security pillar illustrates this ambivalence quite well. According to him, the ASEAN Political and Security Community “has provided the grouping with a relatively comprehensive platform for cooperation in order to address some challenges [. . .] that can be considered as being related to human security (emphasis added)” (Sukma 2012). Many of the elements of ASEAN’s agenda that are closely related to human security continue to be associated with the sociocultural pillar, which some interviewees describe as being “all about human security” as evidence that such concerns are firmly embedded in ASEAN’s mandate. This view, however, is more controversial than it might seem at first glance, as the following section makes clear.

Elements of a Human Dimension of Security in ASEAN’s Approach A number of agenda items in the ASEAN Community can be presented as indicating that the organization has integrated a “human dimension” to its approach to security. Among these elements, the protection of “the people” from transnational crime, pandemics, and natural disasters, as well as issues pertaining to humanitarian intervention, peace-building, and post-conflict reconstruction are more closely associated with the political-security pillar.

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Transnational Crime and NTS as “Human Security”? The rehabilitation of drug users, the protection of women and children as victims of trafficking in persons, and deradicalization have been increasingly acknowledged as key issues of concern by ASEAN. These dimensions of issues typically associated with “transnational crime,” which is central to the political-­ security pillar (see Chapter 4), have been mostly addressed under the sociocultural pillar and by ASEAN bodies that do not involve law enforcement or defense. This is a good example of how blurry the division between pillars is in practice, especially when it comes to “cross-sectoral” issues. This overlap in ASEAN’s agenda is also a result of a broader ambiguity surrounding the concept of “nontraditional security” within ASEAN, which is often promoted as a local version of human security. Indeed, the consortium NTS-Asia (2021), which has been instrumental in mainstreaming the NTS concept in the region, defines it as a series of “challenges to the [security] of peoples and states (emphasis added).” As Mely Anthony, the consortium’s head, noted during an interview, combining these two referent objects into one concept allows those who use it to acknowledge the state as “part of the solution instead of the problem.”11 This move helps circumvent resistance from the government sector, because it underscores the compatibility of NTS with “regional sensitivities” (on behalf of the state, specifically), in contrast with the Western-liberal orientation of human security. According to her: “We should not shy away from adopting a concept [that] people are more comfortable with [if ] that is the only way to [. . .] make it less controversial” to raise concerns linked to human security. This differentiation helps explain why “non-traditional security” and “human security” are often employed interchangeably by practitioners. A key question, which remains unresolved and the subject of competing views, is the nature of the relationship between the two referent objects. Indeed, the security of the people is often considered to be corollary to the security of the state in ASEAN, and therefore subordinated to it, which is something that is not necessarily the case, as discussed below (see also Figure 7 at the beginning of the chapter). NGOs that engage ASEAN on peace and security certainly take issue with the suggestion. As with the “traditional” version of ASEAN’s security community (see Chapter 5), the ambiguity surrounding the referent object of NTS means that it will typically take on a different meaning when the “people-centered” version is invoked than under the “non-traditional” version (see Chapter 4). Some interviewees argue that the importance given to NTS within the political-security pillar is due to a desire to address the security needs of “the people” of ASEAN in the everyday. As a result of this discursive move, ASEAN is positioned as a

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benevolent, “caring” institution. According to Indonesia’s permanent representative to ASEAN, for instance, NTS is the way in which ASEAN “makes a difference” and demonstrates that it is “relevant to our region and to the people, [. . .] to the grass roots.”12 This position is shared by Rizal Sukma, who presents NTS, and transnational crime in particular, as “human security,” despite recognizing that they are, in fact, different. In his view, the ASEAN Political and Security Community address[es] non-traditional security issues, most of which can be seen as human security problems. [. . .] Successful cooperation in [the fight against transnational crime] will clearly benefit the people [. . .], as it is the[ir] security [that is] undermined by non-traditional security threats. [. . .] As such, ASEAN’s commitment to address NTS problems [. . .] directly contribute[s] to the enhancement of human security in Southeast Asia. (Sukma 2012)

In addition to illicit trafficking in drugs and persons, Sukma also refers here to terrorism and maritime security—including sea piracy—as human security issues. To reiterate, such forms of predication, and the referent object invoked (“the people” in lieu of the state), are quite distinct from how NTS is portrayed in the “non-traditional” (see Chapter 4) or the “traditional” (see Chapter 5) versions of the security community. A similar interpretation of NTS is also featured in discussions taking place at the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). The forum’s Vision Statement, for instance, refers to NTS as “priority areas that directly affect our peoples” in order to justify the increasing attention paid to them in the broader regional security dialogue (ARF 2009a ). The gradual extension of NTS beyond transnational crime, such as pandemics and natural disasters, opens up new opportunities in this regard. It leads to the ARF taking on new interest in the daily security of populations of its member states.13 Pandemics and Disasters as “People-Centered” Security The growing attention paid to the management of health and environmental security concerns in ASEAN helps the organization claim further ground as a “caring” community invested in the security of “its” people. These issues were initially addressed under the sociocultural pillar but have been increasingly presented within the region and globally as threats to human security over recent years, often in the context of specific crisis events—the SARS outbreak in 2003, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Cyclone Nargis in 2008, Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) in 2013, the Ebola epidemic (2014 –2016), and of course COVID-19, among others. The majority of ASEAN member states now include pandemics and disasters on the list of “non-traditional” security issues (ASEAN 2013; 2015b). The ASEAN Political and Security Community (APSC) blueprint for

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2025 also makes it clear that these issues are now considered to be security issues, although there remains some ambivalence in official language that has yet to be lifted for the transition to be complete (ASEAN 2016 ). Growing importance given to these issues at the East Asia Summit, a leaders’ level “strategic” dialogue aimed at addressing key regional challenges, is further indication that these issues are undergoing a process akin to securitization. References to pandemics and disasters as security threats have also become more common in ASEAN statements (ASEAN 2014b; 2014c; ASEAN Plus Three 2014). For instance, the Ebola outbreak was portrayed as a key security concern, alongside the South China Sea disputes and terrorism, in the Chairman’s Statement of the 25th ASEAN Summit—this despite the fact that no case had been reported in the Asia-Pacific region (ASEAN 2014b). This shift in discourse on health supported the development of a series of cooperative mechanisms aimed at increasing ASEAN’s capacity to deal with these concerns in a more timely and efficient manner.14 The ASEAN Plus Three, through its Emerging Infectious Diseases Program, has been a key mechanism for the management of health issues (ASEAN 2014c). More recently, extraordinary measures implemented by ASEAN member states in the context of COVID-19 are a major development in the securitization of health in the region. In turn, concerns related to environmental security and disasters have become increasingly salient in the agenda of ASEAN and related fora. Cooperation on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) intensified in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Humanitarian intervention and disaster relief exercises have been conducted within the framework of the ARF since 2011, and in the ADMM-Plus since 2013. Furthermore, the contribution of ASEAN to the Humanitarian Taskforce for the Victims of Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008, is despite its limitations15 widely portrayed as a success story by the organization’s champions. It is used as proof both that ASEAN is capable of offering a common response to such crises and that it recognizes the importance of human security, at least implicitly, even in situations where states are resisting intervention on the basis of non-interference (L. Jones 2008, 287). The development of regional states’ HADR capabilities forms an increasingly important part of the ARF agenda, and has more recently become a central concern at the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting(-Plus). An ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA) was established in Jakarta in 2011. It has since played a supporting role in response to various disasters across the region, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. An ASEAN Militaries Ready Group on HADR is also in the process of being operationalized,

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in support of the implementation of the 2016 “One ASEAN One Response” Declaration on disaster relief. Not only are health and environmental concerns a growing focus of discussions and cooperative activities in ASEAN, but they have also come to be managed through the prism of security and defense. They are often described as “non-traditional” security issues. Yet a major difference with how ASEAN approaches transnational crime as the core of its NTS approach is that the responsibility for health and environmental concerns is typically not attributed to the actions of “bad actors” but instead presented as acts of God. They are also not portrayed as threatening the monopoly of states on legitimate violence nor their control over their borders, despite being of a similarly “transnational” character. As such, when these concerns are brought up, it is the “people-centered” version of ASEAN’s security community that is more likely to be channeled. Intra-state Conflict, Peace and Reconciliation, and the Responsibility to Protect Since the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2007, some space has also opened up in Southeast Asia and ASEAN for debate and the design of policy over matters pertaining to humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, and postconflict reconstruction. This timid overture is the product of internal debates on non-interference, which resulted in additional flexibility in how this principle can be competently practiced in the context of ASEAN since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, especially in relation to ASEAN’s recurring “Myanmar problem.” Indeed, gross violations of human rights in Myanmar since the 1990s, the junta’s failure to respond to Cyclone Nargis in 2008 (see Figure 7), and more recently the Rohingya crisis, have posed a consistently vexing problem for the organization. Indeed, it is a direct challenge to its credibility as an aspiring “caring” cum “people-oriented, people-centered” security community. This pressure has led to some adjustments meant to partially insulate ASEAN from international outrage (Haacke 1999; 2005; Roberts 2010; Martel and Glas n.d.), which are also observable in the organization’s response to the 2021 coup. Over the years, some member states have also been more open to sharing information on domestic problems affecting security, including in the context of intra-state tensions, and to offer and invite third-party mediation (see also Tan 2019). For instance, ASEAN has formally acknowledged the facilitator role Malaysia played in negotiations leading to the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro between the Government of the Philippines and the Mindanao Islamist Liberation Front in 2014 (ASEAN 2014a). A majority of ASEAN member states have also established national centers for peacekeeping over recent years. In 2012, these national centers were brought into an ASEAN Peacekeeping Centers Network within the ADMM framework.

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Discussions and activities have been mostly focused on developing some kind of “ASEAN” participation in international missions taking place outside of Southeast Asia. Yet many interviewees are in favor of the grouping building its capacity to intervene in the context of conflicts taking place within the region. The creation of a regional peacekeeping force has been floated by Indonesia from time to time since 2004, then by Malaysia in the context of its 2015 chairmanship of the organization (Parameswaran 2015b; Thayer 2014a). These ideas and discussions stand in sharp contrast with prior resistance from the group to collective support to the United Nations Mission in East Timor, in which only four ASEAN members states took part on an individual basis—and at the explicit request of the Indonesian government. For Capie (2015), “evolving attitudes” toward peacekeeping on the part of ASEAN countries are now observable in the case of “new players” like Brunei, Cambodia, and Vietnam. These developments are another indication of a gradual and cautious opening of ASEAN to human security–related concerns and what Tan (2019) refers to as the “responsibility to provide,” although this development remains largely tributary to how non-interference is put into practice among member states in relation to specific issues. For the time being, interventions of ASEAN militaries in crisis situations within Southeast Asia remain prudently circumscribed to HADR. Yet as AHA’s participation in the 2017 Marawi conflict shows, signs of incremental progress toward a coordinated response from ASEAN militaries in the context of “human-induced” disasters are already observable. Notwithstanding the formal endorsement by individual ASEAN member states of the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle at the 2005 World Summit, R2P has not made its way in ASEAN’s approach to regional security. ASEAN was adamant in opposing attempts by Western actors (from Australia and France, mainly) to frame the humanitarian crisis that resulted from the Myanmar junta’s handling of Cyclone Nargis in 200816 as a R2P matter to force the entry of foreign aid into the country. As ASEAN secretary general, Surin Pitsuwan took a leading role in defending the organization’s approach to the aftermath of Nargis, and in presenting the grouping’s response as a success story. Surin continued to spearhead efforts at mainstreaming and localizing the responsibility to protect in an “ASEAN way” until his passing in 2017. The publication of a report by the High Level Advisory Panel on the Responsibility to Protect in Southeast Asia, on which he served, ensured that R2P would remain part of the regional security debate in the longer term (Pitsuwan and Caballero-Anthony 2014). Recent debates surrounding ASEAN’s approach to the Rohingya crisis, which has since been recognized as a genocide by the United Nations, as well as the 2021 Myanmar coup, have also given new salience to this ongoing discussion.

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The ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR), established in 2013, is a key mechanism by which ASEAN now tackles issues pertaining to intra-state conflict at the regional level. Despite important limitations in the framing of its terms of reference, it has played a role in fostering a regional conversation carried out under the ASEAN banner. In March 2015, for instance, AIPR shepherded, at the initiative of the Philippines, a workshop on women’s participation in peace processes. The report of the event attributes an explicit role to ASEAN in the promotion of “human security” (AIPR 2015). AIPR is also at the forefront of current efforts to increase ASEAN’s contribution to tackling gendered forms of insecurity and implement new regional commitments to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (ASEAN 2017b; ARF 2019).17 When brought together, these components of ASEAN’s agenda, and how they are framed, make clear that there has been increasing space for a “human dimension” of security, even though the institution still does not recognize the notion of human security itself as part of its approach. This shift is well recognized by speaking agents directly involved in the inception, development, and implementation of the security community, who link these concerns to ASEAN’s bid to become a “people-centered” security community by tackling issues that directly affect the survival, well-being, and dignity of “the people.” This broad objective transpires in ASEAN’s approach to the protection of (some) Southeast Asian populations, and its evolving response to disasters and pandemics, now fully recognized as security threats by all member states.18 It seeps into its approach to the societal dimensions of transnational crime and the increasing attention paid to the protection of victims. The “people-centered” orientation of ASEAN’s security community also extends to the development of regional capabilities to mitigate the risk of intra-state conflict. This relative overture of ASEAN to a human dimension of regional security is accompanied by a push toward raising public awareness of its contribution to peace and security, and making room for the involvement of “civil society” in the regional process. As a result, the “people-centered” rhetoric has also opened new opportunities for non-governmental civil society actors to penetrate the regional process. These actors promote the integration of a human security framework into ASEAN’s response to specific issues. These developments also create new tensions within ASEAN’s security community–building enterprise.

Civil Society Participation in ASEAN: Spaces of Engagement The gradual overture of ASEAN to greater participation of civil society has allowed human security considerations to gain further ground in the region’s security lexicon. Even though human security as a concept remains outside of

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ASEAN’s official language, it is central to the advocacy work of NGOs engaging the regional process. This engagement occurs in a variety of spaces. The ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum is a key venue where such activities take place, as it occurs on the margins of ASEAN summits and is formally backed by ASEAN. In addition, ad hoc consultations between ASEAN and civil society organizations, including NGOs, are held on specific topics and key initiatives where civil society input is considered an asset—if only for co-optation purposes. The ability of NGOs to promote a counter-discourse on peace and security is bounded by important structural, informal, and discursive constraints. As such, they are also engaged in advocacy work that targets ASEAN but is carried out outside ASEAN-sponsored spaces. The discursive practices through which NGOs participate in negotiating the meaning of security and the boundaries of the regional community will vary according to the spaces of engagement (Gerard 2014), as will the room for maneuver they have for challenging the status quo, which sometimes occurs in unexpected ways.

The ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN’s People Forum The ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum (ACSC/APF), launched in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, is organized on an annual basis on the margins of ASEAN summits. A Regional Steering Committee consisting of representatives of civil society organizations from across the region coordinates the event in collaboration with a national committee made up of organizations from the host country, as well as the ASEAN chairmanship. The regional network Solidarity for Asian Peoples’ Advocacy (SAPA), created in 2006 and which now consists of about a hundred NGOs, plays a central role in the organization of the ACSC/ APF. Via its Working Group on ASEAN, SAPA has been able to channel diverse positions put forward by the various organizations involved in a burgeoning “alternative regionalism” into a relatively coherent format. This coordination work takes its most concrete form in a “People’s Statement” to ASEAN. The ACSC/APF has two main components. The first is a civil society forum where various regional issues are discussed in panels, roundtables, and working sessions. This format allows civil society organizations to build collaboration across countries on specific issues of interest, and to frame collective positions that will be represented in the People’s Statement. The second component, when conditions allow, is an interface session between a delegation from the ACSC/ APF and the leaders of ASEAN, where representatives of civil society organizations can present their recommendations directly to member states. The standard format of the interface, although there is considerable variation in practice, involves a formal meeting between representatives of the ten ASEAN member

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states and ten civil society delegates (one for each country). The actual format is highly dependent on three main factors that reflect asymmetrical power dynamics: (1) the level of easiness and overture shown by the government of the host country holding the ASEAN chairmanship on a given year, (2) the extent to which individual ASEAN governments meddle in the selection of civil society delegates, and (3) the ability and willingness of independent— or “genuine”19— NGOs, as opposed to government-organized NGOs (GONGOs), to take part in the meeting as a result. Some involvement in the selection process is presented by government actors as an imperative to mitigate the risk that non-governmental organizations refuse to conform to what officials portray as appropriate practice in this space. According to one official, “the interface isn’t about bashing the leaders.”20 Interviewees from civil society organizations involved in the organization of the ACSC/APF, unsurprisingly, hold different views. One activist from the Bangkok-based NGO Focus on the Global South is unapologetic in this regard: “It is not our business to make the governments feel comfortable.” Instead, “it is their job to address whatever [. . .] questions” civil society organizations may want to ask. In practice, and to a great extent as a consequence of competing claims about what the interface “is” and who holds the authority to determine this, the meeting often results in walkouts or boycotts by civil society participants. As this activist explains: “If it’s a bogus interface, we’d rather not have it.” Otherwise, there is too much of a risk that the event serves as a “deodorant for governments,” allowing them to claim that they consulted civil society while going about their meetings “like nothing happened.”21 The format of the meeting, therefore, varies considerably from one year to the next, insofar as it is held at all (ACSC/APF 2015a ; Consuelo Lopa 2016). NGOs were denied an interface with ASEAN leaders on the margins of the 2019 Summit in Thailand. A meeting was conducted a few months later under the banner of the ACSC/APF with officials from eight ASEAN member states (Government of Thailand 2019). The participation of two foreign ministers (Thailand and Malaysia), including the ASEAN chair, still allowed the Thai government to present the meeting as an “opportunity for the ASEAN Foreign Ministers to listen to the views of the civil society in fostering an inclusive ASEAN Community that is people-centered.” However, civil society delegates, who are increasingly familiar with ASEAN tactics, publicly decried this format, which they described as lacking in meaningful engagement (Pusat Komas 2019). Whether or not an interface is held, the ACSC/APF typically issues a People’s Statement following the event, developed collaboratively by NGOs through discussions shepherded by the Steering Committee. These discussions are often contentious given the variety of views among participants. There is no consensus

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among NGOs involved, for instance, on the relevance of a direct engagement of ASEAN governments by civil society in spaces sanctioned (and controlled) by an organization commonly described as a “club of dictators.” Many NGOs deem it useless to engage ASEAN given the elitist, state-centric, and neoliberal character of its regional project. For them, lending legitimacy through curtailed forms of participation is misguided. One activist who has been regularly involved in the organization of the ACSC/APF and other consultations with ASEAN represents these differences well, alluding to the politics of discourse involved: “Some of the NGOs still believe that [they need to be] harsh, controversial, confrontational and say [things] that governments cannot. [We] can say [these things], but not always with [a] high tone. [In a] lower tone, with a different entry point. Still, we can say that we disagree. But we are not throwing stones to their office. That’s the [difference].”22

These dynamics involve a fair amount of tone policing (self-imposed or otherwise) from actors claiming power/knowledge in determining how civil society positions ought to be conveyed. Such politics affect direct exchanges with ASEAN as well as the wording of the People’s Statement. The drafting of the statement is also complicated by the participation of organizations and individuals from “civil society” that are not actually independent from government. In 2015, for instance, the opposition of a group of Lao civil society organizations to issues related to LGBTIQ rights, indigenous peoples, and the disappearance of Lao activist Sombath Somphone led a regional coalition of independent NGOs to formally request the Steering Committee to not hold the following forum in Laos (SACA et al. 2016). The 2016 ACSC/APF was held in Timor-Leste instead. These issues remain an important challenge underpinning civil society participation in the regional process (Chrek 2016 ). Yet for many NGOs involved, the value of the ACSC/APF has less to do with the opportunity to engage ASEAN and more with having a space to coordinate, strategize, and network among themselves, allowing them to create transnational synergies in their advocacy, including on language, and identify issues of common concern. These practices are a key means through which “alternative regionalism” (Chandra 2009) is fostered outside the purview of ASEAN, and where the agency of non-governmental organizations is centrally featured. According to an activist from the Philippines, the ACSC/APF “is civil society’s way of using ASEAN.”23

ASEAN-Sponsored Consultations Beyond the ACSC/APF, NGOs also have access to other “modes of participation” (Gerard 2014) for engaging ASEAN. Other venues for direct engagement

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include regional working groups and consultations held in preparation for major ASEAN initiatives, thematic engagements with specific ASEAN bodies and mechanisms, and other consultative dialogues with the ASEAN secretary general or the ASEAN Committee of Permanent Representatives, among others (Consuelo Lopa 2016). In the years leading to the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2007, ASEAN opened up new space for civil society participation. This overture remains conditional on a number of restrictions, including those spelled out in highly restrictive guidelines for accreditation of civil society organizations (ASEAN 2012b) that remain out of reach for most independent NGOs.24 A number of governmentsponsored consultative mechanisms have been established to allow civil society organizations, irrespective of their accreditation status, to contribute to the work of specific sectoral committees in charge of rural development and poverty eradication, the protection of migrant workers, and societal security. These committees, although their work is focused on cross-sectoral issues with some relevance to human security, operate outside the purview of political-security cooperation. In any case, the contribution of NGOs is mostly limited to information sharing. Their admission also still depends on how much their work aligns with ASEAN objectives and whether they have the support of member states. More substantial forms of engagement have been occurring in ad hoc consultations with civil society organizations in the context of major ASEAN initiatives like the ASEAN Charter or the more recent Vision 2025. These are settings where the “people-centric” rhetoric is prominent and, as such, they require a veneer of popular legitimacy. Ad hoc consultations have taken various forms, including interface sessions with the ASEAN secretary general, members of a high-level task force, and so on. They often involve some coordination among NGOs from various ASEAN countries on drafting recommendations, which are then presented to the officials involved. The extent to which these recommendations will be taken into account, let alone incorporated, depends a great deal on the language NGOs use to frame them—as the following section discusses more extensively. While participating NGOs do see these mechanisms as providing some opportunity for making headway, the process is accompanied by a fair amount of frustration. According to one activist from the Philippines, these meetings have taken on a ritualistic quality that have curbed earlier enthusiasm. She describes how officials typically engage in self-derogatory discourse about how ASEAN operates. For every one-hour meeting, this activist claims, almost half of that time is “all about excuses. And then thirty minutes [are] about their PowerPoint. And really the substance is . . . maybe five, usually [during a] Q&A.”25 And yet, in spite of

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this frustration, these NGOs do agree that there is some usefulness to the exercise, or at least a potential cost in not participating. According to an Indonesian activist with a prominent role in the organization of such consultations as well as the ACSC/APF, if NGOs do not get involved in these, especially around major initiatives, they will likely have to wait years, if not decades, before the opportunity presents itself again. In the meantime, she argues, “we are going to be very grumpy about everything in ASEAN.” Far from all inputs will be incorporated, but some typically will, thus allowing NGOs to request accountability: “It means we have a tool for advocacy if we do something now.”26 Outside of major initiatives, there are still opportunities to engage ASEAN that, in the view of the activists interviewed, lead to some progress in mainstreaming aspects of a human security framework on specific issues. The opportunities that are most conducive to such progress are provided by ASEAN bodies and mechanisms that were created after the Charter’s adoption, and were designed to involve some form of consultation with civil society. These include the ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC), and the ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR). In addition, specific governments of ASEAN member states, like Indonesia and the Philippines,27 have developed a habit of consulting with independent NGOs in preparation for ASEAN summits, especially when they are assuming the chairmanship. When there is limited space available for engagement in government-­ sanctioned spaces, NGOs will not hesitate, as one activist puts it, to “take it outside”28 through walkouts, protests, rallies, and social media campaigns. This typically happens when public discussion of certain issues runs contrary to prevailing practices of non-interference and consensus-building in ASEAN. The extensive regional coordination among NGOs involved in the Milk Tea Alliance in the context of ASEAN’s much-criticized handling of the Myanmar 2021 coup is the latest example. In sum, the room for maneuver and, therefore, the discursive practices NGOs can and will deploy to put their mark on the security community– building process also vary significantly according to the space they are involved in, and what lies within the realm of possible discursive practice in this context.

Disrupting the “People-Centered” Security Community This section illustrates how contestation over the meaning of security and the boundaries of the regional community is practiced in the context of the “peoplecentered” version of ASEAN’s security community, in relation to specific issues. NGOs involved in the debate over ASEAN’s “people-centered” identity share

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with other actors a broad agreement, grounded in a set of common underlying assumptions, that the grouping should strive to better address challenges to the security of “the people of ASEAN.” They tend to agree that the more ASEAN does on that front, the better. However, they also contest this version’s more precise contours, especially the extent to which the organization ought to be making room for “the people” as a referent object in its approach to security. This disagreement pertains to both the problems addressed and the degree of involvement of civil society actors in the design and implementation of solutions to regional insecurity. In voicing their demands and concerns, the NGOs involved also increasingly rely on security language, and human security in particular. As such, they simultaneously reproduce and destabilize the organization’s identity as a “people-centered” security community in the making. Human security has been presented by some as a “rallying cry” (Lizée 2002, 509) of civil society in the region in the 1990s. Yet independent NGOs (as opposed to other “civil society” actors associated with, for instance, the region’s expert community) have been much more reticent in embracing security language, at least in more recent years. As one activist suggests, security is the “language of government”29 and is often deployed against NGOs and social movements to restrict civil liberties. As discussed earlier, the fact that some ASEAN member states themselves have now adopted “human security” as policy has been a major red flag for activists. Yet this stance has also been evolving through the efforts by some key NGOs and individuals involved in peace work in the region to reclaim human security on behalf of civil society and “the people” they advocate for. According to Marc Batac from the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC)–Southeast Asia, the concept of human security can support the building of a durable coalition between activists involved in the peaceful settlement of armed conflict and the protection of human rights.30 This reclaiming of human security “for the people” brings these NGOs into direct opposition to official discourse. As such, it disrupts a number of fundamentals underpinning the discursive reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a “peoplecentered” security community. For instance, NGOs have actively sought to destabilize assumptions that the state is “part of the solution” to regional insecurity, that Southeast Asia is a region at peace, and that ASEAN is to be credited for this state of affairs. For Marc Batac, ASEAN’s perspective is that “it is an exception that human and national security will clash,” whereas it is actually the opposite in practice.31 In Track 3 spaces, these presuppositions are actively contested, leading to the development of a relatively coherent counter-discourse that denounces the responsibility of the state, and ASEAN’s as a statist institution, in the persistence of various forms of violence against Southeast Asian populations.

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According to Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the Thailand-based People’s Empowerment Foundation, the state and the NGO community have fundamentally different “conceptual attitudes” about security, both on “the meaning of security” and “the implementation of security [policy].” ASEAN’s focus is on “state security [and] the implementation of security laws to ensure peace and order. [. . .] But for us, security means human security,”32 defined in a broad and open-ended sense. At the same time, activists who engage ASEAN on peace and security issues argue that striving to reconcile the security interests of the state and “the people,” to make the “exception” the norm, and state rhetoric a reality, is a worthy enterprise: “National security and human security [should] mean the same thing. It is not ultimately a [necessary] disjoint [. . .]: if there is enough space [for] stakeholders [to] participate in crafting policy, [. . .] then probably, these two will meet.”33 NGOs deploy various discursive practices to advance this agenda and shape the debate over ASEAN’s identity as a “people-centered community.” Practices are also adapted depending on spaces of engagement. This engagement is meant to challenge both the boundaries of the “people-centered” community and dominant meanings of security in this “version.” When NGOs enact discursive power to extend the boundaries of the regional community, they will seek to push ASEAN toward more substantive forms of civil society participation and center the agency of “the people” in developing and implementing security policy. This was on full display in a regional, ASEAN-sponsored civil society consultation on the blueprints of ASEAN’s Vision 2025 conducted in Jakarta in 2015, where NGOs pushed for the adoption of a ­“people-driven” approach to community-building, including on issues pertaining to peace and security (HRWG and WEAVE 2015).34 Civil society actors were especially careful to frame their recommendations following the structure of the ASEAN blueprints, before conveying them to a high-level task force led by senior ASEAN officials during an interface meeting. Discourse played a central role in this process because, as a co-organizer of a regional consultation on Vision 2025 conducted in Jakarta argues, recommendations have more chance of getting adopted “if you use their language.” This way, officials will see them as a “continuity of their work” even if they are actually a direct challenge to it.35 The phrase “people-driven” takes a step further than the “people-centered” rhetoric previously advocated by NGOs and then formally adopted by ASEAN, because it centers the agency of civil society in regional policy design and implementation.36 This creative use of official rhetoric evokes innovation, while ensuring continuity with prevailing linguistic codes in official ASEAN speak. It is thus particularly attractive to officials from ASEAN member states who are on the lookout

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for new discursive elements that can make up a national brand prior to assuming the rotating chairmanship of ASEAN. The term “people-driven” was indeed taken up by the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2011 (Nurhayati 2011). It has also been used by state leaders from the Philippines, including the former president Benigno S. Aquino III (Foreign Service Institute 2015). NGOs also promote concepts that remain alien to ASEAN, fully cognizant that these will probably not fly, but will still increase officials’ familiarity with new language. Such efforts are deployed to challenge prevailing understandings of security in ASEAN, and they help other recommendations appear less controversial by contrast. As a foreign affairs official from the Philippines recognizes: “With ASEAN, sometimes, you just have to repeat the same concept over [and] over again, and after a while, they will begin to adopt it, and then later on, they will parade [it] as their own.”37 This impression is shared among NGOs that engage in such consultations. NGOs challenge prevailing understandings of security in different ways, which will also vary according to spaces of engagement available to them. On the one hand, NGOs will promote a definition of regional security that makes more room for a human referent object in ASEAN’s current approach to issues that are already on its security agenda, such as trafficking in persons. Because access is more likely to be in place in such instances, NGOs will adapt their approach as they navigate ASEAN’s institutional structure. On the other hand, NGOs can also take part in direct ways in the debate on ASEAN’s security community from the margins, even as they remain excluded from spaces sponsored by the organization. This approach proves especially useful when it comes to contentious issues related to the organization’s approach to protection in the context of intra-state conflict, where space to engage with official processes is more heavily constricted. This is particularly salient with respect to the Rohingya crisis. As direct engagement is impossible there, NGO advocacy mostly takes place outside spaces sponsored by ASEAN, and involves shaming by holding a mirror up (Vaughan-­Williams and Stevens 2016, 51) to the grouping’s self-identity.38 Taken together, these cases serve to highlight how NGOs enact discursive power and claim the role of “meaning architects” (Lessig in Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 897) in the security community–building process despite important constraints on their participation.

Negotiating the Meaning of “People-Centered” Security: Trafficking in Persons Navigating ASEAN’s institutional structure— often referred to as an “alphabet soup”—is a notoriously perplexing enterprise, but many NGOs have honed these skills over the years, demonstrating their ability and willingness to adjust

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their framing of certain issues according to the spaces they are allowed in. In consultations on trafficking in persons (TIP), NGOs have actively worked to reshape the meaning of security and challenge important limits in ASEAN’s approach to security. Most of the advocacy work on TIP has been conducted by NGOs in relation with the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC). In their consultation work, NGOs promoted the recognition of a “gendered dimension” to TIP in order to ensure that the issue would not be exclusively framed as a matter of “transnational crime,” which is typically a prerogative of the defense sector in ASEAN and as a result limits the possibility of engagement on human security. As one activist puts it, the “military orientation” of defense interlocutors precludes the integration of human rights concerns in the management of security issues. As such, activists felt that their views were not “welcome” in such settings. Directing their advocacy at the ACWC instead helped in this regard. Yet by their own account, NGOs quickly ran into other limitations given how the mandate of the ACWC is framed. The low priority level that comes from its association with the sociocultural pillar of the ASEAN Community—a residual “bin” in which “issues dear to civil society organizations are all lumped”39— does not help either. NGOs also benefited more recently from an opening within the politicalsecurity pillar to emphasize the protection of TIP victims, in the context of consultations during the elaboration of an ASEAN Convention against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (ASEAN 2015a).40 In this context, participating NGOs sought to ensure that “the redress, reparation, and reintegration process of trafficked persons are implemented from a rights-based approach” (ACSC/APF 2009). Throughout this process, NGO representatives actively relied on their ongoing collaboration with the ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), the main mechanism for the promotion and protection of human rights in ASEAN. As AICHR is situated within the ­political-security pillar, it helped facilitate contacts between NGOs and the ASEAN Senior Officials’ Meeting on Transnational Crime, which is the leading sectoral mechanism on TIP. The 2015 convention (ASEAN 2015a) still frames TIP as a security issue pertaining to transnational crime and focuses to a significant extent on the need for a punitive approach against traffickers. Further, beyond general guidelines, the protection of victims (where women and children are part of the same category and equally devoid of agency) remains subjected to variation in national approaches, and provisions to this effect are aspirational at best. For instance, the convention states that parties “shall consider” allowing victims to remain in their territory

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or not holding them criminally liable, a limitation that NGOs continue to bring up as highly problematic in their advocacy. At the same time, the document also recognizes the issue as a human rights violation and as gendered, in addition to targeting the responsibility of corrupt public officials. It emphasizes the need to prevent revictimization by addressing root causes. The convention also underlines the importance of collaborating with NGOs on victim assistance. Even if they remain highly aspirational and non-committing for member states, these provisions still bring ASEAN’s framing of the issue important steps beyond previous commitments, away from an exclusive emphasis on law enforcement, and closer to the adoption of a human security framework (ASEAN 2004a). A direct causal link between advocacy and the language of the convention is hard to draw. However, it is quite clear that the gap between, on the one hand, ASEAN’s earlier stance on transnational crime, and TIP in particular, and on the other, key elements in non-governmental advocacy, is narrowing. In pushing for adjustments, NGOs have asserted discursive power to extend and reconfigure how ASEAN defines TIP as a security issue. As such, they showcase their ability to actively take part in shaping how the organization defines its approach to security, even if important limitations in framing and implementation remain.

ASEAN’s Responsibility in Situations of Armed Conflict: The Rohingya Crisis Activists do not shy away from pushing for the inclusion of more controversial themes into official language, such as the responsibility to protect or the recognition of gendered dimensions of insecurity. This was on full display in consultations on the Vision 2025 (HRWG and WEAVE 2015). NGOs have faced sustained resistance in their engagement of ASEAN on the most sensitive elements of human security, especially those pertaining to armed conflict (intra- or interstate). In some contexts, NGOs are involved in talks with the government at the national level. Given the lack of openings in ASEAN-sponsored venues, however, NGOs exercise their discursive power in other spaces and in different ways. In such cases, NGOs will not hesitate to “take it outside” and adopt a more confrontational public stance that involves directly calling out ASEAN for its failures to uphold its responsibilities toward the security, well-being, and dignity of Southeast Asian populations. In these situations, NGOs also draw from inroads made in ASEAN-sponsored spaces, as they publicly call out ASEAN for failing to walk the talk by implementing its “people-centric” approach to security ­community–building. For instance, the 2015 ACSC/APF Civil Society Statement, titled “Reclaiming the ASEAN Community for the People,” states that while the civil society of Southeast Asia

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welcomes the commitment of ASEAN “to establish a people-centric ASEAN, [. . .] the people of ASEAN continue to suffer from authoritarian and military regimes, increased militarization, violence and armed conflicts,” among other issues (ACSC/APF 2015b). From the standpoint of NGOs, ASEAN’s principle of non-interference hampers its ability to provide “effective solutions to human insecurity” (ACSC/APF 2015b). This practice of holding a mirror up to ASEAN’s self-identity as a peoplecentered community informs the advocacy of NGOs on situations of armed conflict, including the 2021 coup in Myanmar, but also the South China Sea. It is prevalent as well on issues that are not specific to any conflict in particular, such as rape used as a weapon of war and child soldiers (e.g., ACSC 2006; ACSC/APF 2009; 2015b; IID 2010). It is, however, especially well illustrated by the Rohingya crisis, to which I now turn. Southeast Asian NGOs have been at the forefront of raising awareness of the plight of the Rohingya.41 The transnational and regional implications of the crisis, which has led to ongoing waves of refugees fleeing persecution to neighboring countries, including a number of ASEAN states, have become more apparent as a result, especially in the context of the discovery of mass graves in Thailand and Malaysia. Local and regional NGOs were sounding the alarm for years before the situation was recognized as a crisis and made its way into the international news cycle—as early as 2006, in fact. A significant portion of their advocacy has focused on engaging ASEAN itself as part of a broader “boomerang” (Keck and Sikkink 1999) strategy to exercise pressure on the Myanmar government. For ASEAN, the Rohingya crisis is but one iteration of an ongoing “Myanmar problem” for the organization since Myanmar became a member of ASEAN in 1997 (Roberts 2010)—as also shown by the 2021 coup. ASEAN’s approach to Myanmar remains bounded by a policy of “constructive engagement,” which means that until very recently, the Rohingya crisis was not discussed in formal ASEAN settings but outside the purview of the organization, through mini-­lateral and/or informal meetings between “affected countries,” or through the Bali process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons, and Related Transnational Crime. In this context, and to ensure Myanmar’s participation in a regional dialogue on the issue, state responsibility was not directly targeted, and the Rohingya have remained unnamed, commonly referred to instead as “illegal migrants.” ­ASEAN’s formal position on the issue has been to encourage Myanmar to take steps to address the domestic sources of the crisis and put conditions in place for repatriation, while offering to lend support upon request (e.g., ASEAN 2012c). In this context, NGOs quickly reached the conclusion that if they were to make progress in regional advocacy, they had to “take it outside” government-sanctioned spaces.42

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Interestingly, the favored approach of the NGO community has been to hold ASEAN accountable not to standards put forward by the international community, but to the grouping’s self-identity as a people-centered security community. This discursive practice was on full display when, in 2009, the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma started referring to the situation in Rakhine as a “genocide,” and criticized ASEAN’s position as undermining “its own declared aspiration to be a regional community” (AltSEAN-Burma 2009). The same practice is observable in a statement from FORUM-Asia that questions the “seriousness” of ASEAN in implementing its own project. It condemns the organization’s “unwillingness or inability to forestall a preventable humanitarian disaster” that would have been averted were ASEAN what it claimed it was (FORUM-Asia 2015). The common characterization of the crisis in regional media as “the greatest embarrassment ASEAN has ever faced” (Hunt 2015; see also Chalermpalanupap 2016; Kassim 2012) speaks to the ability of NGOs to disrupt the dominant discourse on the “people-centered” ASEAN while also unsettling its boundaries by naming and re-inscribing the Rohingya (among other vulnerable groups) as part of “the people.” Similar discursive practices are now being deployed against the junta as well as ASEAN itself in the context of the 2021 coup.43 While there has not been much development of ASEAN’s practical capacity to alleviate the plight of the Rohingya because of factors situated well beyond the scope of this book, NGOs’ participation in the security community–building process from the margins has certainly contributed to increase pressure on the organization. As a result of this external pressure, significant internal pressure has since been exerted on Myanmar, both quietly and, sometimes, very publicly, by its fellow member states, whose international reputation suffers by association, in addition to some of them facing additional domestic pressure.44 Malaysian policy makers, for instance, have been especially vocal in denouncing the violence against fellow Muslims as a genocide, calling for regional and UN-led responses, and questioning the compatibility of ASEAN’s approach to non-interference with the organization’s own Charter (see also Martel and Glas n.d.). As such, they have not only echoed concerns raised by NGOs but also espoused similar discursive tactics. Myanmar has since shown some overture to limited forms of intervention by ASEAN in Rakhine, including the deployment of an ASEAN Emergency Rapid Assessment Team in 2019, something that was unimaginable only a few years ago. The issue is now regularly discussed in meetings between ASEAN foreign ministers. It has been addressed in public statements that emphasize ASEAN’s commitment “to play an enhanced role in supporting Myanmar through providing humanitarian assistance, facilitating the repatriation process, and promoting

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sustainable development in Rakhine State” (ASEAN 2020c). Discursive power exercised by regional NGOs is certainly not the only cause for this shift. Yet it contributed, alongside international pressure, to creating the conditions under which a more proactive response by ASEAN was repositioned not only within the realm of possible action, but as necessary to preserve its self-identity as a people-centered security community. The important limitations that continue to characterize ASEAN’s handling of the issue also serve as a new basis for regional NGOs in pressuring the organization further (FORUM-Asia 2019), including on other issues pertaining to its “Myanmar problem,” such as the 2021 coup (e.g., FORUM-Asia 2021). The Rohingya crisis has been widely recognized as a credibility crisis for ASEAN, and as much of a litmus test as its management of the South China Sea disputes (or COVID-19). Comments by state leaders in response to the criticism of ASEAN indicate that the multiple salvoes targeting its image have had an impact on its ontological security and have led to adaptive responses (see also Mahé and Martel n.d.). Regional NGOs continue to play a major role in this war effort, which is mostly carried out by enacting discursive power but is not without effect. Taken together, the discursive practices highlighted in this section have allowed NGOs to challenge, disrupt, and to some extent reshape ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making. Even when they are not able to foster the diffusion— or localization (Acharya 2004)— of new security “norms,” NGOs still engage in the articulation of an alternative, if not always radical, discourse on regional security. Elements of this discourse find their way into official language. As a result of their active participation in internal contestation of ASEAN’s “people-centered” version of its security community, NGOs open new space for holding the organization accountable, not to some idealized, extra-regional, and/ or liberal understanding of what a security community entails but to the collective’s self-identity. Because access to the discursive field is dependent on adhering to certain presuppositions that remain controversial among NGOs, these actors also take part, if only reluctantly or even unwarily, in the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a security community “in the making.” The exercise of discursive power therefore goes both ways, and involves trade-offs for everyone involved. There is no straightforward answer to how “win-win” this situation is, or how asymmetrical the trade-offs are. Yet the fact that well-established, reputable, independent NGOs continue to engage ASEAN on peace and security, and find value in this process, is an interesting development that deserves to be taken seriously. ASEAN has made some progress toward the integration of a “human dimension” into its security agenda over recent years, and this overture has been

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growing ever since. ASEAN now embraces a “people-centered” identity that extends to its Political and Security Community. It actively seeks to incorporate this human dimension into its approach to specific issues, including transnational crime, pandemics, natural disasters, and, more timidly, matters that pertain to the less controversial aspects of a “responsibility to protect.” As a result, new opportunities have also arisen for NGO participation in the security community– building process. The interest of NGOs in engaging the organization on peace and security issues has also grown over recent years. NGOs deploy in spaces sponsored by the organization, such as ad hoc consultations on specific themes or in the context of major ASEAN initiatives. They take part in interface sessions, during the ACSC/ APF or in other spaces. As they do so, important hurdles to non-governmental advocacy remain in place. States continue to actively attempt to co-opt these actors, leading to important dilemmas for civil society actors in general, and independent NGOs in particular. Yet the fatalism of some observers of regional affairs on the limitations of “alternative regionalism” is not necessarily warranted. No one involved in Track 3 regionalism is especially convinced by ASEAN’s claims of “people-centeredness.” Nonetheless, changes in official language, irrespective of the motives underpinning them, have opened up new possibilities for civil society actors to apply pressure, hold the organization accountable to its own commitments, and push for further change through the enactment of discursive power. NGOs have become increasingly sophisticated in navigating the elusive alphabet-soup structure of ASEAN, finding ways to adjust tone and deploy various discursive practices to disrupt official discourse. As a result, they make incremental headway in the spaces of engagement available to them as well as those they carve for themselves. In some of these spaces, NGOs are subjected to tone-policing, censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), and other practical and structural limitations. Yet they do not shy away from more confrontational public engagement when the time comes to “take it outside,” especially in the context of issues they cannot discuss with ASEAN directly. NGOs adjust discursive practices to the space they engage, allowing them to openly challenge ASEAN’s self-identity as a peoplecentered security community from various fronts simultaneously. In so doing, they contest some of the presuppositions that inform ASEAN’s approach to security community–building, such as the compatibility of statist and human security interests. The results of these efforts are certainly mixed, and subjected to power asymmetries that are here to stay. Yet they also ensure the longevity of debates on the applicability of human security, even when it remains unnamed, to the ASEAN context.

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Such internal contestation puts the security community–building process under stress, but it also has productive effects. NGOs engaged in the ASEAN process also come to adopt presuppositions similar to those of their counterparts from other tracks, including some that remain highly controversial for NGOs who stand firmly outside this field. This includes a recognition of “security” as a value to be pursued and prioritized over others. It extends to the idea of a coherent region made of peoples and states, with a destiny distinct from the rest of the world. Most importantly, it involves acknowledging ASEAN as the main institutional vehicle for multilateral regionalism in Southeast Asia and the broader AsiaPacific region and, at least in aspiration, as an appropriate provider of solutions to regional insecurity, however defined. By adhering to these presuppositions, these non-state actors also take part, if only reluctantly but also perhaps unwarily, in the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a security community “in the making.”

7

To Hell and Back ASEAN’s Continuing Odyssey

in this book, I show that security community–building in ASEAN is a polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested process grounded in meaning-making, the finality of which is always in flux and ever movable. Discourse, as both structure and “meaning-in-use,” played a productive role in the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a security community from the very first authoritative claim that such a community was in the making. At the same time, contestation has also taken central stage throughout this never-ending process of becoming, and thus cannot be reduced to a disruptive event against which the community then re-establishes a coherent identity. Contestation, however, is not a bug to be fixed but, rather, sustains the (re)production of ASEAN’s heroic narrative, and its identity as a security community. The book maps out the “epic stories” that make up the discourse strands through which competing representations of ASEAN as a security community in the making are put forward by social agents. These “versions” coexist, often quite awkwardly, in the discursive field where the identity of this institution is performed. This concluding chapter reviews the main findings of the book, contrasts the different “versions” of ASEAN’s security community by putting them in direct conversation with one another, and offers an assessment of where this never-ending quest for a secure ASEAN identity is likely to take us next. Making better sense of how security community–building unfolds in practice requires paying more attention to the “essentially contested” (Buzan 1983, 6) —and essentially discursive— character of this process. This study of ASEAN affords new insight into this key aspect of security community–building precisely

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because this institution’s enterprise is explicitly aspirational, and is recognized as such by its engineers. This open-ended work in progress is an ideal basis for examining how security communities work in practice. Whether such communities actually exist “out there in the real world” or not, and whether they are broadly considered to be a finished product based on academic criteria, is not what matters the most here. Security communities are constantly in the process of being reinvented, and as such they remain unfinished business everywhere, from ASEAN back to the EU. That a security community is not broadly recognized as a “mature” one based on prevailing standards in scholarly literature in no way prevents an inquiry into how the contours of the community are spelled out, and the role contestation plays in this process—to the contrary. Because ASEAN’s identity as a security community has not yet crystallized— and in fact, that might never happen—its omnidirectional character is on full display, and especially amenable to the kind of interpretative methodology that underpins discourse analysis. Having to recover what has been irremediably lost would have been much more challenging than to identify what still lies just underneath the surface and can be retrieved so long as one knows where to look. The discourse-based but practitioner-near framework spelled out in Chapter 2 and deployed in the following chapters made it possible to better understand how security community–building unfolds in the context of ASEAN. Despite not being an instance of cross-regional comparison per se, this book’s findings can serve as a fruitful basis for rethinking how to approach similar processes in other contexts, from the African Union to NATO. Security community–building in ASEAN is a messy, context-specific story, but the idiosyncratic character of this process should not be overstated. To paraphrase Bilahari Kausikan’s (2015) critique of faulty comparisons with European integration, ASEAN is “not a horse,” but it is no unicorn either. A lot of what I have discussed here also holds for other security community–building institutions that similarly grapple with the effects of a growing diversification of issues and actors involved in the complex enterprise of providing “security” against uncertainty via multilateral means. At the same time, there also needs to be room for assessing an institution’s journey on its own terms. This is done by centering the agency of local actors swimming in the currents of a relatively self-contained discursive basin shaped by a common repertoire but also unavoidably connected to the outside through many streams. This repertoire is not located in human cognition or some other inarticulate realm, but is made up of prior, fluid, but still tangible “texts” that new articulations stir afresh or, often unpredictably, shift in more fundamental ways. Enacting ASEAN’s security community is a performance that is to a great extent inspired by prior debates about the organization’s role in the pursuit of

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regional security, extending to preliminary attempts to talk the community into existence. The formal launching of ASEAN’s security community–building project in 2003 cannot be properly understood without due attention paid to a long-standing discursive process of identity-building that extends from the adoption of the Bangkok Declaration through the ASEAN Vision 2025. Chapter 3 provided this necessary context, including by mapping out debates that followed the end of the Cold War and saw ASEAN embarking on a more explicit and omnidirectional path toward security cooperation on a wide spectrum of issues. Instead of a programmatic, teleological analysis of ASEAN’s institutional development, however, I put special emphasis on areas of ambiguity, tension, and contestation in the discursive field. This allowed me to show certain paths opening up while others were foreclosed, sometimes permanently, although often only temporarily. The ASEAN process is dialogue oriented, and for this reason it attracts a lot of criticism. Yet the lowest common denominator is not a passively obtained outcome. It requires the active mobilization of discursive power by participants, if only to block initiatives that, for whatever reason—hidden motives, firmly held beliefs, or simply out of habit—they do not wish to see coming to fruition at this time. Instead of trying to uncover reasons that are no doubt interesting and complex ones, my discursive historical approach to ASEAN’s institutional development is best tailored to uncover how “things social happen” (Pouliot 2014, 240) in this context, and to what effect. This analysis provides the necessary background for a more in-depth examination of the various “discourse strands” that accompany the reproduction of ASEAN’s identity as a distinct security community in the making, undertaken in Part 2 of this book. Part 2 then investigates how each “version” of the ASEAN security community took shape and is currently enacted by social agents in the discursive field. Each version is a relatively self-contained construct, organized around specific positions on (1) the source and nature of regional insecurity, (2) the boundaries of the community and the identity of the referent object, and (3) the delineation of ASEAN’s role in the pursuit of security. These positions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There is obviously room for a conception of regional security that makes space, as ASEAN does, for military and non-military, domestic and international, traditional and non-traditional threats to security. At first glance, it makes a lot of sense to conceive of ASEAN’s (or any multilateral institution’s) contribution to security as multidimensional, or as inclusive of various referent objects: the region, the state, the people, and so on. Yet part of the discursive power exercised by social agents claiming that ASEAN is a security community in the making stems from their ability to reconcile, sometimes very awkwardly,

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what would otherwise be irreconcilable. When the security community is invoked by practitioners, they invariably take a stance on what the primary source of insecurity is, what the most important referent object is, and what ought to be the priority for ASEAN security-wise, even if they may adopt a different position on one or all of these things later on. It is to this extent that, very quickly in their enactment of meaning-in-use, actors are compelled to adopt incompatible positions on what security and community mean at their essence, even if they may remain flexible—and many do not. In the first version discussed (in Chapter 4), what I referred to as the “nontraditional” security community, the nature of regional insecurity is either nonmilitary, transnational, or both at the same time. Its source is located in an elusive, non-spatial, interstitial realm “in between” the domestic and the international, yet still outside the bounds of the regional community. This regional community is a Southeast Asian one, made up of ASEAN states—meaning it might still expand to incorporate new members: Timor-Leste, in a not-so-distant future, or perhaps even Papua New Guinea. It relies on its ongoing partnerships with interested non-member parties who invest in securing a community to which they do not belong per se, but still collaborate closely with. While the actual origin point of the threat(s) faced may stem from the domestic realm of a fellow member state, insecurity is presented as operating outside of this state’s control, and is often attributed to dangerous non-state actors preying on the community, who are also explicitly Othered. Many predicates are affixed to regional insecurity as defined in this version. The nature of the threat is new—but also very old. It is shared, and therefore uncontroversial. It is transnational, and therefore not a “domestic concern” shielded by non-interference. It is growing, increasingly complex, and yet it cannot be measured. ASEAN’s role is to provide ways for states to pool resources to gain the control to which, as states, they are entitled. Retaining control would involve getting rid of the threat—for example, by making ASEAN “drug-free.” This objective, conveniently, can never be achieved. Neither can control be obtained without a cooperative, interstate response, which is not possible without the platform, guidance, and mechanisms provided by ASEAN. A key feature of ASEAN’s approach to security and security community– building that sets it apart from other multilateral institutions is the emphasis it places on transnational crime and other issues that it has come to associate with “non-traditional security” (NTS). As such, the most practical and uncontroversial way that ASEAN seeks to position itself as a security actor has been the development of cooperative initiatives meant to bolster its member states’ ability to tackle NTS. Starting with drug trafficking and expanding to an ever-growing

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list of other challenges, from terrorism to cybercrime, the ritual incantation of the ambiguous phrase that is “non-traditional security” in the ASEAN context has had productive effects on the grouping’s ability to seize its security community identity. Indeed, while it is not as uncontroversial as often portrayed, as shown by the many “points of diffraction” that characterize the enactment of NTS discourse across different tracks and states, the “non-traditional” version of ASEAN’s security community, despite being the one with the least stable core, is the most firmly embedded among ASEAN states. The constructive ambiguity that accompanies NTS has helped turn this concept into a benign agenda that drives security dialogue and cooperation onward without much resistance. As Chapter 4 reveals, this is the result of an active securitization effort, not because of the essentially uncontroversial quality of NTS. Prior resistance needed to be overcome, by affixing NTS to established security concepts that were already part of state language, comprehensive security first and foremost. It involved repositioning a previously established regional agenda that had evolved outside the bounds of the security domain, and creating a term that gave old preoccupations a new, transnational flavor. At the same time, NTS, precisely because of its deeply ambiguous quality, also turned into the ideal “floating signifier” in ASEAN security discourse. As such, while it is anchored in a particular representation of ASEAN’s identity as a security community in the making, it has also traveled to other, “traditional” and “people-centric” versions, creating new productive tension in the process. Chapter 5 shows how the careful, step-by-step approach that ASEAN privileges when it comes to “hard” security issues, interstate conflict management, and its “honest broker” role in the broader Asia-Pacific region makes use of the ambiguous and elusive character of NTS as simultaneously important and inconsequential. ASEAN’s “traditional” version of the security community is, at least initially, a very indirect project, where the grouping provides the “conditions for peace” and regional order among states whose security preferences are often at odds. NTS in this context is rid of its urgent, dangerous character. It becomes a “low-hanging fruit” of cooperation, a pretext to build trust— or, perhaps more accurately, “manage mistrust” (Kausikan 2020). It is hoped that NTS cooperation will lead to positive outcomes on more vexing, but also more crucial, issues. ASEAN’s handling of the South China Sea disputes is a key instance where this broader approach to conflict management is on full display, to the exasperation of many, both outside and inside. It also drives a highly repetitive line of critique targeting the prevailing terms under which the ASEAN-centric regional security “architecture” operates, as well as the organization’s response, including most recently via the adoption of its Indo-Pacific Outlook.

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The traditional version of ASEAN’s security community, despite making room for NTS as a category of issues of secondary importance, centers on a much more conventional definition of insecurity as interstate, militarized conflict. This security community in the making has ASEAN at its core, but it projects to the broader East Asia, Asia-Pacific, and/or Indo-Pacific regions, reaching out to a larger yet ill-defined membership of “regional states.” This group, in its least inclusive interpretation, includes the “strategic partners” of ASEAN (i.e., the Plus Eight countries for the time being), but it potentially extends to all ten dialogue partners in the near future, or even the twenty-seven members of the ASEAN Regional Forum, if not the thirty-five signatories of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Its boundaries are highly flexible, and yet it is a statist community. Insofar as other actors (e.g., experts) are allowed in, it is merely at the explicit request of states, and to provide counsel to them. These limits do not preclude these actors from enacting the traditional security community in other liminal Track 2 spaces where this community is also embodied by state officials, but “in their private capacity.” The deeply pervasive character of NTS is also apparent in yet another, ­“people-centric” version of ASEAN’s security community. Indeed, NTS played a key role in pushing the organization to seize new ground for its security agenda even when ill-intentioned, dangerous non-state actors were not readily identifiable as the source of insecurity. ASEAN’s growing interest and capacity in dealing with pandemics and environmental disasters is partly the product of the elasticity of its NTS commitment. It also stems from the recognition of a broader need to show “the people” of ASEAN that it can make a positive difference in everyday life, including on security terms. In the “people-centric” version of ASEAN’s security community, regional insecurity is defined as a broad, extensive spectrum of military and non-military security threats that affect the daily lives of Southeast Asian populations. ASEAN’s official discourse predominantly focuses on the non-military dimension and societal forms of insecurity. It draws connections with other pillars of the ASEAN Community as well as echoing regional understandings of human security as not being limited to— or predominantly focused on—“freedom from threat” defined as physical violence in the context of armed conflict. Yet the impact of intra-state armed conflict on the security of “the people” is increasingly raised, including in Track 1 spaces, and in the context of specific mechanisms such as the ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation or in discussions pertaining to the development of an ASEAN capacity in humanitarian intervention. This development now extends to discussions on the Rohingya crisis. Actors involved in Track 2 and Track 3 play a role in opening further space for this conversation to happen.

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This “people-centric” turn is rooted in a prior enactment of ASEAN’s identity as a “caring” community, which was initially devoid of any security content but no longer is. In this context, civil society organizations have found new entry points for engaging the organization on peace and security. This move also has effects on discussions held in other tracks where, for instance, the Rohingya crisis went from being considered an ultimate taboo to form an inescapable topic of substantial discussions. Part of this turn of events is undoubtedly due to increased international pressure, including international recognition of the crisis as a genocide. Yet ASEAN’s Myanmar problem had been a thorn in the organization’s side at least since 1997. ASEAN’s own embrace of a new responsibility to protect “the people” as part of its claim to the security community status has opened new possibilities for actors on the margins of the regional process. While (Western) dialogue partners continue to hold ASEAN accountable to standards it only partially and reluctantly adheres to, region-based civil society organizations have proved increasingly competent in using ASEAN’s own language against it in their enactment of discursive power. By holding a mirror up to the organization’s Self-identity, these actors have contributed to jolting it into action as it seeks to safeguard its ontological security. This is on full display in the aftermath of the 2021 Myanmar coup. The drive to bridge the divide between ASEAN’s vision of itself and the image reflected back at it has led to some progress in other issues, such as trafficking in persons. It has opened up space for envisioning new roles for the organization, from peacekeeping to the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Taken together, these three versions of the security community paint a messier but richer and more dynamic portrait of ASEAN as a regional security institution than most existing representations, whether in scholarly literature, policyoriented commentary, or media reports. One of the main findings of this book is that while the “versions” of ASEAN’s security community are relatively selfcontained, and offer relatively coherent representations of the grouping’s identity and contribution to regional security, they are also quite porous. They are enacted in the same discursive field, although this field has many nooks and crannies where one version or another is more likely to thrive. Therefore, the “speaking agents” who do the enacting on a daily basis have many opportunities to navigate where they please. They can switch from one to the other—including within the same “text,” whether it takes the form of a well-rehearsed speech at a diplomatic meeting, an op-ed in a national newspaper, or a casual conversation with the researcher. Some actors are more versatile seafarers than others, able to adapt to shifts in currents, irrespective of which “track” they find themselves primarily affiliated with at a particular point in their career. Some of this versatility is no

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doubt attributable to experience and the additional comfort that comes with seniority, particularly for officials, but it also depends on many other factors, having to do with positionality, personality, and background. Indeed, the story of ASEAN’s quest for the security community features many characters. A peace activist from the Philippines pushing for a civil society stance on the South China Sea disputes. An Indonesian expert cum ambassador lamenting that major power rivalry is diverting attention away from threats to human security, yet pushing for a “post-ASEAN” foreign policy because of the organization’s passive approach to hard security concerns. A Thai senior official arguing in the same breath that transnational crime is a twenty-first-century threat, something ASEAN has always dealt with, a looming danger, and a pretext for mitigating interstate tensions that are nothing more than a thing of the past. They share the discursive field with many others. Their claims are all accurate to some extent, and they are also contradictory. This is because the boundaries of the community these speaking actors invoke when they take position in the discursive field are deeply unstable and always in flux. So are their representations of what achieving regional security looks like. The evidence garnered here makes it quite hard to pinpoint a “national character” that would drive how specific actors engage in the regional security debate. Isolating the role of various identity markers and personal experiences that might affect which version of the security community one finds the most convincing at any given moment is inherently difficult, and this question remains unresolved here. My discourse-based approach is less interested in assessing the underlying causes playing out in the background of the enactment of meaning-in-use in text and context than in looking into how it happens and to what effect. Discourse analysis is not meant to offer a truly representative sample of the various positions enacted in a discursive field, nor is it poised to put forward direct causal claims as to why specific actors take the positions they take. The goal was merely to identify general tendencies in what is necessarily an incomplete story. Therefore, I cannot offer firm conclusions about which “version” predominates among Malaysian or Singaporean, male or female, junior or senior individuals, although this does spell out some interesting avenues for future research. To complicate matters further, as discussed above, many of these agents also draw from different versions of the security community when deploying power/knowledge in the discursive field. What my findings do suggest, however, is that some versions of the security community are better entrenched in some sites than others. The “non-­ traditional” version of the security community, despite (or perhaps because of ) the ambiguities and contradictions it carries, seems more firmly ingrained among

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ASEAN officials than it is among dialogue partners and in other tracks. The “traditional” version of ASEAN’s security community, given its broader AsiaPacific scope and strategic, “hard” security implications, is predominantly invoked in spaces where representatives of dialogue partners and defense experts from ASEAN countries that are formal claimants in the South China Sea are well represented. The “people-centric” version of the security community is the one attracting most, if not all, of the attention in Track 3, NGO-dominated spaces, and is more likely to be brought forth by representatives of more progressive and democratic ASEAN states. Beyond individual characteristics, an important conduit facilitating the circulation of speaking agents between different “versions” of ASEAN’s security community is the highly elusive concept of “non-traditional security.” NTS, much more so than predominant representations of security in the “traditional” and “people-centric” versions of ASEAN, acts as a “floating signifier.” It is not devoid of meaning, and is in fact anchored to the “non-traditional” version of ASEAN’s community. It has an intricate relationship with both “comprehensive security” and ASEAN’s earlier focus on transnational crime. Yet it has morphed into an ever-expanding category of issues. More importantly, it has taken on other meanings deriving from the “constructive ambiguity” that accompanies its use in the discursive field as it travels to other versions as well. As such, NTS is the root of a lot of productive tension in ASEAN’s security community–building enterprise. Its deeply ambiguous character creates inconsistency and contributes to the porosity between the pillars of the ASEAN Community. Yet its enactment comes with significant discursive power. It fosters new possibilities for cooperation, transforming zero-sum concerns into win-win scenarios for state actors. It serves to bolster ASEAN’s ability to claim direct and immediate added value in the pursuit of regional security, however defined. It redistributes agency and allocates new powers to various security actors, for better or worse. It allows ASEAN’s security agenda to seamlessly expand into new territory while presenting this expansion as natural continuity. Because of the inherently performative character of the security community–building process, the ability of ASEAN to actually do something about the issues it seizes in practical terms with the few resources it has is of secondary importance. What matters, quite simply, is that the “jaw-jaw” continues, to borrow from Winston Churchill’s words and a common mantra in ASEAN circles. Not because it actually prevents “war-war” or fosters dependable expectations of peaceful change, but because it is how the security community, as an end in itself, lives on in rhetoric and practice despite never coming to fruition.

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Beyond NTS itself, the versions of ASEAN’s security community do share a number of elements that allow “speaking agents” to move from one to the other. As they branch out of the same “tree of derivation,” these versions are rooted in a number of presuppositions that must be accepted for actors to be granted access to the discursive field where ASEAN’s identity as a security community is nested. First, social agents need to commit to the notion that ASEAN is a force for regional peace, and that the development of its security community is a laudable goal that ought to be supported. What achieving regional peace means will vary from one version to the other, as the source of insecurity is located in different places. In the “non-traditional” version of the security community, ASEAN is best equipped to advance the collective, multilateral response that is necessary to deal with transnational and/or non-military threats to the security of member states, who simply cannot do it alone. Any form of inter-member state collaboration on a bilateral, trilateral, or mini-lateral basis will be linked to the ASEAN brand or at least considered to be compatible with, or following, a spirit of cooperation that the organization embodies and is to be credited for. In the “traditional” version of the security community, only ASEAN can provide the kind of neutral, “honest” platform for the mediation of relations between regional states, and the mitigation of conflict between them. Any proposal made that does not undoubtedly put ASEAN at its center is at risk of being sidelined as a pipe dream. The unavoidable conclusion of any new airing of frustration with existing institutions and mechanisms since the turn of the twentyfirst century has been an agreement over the need to reform, strengthen, and/or expand “existing institutions” that are part of the ASEAN-centric architecture. In the “people-centric” version of the security community, ASEAN embodies a “One Southeast Asia” community that reaches across state borders to a regional population sharing a common history and destiny. The challenge is for ASEAN to build awareness of its intrinsic value for the people of Southeast Asia, to whom it brings peace without being given due recognition, and to keep finding new ways to make itself useful. All versions of the security community center ASEAN’s agency, but they convey specific positions on what this agency is, and the extent to which other actors also have power in making the security community happen. While the “nontraditional” version of the security community is a product of ASEAN and its member states, dialogue partners have a responsibility to support the organization in fulfilling its vision for regional security, even if they only indirectly benefit. Non-state actors can provide expertise and information about the ways in which

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particular threats unfold, and best practices. That is, so long as they do not contest the fundamental elements of the discourse and the dominant characterization of insecurity that prevail in this version. In the “traditional” version of the security community, dialogue partners, especially those with strategic partnership status, hold special obligations in contributing to regional peace and stability in a way that is compatible with ASEAN’s model of regionalism and respects its centrality. With great power capabilities come great responsibilities, and regional powers hold a type of agency that ASEAN does not possess. Yet ASEAN’s own “strength in weakness” (Stubbs 2014) brings added value that only it can offer. In this version, some non-state actors, such as experts involved in Track 2 diplomacy, have a limited advisory role, while others, like NGOs, are simply invisible. In the people-centric version of ASEAN’s security community, the role of dialogue partners is similar to that in the “non-traditional” version. The exercise of this role, however, requires additional caution and acknowledgment of ASEAN’s role as mediator between the international community and its member states when it comes to addressing domestic concerns through the prism of a “responsibility to protect.” There is also additional agency allocated to NGOs, more so than in any other version, to act in an advisory role. Again, this is so long as they adhere to fundamental elements of the discourse underpinning this version, such as the recognition of the state as “part of the solution” to insecurity. Second, social agents need to adhere to a crisis narrative that places “uncertainty” at the center of a shared sense of impending doom for the region. This state of affairs is implicitly contrasted with the “certainty” of a Cold War past where, one ought to assume, and not without great effort, things security were more straightforward. According to a dominant view, it is not simply that ASEAN’s definition of security needs to expand, but that the “reality” of the regional security environment itself has been irremediably changed in fundamental ways. Distinct versions and the “epic stories” that support them will invoke different “monsters” to characterize this new uncertainty—be they “bogeymen,” “dragons,” or “sirens.” In the “non-traditional” version, the proliferation of transnational and nonmilitary security threats is presented as especially alarming. It is the allegedly “novel” and elusive character of the threat, although it is hard to pinpoint, that requires new heroic responses that would have seemed impossible for ASEAN in the before times. Sometimes this will mean turning ASEAN into an anti-hero, such as when it counters a liberal push for the decriminalization and legalization of drug use. The danger, still, originates from the “outside” of the community, but its location is not merely a spatial one. Insecurity lies in the interstitial space

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beyond the grasp of the state itself. Contrary to the state (and region), it has no borders, which is what makes it unsettling and scary. The fact that it is unquantifiable only serves to reinforce the fear of the bogeymen who keep coming to get ASEAN, as a result of its own actions. More recently, this discourse on (nontraditional) danger has served to support calls in favor of reinforcing internal cohesion, more careful implementation of initiatives already on the agenda, and the strengthening of mechanisms in place. In the “traditional” version, the uncertainty arises out of ghosts from the past that take on new shapes as a result of interdependence. If there is to be a peaceful end to the clash of dragons from West and East, ASEAN, as the timid, small, and reluctant hero caught in the middle of titans as always, is the region’s best hope to mitigate the risks of the incipient Asia-Pacific community falling into chaos. If only it could rise to the occasion and be supported by its allies in its endeavor to find its “single voice.” In the people-centric version of the community, the most pressing threats are the ones arising from uncertainty taking place in everyday life, where ASEAN ought to make a difference in ways that the state alone (or the international community, in the case of the Rohingya) cannot. ASEAN, brandishing its Charter and equipped by a variety of new mechanisms for the promotion and protection of human rights, can serve as a force for peace by tackling issues that take place in the domestic realm but now have transnational repercussions. It can also encourage its member states to accept new heroic responsibilities in the protection of the people that they would have previously shunned. Indeed, only ASEAN can serve as the legitimate mediator between the “sirens” of human security and R2P and the genuine concerns of its member states that it is best placed to assuage. The insecurity deriving from a newly uncertain and unpredictable environment can be defined in many ways, but the response needs to be multilateral, regional, and, of course, securitized. Only ASEAN, the story goes, because of its heroic qualities that are often denied but are nonetheless unparalleled, is equipped to provide it. As such, the security community acts as both the means and the end in the never-ending search for security. Third, all versions of the security community, by putting ASEAN at the center of the solution, rest on the prior assumption that the security of the state, “the people,” and the region are, at their essence, compatible and intertwined. There is some disagreement on whether national security interests and those of the population are in fact in sync in current practice. The NGO participants to the regional security debate are generally skeptical that this is the case. Yet there is still a broad consensus over the possibility, and the desirability, of this conciliation of interests across tracks. Again, accepting this proposition is a prerequisite

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for being granted access to the discursive field where the making of ASEAN’s heroic identity as a security community in the making happens. The position of actors within the field, at the core or on the margins, depends on the extent to which they accept this presupposition—as reality, or as an ideal scenario resting on conditions that have not yet been met and the recognition of their agency in helping realize it. As they enact the security community in practice, social agents position themselves as supporting characters in this epic coming-of-age story, whatever their targeted monster is at any given moment, and accept that they share a common destiny, in either doom or peace. They also express a sustained interest in helping the collective achieve security for all. Finally, they make claims of authority, competence, or legitimacy in defining the meaning of security for the community, as well as where its boundaries lie, that are at least partly acknowledged as such by other members of the community. This common core in which the various branches of the discourse about ASEAN meet is itself rooted in other presuppositions at deeper layers of sedimentation. These presuppositions are rarely explicitly articulated, but a commitment to them is necessary for explicit articulations of the security community to become possible. A discourse-based approach requires an understanding of the play of intertextuality, meaning that one text (or statement) enacted in the here and the now is always at least partly derivative of a prior text, even if its sources are not clear. The ways in which speaking agents position themselves in the discursive field also contribute to reproducing a set of underlying assumptions that are taken for granted to the extent that they no longer need to be asserted. These include (1) a recognition of the inherently desirable character of a political project that rests on the constant accumulation of security, often to the detriment of other goals, (2) a commitment to the state as the ultimate purveyor of security and community, and (3) a recognition of the “region” as something that is self-coherent, delineated geographically, with a destiny that is part of but also distinct from a broader international community. These underlying assumptions are not specific to ASEAN, and are linked to a broader security discourse with global ramifications, but they do play out in specific ways in this regional context. Each version of the security community is self-coherent, but it is also subjected to significant contestation. It also branches out in ways that overlap with other versions. Internal and external forms of contestation accompany the enactment of each version in practice. This contestation, in some cases, actively destabilizes one version’s key elements. Most of the time, the destabilizing act will be the product of a speaking subject’s commitment to another version of the

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security community, and will be limited to the “branches” of the tree of derivation, while its roots remain unharmed. This happens, for instance, when social agents argue that the way ASEAN prioritizes non-traditional security concerns that are misleadingly presented as urgent is actually a pretext for ignoring the much more pressing concerns associated with the risk of interstate conflict in the South China Sea. On some occasions, actors situated within or at the margins of the discursive field contest presuppositions situated at deeper layers of sedimentation, where the possibility of a counter-discourse leading to more radical change is more likely to be situated. In relation to the “non-traditional” version, this occurs when actors push for the de-securitization of transnational crime, not because it is unimportant, but because the problem would be more appropriately addressed via nonsecurity means, by non-security actors, and possibly even outside the bounds of ASEAN itself. When it comes to the “traditional version” of the security community, destabilizing practices can be observed as social agents express serious doubt about the heroic qualities of ASEAN, or the possibility that what looks like an anti-hero can in fact be redeemed or strengthened. Examples of this are found when actors promote the adoption of a “post-ASEAN” foreign policy, refuse to attend an ASEAN-centric meeting, or argue that what the region actually needs is a different hero altogether to come to the region’s rescue—perhaps some kind of “Asian NATO.” In the “people-centric” version of ASEAN’s security community, such destabilization occurs when ASEAN is considered irrelevant or even threatening to the safety, well-being, or dignity of Southeast Asian populations, particularly in the case of populations that are rendered invisible or are radically Othered by the state. Calls by certain local activists in favor of the abolition of the death penalty for drug traffickers or the decriminalization of drug use, an agenda that ASEAN conveniently portrays as a “liberal” push from outside the regional ranks, would fit in this category. The full realization of ASEAN’s security community is a target that is not only multiple but constantly on the move and essentially contested. Therefore, whether the organization is able to vanquish enough monsters to meet all of its current “action lines” by 2025, or at least to convincingly declare itself to finally be a fully fledged security community, matters less than its ability to keep everyone hooked in preparation for the next episode and season. Right now, this is the ASEAN Community’s post-2025 Vision, adopted in Ha Noi in November 2020, which stands as ASEAN’s latest attempt to reproduce its heroic qualities: a “politically cohesive,” “rules-based,” “people-centered”

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ASEAN community with “enhanced capacity to harness new opportunities and respond effectively to current and future challenges.” Doing so, ASEAN must be further strengthened so that it can cope with the turmoil of the “rapidly changing global and regional geo-political [. . .] landscape” characterized by a global pandemic, the emergence of “mega-trends,” and “non-traditional threats” that shall mostly remain unnamed (ASEAN 2020b).1 ASEAN’s security agenda will continue to expand, while “true” security remains forever out of reach as a result of the very nature of the enterprise. As such, the association’s project will likely remain a messy affair, full of hurdles and new chimera to combat. The quest is also bound to become even more complex over time. Although current efforts seem to be shifting toward bridging the gap between “rhetoric and practice” (or implementation), and strengthening existing mechanisms and agenda items, the urge to invoke new “monsters” and missions, whether they come in the form of threats to Women, Peace, and Security or the need to secure the “Indo-Pacific,” is already proving hard to resist. Monsters, after all, are in many ways fantastical representations of what is “really out there.” To be clear, the fact that “the bodies keep piling up” (Zalewski 1996) in Southeast Asia or elsewhere is not what is in question here. What is in question are the stories being told about them, and the effects these have on what is done (or not done) about it. Searching for ASEAN’s security community, however, may look less like a heroic quest for the Holy Grail— or the hunting of a Snark—to the casual observer, and more like a circumstantial partnership of unlikely companions looking for Schrödinger’s cat while debating what the color of the box is. Whatever we title the tale of ASEAN’s security community, which is ultimately what its protagonists say it is, it is likely to be never-ending. While some of those involved do feel like they might be running in circles, and others regularly threaten to give up, no one seems any closer to actually calling it a day than when they first started more than fifty years ago. I certainly cannot reasonably assert with certitude that ASEAN will live on forever, let alone happily, but the odds of survival remain in its favor.

Appendix: List of Interviews

Code

Name

Position

Date

Location

O1 E2

Foreign Affairs Official from ASEAN country Director of ISIS-Thailand

N-A/2014 N-A 09/2014 Bangkok

O3 O4

Anonymous Thitinan Pongsudhirak Anonymous Rachanikorn Sarasiri

N-A/2014 N-A 11/2014 Bangkok

O5

Wanchai Disates

O6

Chuanpit Choomwatana

O7

Apichai Sunchindah

O8

Amara Pongsapich

C9

Dorothy G. Guerrero

E10

Panitan Wattanayagorn

E11A E11B

Suthipand Chirathivat Surichai Wun’Gaeo

O12

Anonymous

Foreign Affairs Official from ASEAN country Deputy Secretary General of the Office of Narcotics Control Board (Thailand) Former Senior Narcotics Law Enforcement Officer at the Office of Narcotics Control Board (Thailand), Former Drug Liaison for Thailand overseas (East Asian region) Director of Demand Reduction Strategy Development Division at the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (Thailand) Policy Adviser, Former Executive Director of the ASEAN Foundation (2005 –2008), and Former Assistant Director of the Environment unit at the ASEAN Secretariat Chairperson of the Office of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand Program Officer at Focus on the Global South (a member organization of SAPA) on ASEAN issues Professor of International Relations, Chulalongkorn University; Adviser on security affairs for the Deputy Prime Minister Director of the ASEAN Studies Center, Chulalongkorn University Director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Chulalongkorn University Foreign Affairs Official from ASEAN country

11/2014

Bangkok

11/2014

Bangkok

11/2014

Bangkok

11/2014

Bangkok

11/2014

Bangkok

12/2014

Bangkok

12/2014

Bangkok

N-A/2014 N-A

180

Appendix

Code

Name

E13

Pranee Thiparat

E14 O15 O16 E17 E18 O19 O20 O21 E22

E23

E24 O25 C26

C27

O28 E29 E30 O31 O32 E33

Position

Former Director of ISIS-Thailand, Professor at the Department of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University Suchit Bunbongkarn Senior Fellow, Former Chairman and Founder of ISIS-Thailand Termsak Former Director of Political and Security Chalermpalanupap Cooperation, ASEAN Secretariat Ong Keng Yong Former Secretary General of ASEAN (2003 – 2007) Kavi Chongkittavorn Senior Fellow at ISIS-Thailand; Columnist for The Nation Punchada Assistant Professor in Political Science, Mahidol Sirivunnabood University Mohamad Razdan Deputy Permanent Representative of Malaysia to Jamil ASEAN Anonymous ASEAN Diplomat Rahmat Pramono Permanent Representative of Indonesia to ASEAN Clara Joewono Vice-Chair of the CSIS Foundation, Centre for Strategic and International Studies ( Jakarta); Member of Indonesian National Committee of Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific Jusuf Wanandi Senior Fellow, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and Co-Founder of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies ( Jakarta); Co-Chair of the Council of Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (Indonesia) Shafiah Muhibat Researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Centre for Strategic and International Studies ( Jakarta) Anonymous ASEAN Diplomat Raffendi Djamin Representative of Indonesia to the ASEAN InterGovernmental Commission on Human Rights; Executive Director of the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) Yuyun Senior adviser on ASEAN and Human Rights at Wahyuningrum the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG); Convener of the CSO Regional Consultation on ASEAN Vision 2025 Anonymous ASEAN Diplomat Anonymous Researcher in a think tank in Jakarta Rizal Sukma Centre for Strategic and International Studies ( Jakarta); Foreign Policy Adviser for President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo Chandra Widya Director of Political and Security Division, Yudha General Directorate for ASEAN Cooperation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Indonesia) Anonymous ASEAN Secretariat Staff Member Shahriman Lockman Senior Analyst in the Foreign Policy and Security Studies Programme of ISIS-Malaysia

Date

Location

12/2014

Bangkok

12/2014

Bangkok

01/2015

Singapore

01/2015

Singapore

02/2015

Bangkok

02/2015

Jakarta

02/2015

Jakarta

02/2015 02/2015

Jakarta Jakarta

02/2015

Jakarta

02/2015

Jakarta

02/2015

Jakarta

03/2015 03/2015

Jakarta Jakarta

03/2015

Jakarta

03/2015 04/2015 04/2015

Jakarta Jakarta Jakarta

04/2015

Jakarta

N-A/2015 Jakarta 04/2015 KL

Appendix Code O34

Name

Position

Shahril Nizam Abdul Director at the ASEAN Political and Security Malek Community Division II, ASEAN-Malaysia National Secretariat, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Malaysia) C35 Chalida Tajaroensuk Executive Director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation (Thailand) E36 Anonymous Well-informed source involved in regional counterterrorism and collaborator of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of an ASEAN country E37 Bunn Nagara Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Security Studies Program of ISIS-Malaysia O38 Kent M. Mullen Politics and Economics Officer at the United States Mission to ASEAN O39 Robert McCubbing Counselor on ASEAN at the Embassy of Canada to Indonesia, Timor Leste, and ASEAN O40 Denis Fedorov First Secretary of the Russian Representation to ASEAN, at the Embassy of the Russian Federation to Indonesia O41 Seonyoung Yang Foreign Affairs Attaché and Policy Analyst at the Mission of the Republic of Korea to ASEAN O42A Anonymous Officer at the Directorate General of ASEAN Cooperation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Indonesia O42B Anonymous Officer at the Directorate General of ASEAN Cooperation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Indonesia O43 Anonymous Deputy Head of Dialogue Partner Mission to ASEAN E44 Meidyatama Editor-in-Chief of the Jakarta Post Suryodiningrat E45 Aries Arugay Executive Director of the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies (Philippines) and Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines-Diliman E46 Carolina Hernandez Founding President and Chair of the Board of Directors at the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies (Philippines) E47A Julio Amador III Deputy Director-General of the Foreign Service Institute, Department of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of the Philippines E47B Maria Anna Rowena Chief Foreign Affairs Research Specialist and Luz. G. Layador Head of the Foreign Service Institute’s Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies (CIRSS), Department of Foreign Affairs ot the Republic of the Philippines E47C Joycee A. Teodoro Foreign Affairs Research Specialist at the Foreign Service Institute, Department of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of the Philippines O48 Orlando Mercado First Permanent Representative of the Philippines to ASEAN (2009 –2011); Former Secretary of National Defense under the Estrada administration (1998 –2001)

181 Date

Location

04/2015

KL

04/2015

KL

04/2015

N-A

04/2015

KL

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

05/2015

Jakarta

06/2015

Manila

06/2015

Manila

06/2015

Manila

06/2015

Manila

06/2015

Manila

06/2015

Manila

182

Appendix

Code

Name

E49

Aileen S.P. Baviera

Position

Professor of Asian Studies at University of the Philippines, specializing in international politics and security in East Asia C50 Marc Batac Regional Liaison Officer (Southeast Asia) for the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict at Initiatives for International Dialogue; Project Coordinator, Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID) E51 Herman Joseph Kraft Former Executive Director of the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies (Philippines); Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines-Diliman C52A Chang Jordan Program officer at the Women’s Legal Bureau, a member organization of Southeast Asia Women’s Caucus on ASEAN and Weaving Women’s Rights in ASEAN C52B Jelen Paclarin Executive Director of the Women’s Legal Bureau, a member organization of Southeast Asia Women’s Caucus on ASEAN, and co-chair of Weaving Women’s Rights in ASEAN E53 Kwa Chong Guan Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University; Former Policy Analyst for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense (Singapore) E54 Mely Anthony Head of the Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (Singapore) O55 Anonymous ASEAN Diplomat O56 Daniel Espiritu Director-General of the APSC Division, Department of Foreign Affairs (Philippines) O57 MC “Jun” Abad Jr. Former Chairman of the International Strategic and Development Studies (Philippines); Former Assistant Director of the ASEAN Secretariat; Former Director of the ASEAN Regional Forum Unit at the ASEAN Secretariat C58 Augusto “Gus” Executive Director and Co-Founder of Initiatives Miclat for International Dialogue E59 Tan Sri Mohamed Former Chairman and Chief Executive, Institute Jawhar Hassan of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia; Malaysia’s representative at the ARF Expert and Eminent Persons Group E60 Barry Desker Singaporean diplomat; former Dean and Distinguished Fellow at RSIS; 2018 chair of the ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights; Singapore’s representative at the ARF Expert and Eminent Persons Group

Date

Location

07/2015

Manila

07/2015

Manila

07/2015

Manila

07/2015

Manila

07/2015

Singapore

07/2015

Singapore

07/2015 07/2015

N-A Manila

07/2015

Manila

07/2015

Manila

06/2019

KL

06/2019

Singapore

Notes

chapter 1 Excerpts of this chapter draw on material previously published as Martel, Stéphanie. 2020. “The Polysemy of Security Community-Building: Toward a ‘People-Centered’ Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)?” International Studies Quarterly 64(3): 588 –599, by permission of Oxford University Press. 1.  ASEAN’s current membership includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. 2.  This claim has been made by many, but the most systematic examination of ASEAN as a “nascent” security community remains Amitav Acharya’s Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, now in its third edition (see Acharya 2014). 3.  A quick Google search reveals how prevalent this assessment is and the scope of issues (e.g., the South China Sea, COVID-19, the 2021 coup in Myanmar) that present ASEAN with such a test. 4.  An EU official who worked at the EU mission in Jakarta recently referred to ASEAN as “a sort of EU ‘Extra-Lite’” (Blankert 2020). 5.  The “Asia-Pacific” region, as with “Southeast Asia” and the “Indo-Pacific” region, is a geopolitical construct with ambiguous boundaries. In this book, it is understood as comprising Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and South Asia, while also extending to ASEAN’s “dialogue partners.” 6.  This interpretive, abductive, and nominal approach to case selection is meant to “advance insight, understanding, and explanation by conceptualizing the particular in more abstract terms, as an instance bearing on something more general” (Soss 2018, 23; see also Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012). This approach also echoes calls for more contrapuntal analysis in International Relations (Said 1993; Chowdhry 2007). Indeed, it contributes to turning on its head the pervasive tendency to use Western experiences of such processes as paradigmatic cases against which others ought to be judged (Breslin, Higgot and Rosamond 2002, 12; Acharya 2016a), while refraining from overgeneralization.

184

Notes

7.  For a good overview and the latest iteration of this debate, see Stubbs 2019 and responses by Beeson (2020), Jetschke and Theiner (2020), Ba (2020), as well as Stubbs (2020). 8.  This state of affairs is indeed still quite apparent in the study of international and regional institutions and cooperation (see, among others, Acharya 2016a; Söderbaum 2016). 9.  The distinction between tracks is a useful conceptual tool but highly porous in practice. This analysis covers a spectrum that includes intermediary positions (e.g., Track 1.5, Track 2.5). 10.  The ASEAN-Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS), the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP), the Track II Network of ASEAN Defence and Security Institutions (NADI), and institutes affiliated with these networks. 11.  The corpus includes statements from the ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ ASEAN People’s Forum (ACSC/APF), as well as from the Solidarity for Asian People’s Advocacy (SAPA) network and its most active NGOs on issues of peace and security: Initiatives for International Dialogue/GPPAC-Southeast Asia, AltSEAN-Burma, FORUMAsia, and Focus on the Global South, among others. 12.  When transcripts are directly quoted, brackets [. . .] indicate edits made for concision or to remove hesitation, repetition, and other verbal speech markers to improve readability. Interviews are referred to in footnotes by codes, linking them back to a list of interviewees in the Appendix. The letters O, E, and C are used to indicate affiliation of interviewees to various “tracks” (referring respectively to “official,” “expert,” or “civil society”). In the case of interviewees who cumulate different roles, letters indicate the main position from which they spoke during the interview. 13.  Officials interviewed include (acting and retired) foreign affairs officials, ASEAN Secretariat staff, and diplomats from ASEAN and dialogue partner states. Interviewees also include experts involved in key regional Track 2 networks and NGOs working on peace and security issues in ASEAN (see previous note). A list of interviewees with further details is available in the Appendix. 14.  These include the ASEAN Regional Forum’s Expert and Eminent Persons Group (Track 1.5), the Shangri-La Dialogue (Track 1), the Asia-Pacific Roundtable (Track 2), the ASEAN People’s Forum (Track 3), as well as other meetings organized on a more ad hoc basis, between September 2014 and August 2021.

chapter 2 Excerpts of this chapter draw on material previously published as Martel, Stéphanie. 2020. “The Polysemy of Security Community-Building: Toward a “People-Centered” Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)?” International Studies Quarterly 64(3): 588 –599, by permission of Oxford University Press. 1.  It is far beyond the purview of this book to address differences between variants of poststructuralism or, more broadly, discourse scholarship in IR. My approach can be roughly described as poststructuralist insofar as it draws on the work of scholars like Richard Ashley, R. B. J. Walker, David Campbell, Roxanne Doty, Iver B. Neumann, Lene Hansen, and Charlotte Epstein, among others. This scholarship is in turn an offshoot of a broader intellectual tradition represented by Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and others. 2.  A common criticism of securitization theory is that this definition conflates the illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects of a speech act, and that securitization only grasps

Notes

185

the former. Such critiques, however, do not account for the performative effects of discourse as discourse, and reproduce an artificial distinction between discourse and practice that a poststructuralist approach circumvents. A detailed account of debates on securitization theory, however, is beyond the scope of this book. For more on this see, among others, Balzacq 2005; Vuori 2008; McDonald 2008. 3.  As mentioned in the first chapter, discourse analysts define “texts” broadly, as specific instantiations of discourse enacted in context.

chapter 3 1.  For more in-depth examinations of ASEAN’s institutional history, see Tarling 2006; Ba 2009; Acharya 2014. 2.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). 3.  For more in-depth examinations of these failed attempts, see Jorgensen-Dahl 1982; Tarling 2006; Ba 2009; Acharya 2014. 4.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). 5.  A similar point is made by Thanat Khoman (1998, 83 – 86). 6.  MAPHILINDO stands for Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia. It was one of the two main failed attempts at a regional organization that preceded the founding of ASEAN. The other is the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA). 7.  The European Economic Community at the time. 8.  Since then no new states had been granted a full dialogue partner status, until August 2021, when this status was extended to the UK. ASEAN has also created new categories of partnerships: sectoral dialogue partner (e.g., Pakistan), development partner (e.g., Germany), and the much coveted “strategic partner” status. At the time of writing, the European Union is the latest dialogue partner to be elevated to this status, in December 2020, following Russia in 2018. According to reports from the 2020 ASEAN chair (Vietnam), Canada should be next. 9.  A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official had participated in the ASEAN-ISIS meeting that led to the formulation of the memorandum, informed his ministry of the discussions taking place, which led to Nakayama bypassing ASEAN-ISIS by raising it at the ASEAN-PMC. 10.  In addition to the Southeast Asian signatories of the TAC (the then six ASEAN members plus Vietnam and Laos following accession in 1992), the Forum initially included Australia, Canada, China, the United States, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Russia, and the European Union. Cambodia and Burma would accede in 1995 and 1996, respectively. 11.  The first open reference to “cooperative security” by the ARF dates back to the Forum’s ninth iteration. The Chairman Statement described the ARF as “the main cooperative security forum” in the Asia-Pacific region (ARF 2002). This is likely a response to growing dissatisfaction from dialogue partners toward the Forum, and roughly coincides with the launching of the Shangri-La Dialogue (see Chapter 5). 12.  This interpretation is shared by one interviewee from the Track 2 community in Indonesia (E29). 13.  Malaysian experts involved in Track 2 diplomacy (E33; E37; E59) are skeptical of the value of this dichotomy, and consider the notion of “comprehensive security” to be more useful because it treats these aspects as intertwined, not separate.

186

Notes

14.  Updated to add a reference to the “people-oriented, people-centered community” in the 2016 –2025 version. This is addressed more extensively in Chapter 6. 15.  Slightly reformulated and extended in 2016 to include a reference to an “enhanced capacity to respond effectively and in a timely manner to challenges” pertaining to comprehensive security. This objective is discussed mainly in Chapter 4. 16.  The 2016 –2025 blueprint refers to the deepening of cooperation with external parties, the need to uphold and strengthen ASEAN centrality in the evolving regional architecture, and the need to play “a responsible and constructive role globally based on an ASEAN common platform on international issues.” Chapter 5 is especially relevant when it comes to this characteristic. 17.  The 2025 blueprint also adds a fourth characteristic, previously spelled out in Bali Concord III (ASEAN 2011a): the strengthening of ASEAN’s institutional capacity, with a focus on the ASEAN Secretariat (ASEAN 2016). This strengthening is not specific to the political-security pillar.

chapter 4 Excerpts of this chapter draw on material previously published as Martel, Stéphanie. 2017. “From Ambiguity to Contestation: Discourse(s) of Non-Traditional Security in the ASEAN Community.” Pacific Review 30 (4): 605 –22, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com). 1.  While the “crime-terror nexus” has become quite the cottage industry in criminal and terrorism studies over the years, it is not without significant problems. See FelbabBrown 2019. 2.  This first phase of the project would later lead to the establishment of the Consortium on Non-Traditional Security in Asia in 2007, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. 3.  While the definition of transnational crime used in prior documents varied in the issues listed, with drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, and sea piracy being the more consistently cited, the Work Programme to Implement the ASEAN Plan of Action to Combat Transnational Crime, adopted in May 2002 (ASEAN 2002e), lists the eight priority areas in a much more systematic fashion. It makes no reference to non-traditional security. 4.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (O57). 5.  Interview conducted in Singapore in January 2015 (O16). 6.  Interview conducted in Singapore in July 2015 (E54). 7.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (O57). 8.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (O57). 9.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (E30). 10.  Interview conducted in the greater Manila region in June 2015 (E45). This interpretation is shared by a number of interviewees affiliated with other think tanks in the ASEAN-ISIS network. 11.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). This argument is also commonly used by officials from Thailand’s Office of Narcotics Control Board, in charge of coordinating the regional response to drug trafficking in ASEAN, during interviews conducted in November 2014 (O4; O5; O6). It is also prevalent among other interviewees from foreign affairs in charge of ASEAN security cooperation in the Philippines and Indonesia. 12.  Interview conducted in Bangkok in December 2014 (E10).

Notes

187

13.  Interviews conducted among the regional Track 2 community and with foreign affairs officials, as well as ASEAN Secretariat staff. 14.  Remarks by Malaysia’s defense minister at the time (and current foreign minister), Hishammuddin Hussein, at the 2017 Shangri-La Dialogue indicate that this might be changing. 15.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (E23). 16.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (O31). 17.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O1). 18.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (O19). 19.  Interview conducted in Singapore in January 2015 (O15). 20.  Interview conducted in Jakarta (O19). This view is supported by a former director at the ASEAN Secretariat (O57), and by diplomats from dialogue partner countries (O38; O39). 21.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). 22.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (O34). 23.  One Malaysian official explicitly addressed this tension during an interview conducted in April 2015 (O34) by listing specific ongoing conflicts right before concluding that they were “isolated cases” that did not warrant regional intervention, and that therefore ASEAN was justified in focusing on NTS. 24.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (E29). 25.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in May 2015 (O38). 26.  Interview conducted in Singapore in January 2015 (O16). 27.  Interview conducted in Bangkok in December 2014 (E10). 28.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (E30). 29.  The Thai government, under the leadership of Thaksin Shinawatra, established a Ministry of Social Development and Human Security in 2003. Thaksin is also known for his particularly harsh approach to drug use and trafficking. His war on drugs, launched in February 2003, resulted in 2800 extra-judicial killings over the course of three months, according to Human Rights Watch estimates (HRW 2008). 30.  Interview conducted in Bangkok in December 2014 (E13). 31.  Interviews conducted among the expert community and officials from Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. 32.  Interview conducted in Singapore in January 2015 (O16). 33.  Interview conducted in Singapore in July 2015 (O55). 34.  Interviews conducted with Malaysian security experts in April 2015 (E33; E37) and June 2019 (E59). 35.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (E37). 36.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (E33). 37.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). 38.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (O20). 39.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (O56). 40.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (O31). 41.  Interview conducted in Bangkok in September 2014 (E2). 42.  Interview conducted in Bangkok in December 2014 (E13). 43.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (E33). 44.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (E33). 45.  Interview conducted in Singapore in 2015 (O15).

188

Notes

chapter 5 1.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in May 2015 (O38). 2.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (O57). 3.  While China typically sends a lower-ranking People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officer to the Shangri-La Dialogue, China’s defense minister attended the 2019 edition for the first time in years. 4.  Participant observation at the 2019 ARF Expert and Eminent Persons Group Meeting. 5.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (O57). 6.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (E24). 7.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (O21). 8.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). 9.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (E33). 10.  Interview conducted at the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (E47A) in June 2015. 11.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (E30). 12.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in May 2015 (O38). 13.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). 14.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in April 2015 (E30). 15.  The initial membership of the EAS comprised the ASEAN Plus Three Countries plus Australia, India, and New Zealand. 16.  Interviews conducted with experts, dialogue partner diplomats, and one official from an ASEAN country’s ministry of foreign affairs (MOFA). 17.  Interview conducted at the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies in June 2015 (E46). Jusuf Wanandi also conveyed as much in an interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (E23). 18.  The current CICA membership of 27 member states includes Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, and the Philippines have observer status. 19.  Interview conducted with a foreign affairs official from an ASEAN state in July 2015 (O55). 20.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (E23). 21.  Interview conducted in Manila in June 2015 (E46). Similar views have been expressed by her Thai and Indonesian colleagues. 22.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (O20). This view was also shared by MOFA officials from the same country interviewed in July 2015. 23.  The Quadrilateral Dialogue, initiated by Abe in 2007, involves informal talks at the leaders level and joint military exercises between the United States, Australia, Japan, and India. It was discontinued in 2008 after Australia’s withdrawal, and revived in the form of a virtual summit in March 2021 after much discussion since 2017. 24.  Interview with a U.S. diplomat in Jakarta in May 2015 (O38). 25.  For a detailed account of the event, see Thayer 2012. 26.  Interview conducted in Singapore in January 2015 (O16). 27.  Interview conducted in February 2015 in Jakarta (O20). 28.  Interview conducted in Singapore in 2015 (O16). 29.  This view was also shared by Indonesian experts during interviews conducted in 2015.

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30.  The “nine-dash line” (also referred to as the U-shape line or as the ten- or elevendash line by the Republic of China (ROC, or Taiwan) is a demarcation line that has been used by the People’s Republic of China and the ROC to delineate their claims in the South China Sea. 31.  China announced the establishment of an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea in December 2013. 32.  Interview conducted in July 2015 (O56).

chapter 6 Excerpts of this chapter draw on material previously published as Martel, Stéphanie. 2020. “The Polysemy of Security Community-Building: Toward a ‘People-Centered’ Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)?” International Studies Quarterly 64(3): 588 –599, by permission of Oxford University Press. 1.  Interviews with senior foreign affairs officials of ASEAN member states, as well as Track 2 experts. 2.  In the context of ASEAN, as elsewhere, “civil society” is a floating signifier often used to refer to a variety of non-state actors, including private and/or corporate actors, think tanks, and NGOs with various degrees of independence from government. ASEAN commonly uses “civil society” in this way. To complicate matters further, independent NGOs in the region also commonly refer to themselves as “civil society” and “civil society organizations.” To avoid confusion, this chapter uses civil society as an all-encompassing term and NGOs as a more precise term that describes a more specific type of non-state actor, while also sometimes relying on a distinction between “independent” and ­“government-organized” NGOs where relevant. 3.  Mahbub Ul-Haq, Sadako Oda, and Amartya Sen, among others, have played a central role in defining and promoting the human security concept at the United Nations. 4.  Surin would later serve as ASEAN’s secretary general between 2008 and 2012. 5.  There has been significant debate within the ASEAN membership over which version of this “people”-related adjective should be used to describe ASEAN’s approach. Given the lack of consensus, ASEAN currently privileges a somewhat awkward formula that includes both (ASEAN 2015g). 6.  This argument is closely related to the debate on “Asian values” that took place in the region in the 1990s, at about the same time that human security was being actively promoted (and debated) at the UN. 7.  Interviews conducted with Thai and Indonesian officials in 2014 and 2015. 8.  Interview with NGO staff member in the Philippines (C50). 9.  Interviews conducted with a foreign affairs official in 2014 (O3), and an ASEAN diplomat in Jakarta in February 2015 (O21). 10.  Interview conducted in 2014 (O3). This view is also shared by a reputable analyst of regional affairs (E17). 11.  Interview conducted in Singapore in July 2015 (E54). Some version of this view has been conveyed by other experts and officials from various ASEAN member states. 12.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in February 2015 (O21). 13.  The recent adoption by the ARF of the Joint Statement on Promoting the Women, Peace and Security Agenda at the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF 2019), which follows a

190

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similar ASEAN statement adopted in 2017 (ASEAN 2017b), is also a good example of this trend. 14.  For more details, see Caballero-Anthony 2008. 15.  A major one being the time it took for ASEAN to break through the junta’s resistance to granting access to foreign aid (as illustrated by Harn Lay, see Figure 7), widely reported internationally as a major dent on the grouping’s credibility as a security provider for “the people.” 16.  See Figure 7. 17.  Informal conversation with activists in December 2020. 18.  This was already clear before the COVID-19 pandemic, which only made the security angle sharper. 19.  This term is used by independent NGOs in the context of the ACSC/APF to distinguish themselves from government-organized NGOs (GONGOS), among other types of “bogus” civil society organizations. See, for instance, Democratic Voice of Vietnam 2015. 20.  Interview conducted in Kuala Lumpur in April 2015 (O34). 21.  Interview conducted at Focus on the Global South in Bangkok in November 2014 (C9). 22.  Interview conducted in Jakarta in March 2015 (C27). 23.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (C50). 24.  These criteria include contributing to the realization of ASEAN’s objectives, obtaining the endorsement of all ASEAN member states, fully complying with national laws, having a regional scope, and not holding links with international NGOs. As a result, the only NGO associated with SAPA that is formally accredited with ASEAN is the Asia Partnership for the Development of Human Resources in Rural Asia. The registry of accredited civil society organizations (CSOs) mostly features corporate associations and innocuous interest groups, such as the ASEAN Kite Council or the ASEAN Chess Confederation. 25.  Interview conducted in Manila with two activists from Weaving Women’s Rights in ASEAN (WEAVE) in July 2015 (C52A; C52B). 26.  Interview conducted in Jakarta with a staff member of the Human Rights Working Group in March 2015 (C27). 27.  However, this practice, in the case of the Philippines, has receded under Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. 28.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (C52B). 29.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 with a staff member of Initiatives for International Dialogue (C50). 30.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (C50). 31.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (C50). Again, the Myanmar junta’s handling of Nargis as illustrated by Harn Lay (see Figure 7) is a good example of this opposition. 32.  Interview conducted on the margins of the 2015 ACSC/APF in Kuala Lumpur (C35). 33.  Interview conducted in Manila in July 2015 (C50). 34.  Participant observation at a consultation session on ASEAN Vision 2025 in Jakarta in 2015.

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35.  Participant observation at a consultation session on ASEAN Vision 2025 in Jakarta in 2015. Interview conducted with representatives of WEAVE in Manila in July 2015 (C52A; C52B). 36.  Interview conducted at the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) in 2015 (C27); participant observation of a civil society consultation on the ASEAN Vision 2025 in Jakarta. 37.  Interview conducted in July 2015 (O56). 38.  Similar practices are on display in the aftermath of the 2021 coup in Myanmar. 39.  Interview with a former assistant director at the ASEAN Secretariat (O7). This view is shared by NGO interviewees in Thailand and the Philippines. 40.  Interviews with Indonesia’s representative (C26) at the AICHR, with a staff member (C27) of the HRWG, and with representatives of WEAVE activists in 2015 (C52A; C52B). 41.  This Muslim minority group from the Rakhine state in Myanmar has been the target of violence orchestrated by members of the Buddhist majority and the state’s security forces. The violence culminated in 2012 and has been ongoing since, leading to accusations of genocide. 42.  Interview conducted with WEAVE activists in July 2015 (C52A; C52B). 43.  A good example of how civil society actors engage in public shaming of the organization over the coup is provided by the Civil Disobedience Movement (2021) in Myanmar, as shown by a picture of an ASEAN flag burned by an activist, accompanied by the tweet: “See how we feel @ASEAN. We will fight our battle with or without your help.” 44.  Again, the parallel with the 2021 coup is relevant and shows continuity.

chapter 7 1.  As a testament to ASEAN’s performative force, the date of adoption is still not i­ncluded in the “final” version available online at the time of writing; it is marked as “. . . Day.”

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Index

arms trafficking, 85 – 86 ASEAN centrality, 116, 123 –29, 135 –36, 174 ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum, 141, 149 –51, 158 –59 ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Women and Children, 153, 157 ASEAN Community: establishment of, 1, 20, 71, 133; people-centered, 158 – 62; post–2025 Vision, 177–78; three-pillar structure, 73 –75, 157, 169 ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM)(–Plus): blueprint, 76; formation, 75, 114, 123; non-traditional security, and, 114 –16, 145 –46; track 1, 18 ASEAN Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, 148, 153 ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies, 64 – 65. See also multi-track diplomacy ASEAN People’s Assembly (APA), 141. See also civil society; multi-track diplomacy ASEAN Plus, 63; Plus Three, 75, 141, 145; Plus Eight formula, 118, 122, 169 ASEAN Political and Security Community, 75 –78, 142; 2025 blueprint, 93, 144 –45 ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conferences, 65. See also ASEAN Plus ASEAN Regional Forum: establishment of, 63 – 67; non-traditional security, and,

98 –99, 144; reform, 109 –13, 118; practical security cooperation, 113 –15; transnational crime, 86 – 89 ASEAN Security Outlook, 98 ASEAN Vision: ASEAN Vision 2020, 70 –73, 86 – 87, 140 –41; ASEAN Vision 2025, 75, 155, 166; Hanoi Plan of Action, 71–72, 140 ASEAN Way, 9 –11, 13, 70 –71, 74, 110 Asian Financial Crisis, 21, 69 –71, 110, 136, 140, 146; transnational crime, and, 83, 85 – 88 Australia, 67, 75, 118 –21. See also dialogue partners Bali Concord: Bali Concord I, 61; Bali Concord II, 73 –74, 112; Bali Concord III, 77 Bangkok Declaration, the, 52 –57 Brunei, 127, 132, 134, 147 Cambodia, 61; 63; 67– 69; 86; 98; South China Sea, and, 129 –32, 134; 147. See also South China Sea Canada. See dialogue partners China: major power rivalry, 4, 19, 22; nontraditional security, and, 89; traditional security, and, 108 –9, 124 –25. See also dialogue partners; new security concept; South China Sea; Xi, Jinping

214

Index

Civil Society: alternative regionalism, 141, 149, 151, 162; non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 139; 153 –56, 149 – 63; participation in ASEAN, 148 –59. See also multi-track diplomacy Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), 123 –24 comprehensive security, 66 – 67, 74 –76, 89 –91, 94, 102 –3 constructivism, 9 –14, 42 –43: discourse, and, 30, 34, 39, 42 –43; mainstream constructivism, 42 –43; neo-constructivism, 13; security community, and, 27–28. See also rationalism; poststructuralism cooperative security, 66 – 67, 74 –76, 89 –91, 94, 102 –3 Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP), 66, 112 –14, 141. See also multi-track diplomacy Covid–19, 134, 144 –45. See also pandemics cybercrime, 21, 81, 89, 93, 97, 168 Cyclone Nargis, 144 –47. See also Myanmar Defense Cooperation, 54 –57. See also security community; traditional security discourse analysis: discursive contestation, 32 –33; deconstruction, 45, 48; framework, 28, 31–35; methodology, 17–19, 171; poststructuralist, 18, 20, 27–29, 34 –40, 42; practitioner-near variant of, 40 –49; speaking agents, 18, 33, 41, 46, 51, 122, 136, 148, 170 –73; tree of derivation, 40 –41, 173, 177. See also Foucault, Michel dialogue partners, 170, 172: membership, 63, 65 – 69, 122 –23; non-traditional security, and, 90, 94, 97–99, 115 –17; Indo-Pacific, and, 125 –27. See also ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM)(–Plus); ASEAN Regional Forum disasters, 90, 92 –93, 144 –48, 162; One ASEAN One Response, 146. See also Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief drug trafficking, 82 –93, 97, 103 –4 drug-free ASEAN, 83, 85, 87, 167 East Asia Community (EAC), 120 East Asia Summit (EAS), 18, 75 –76, 116, 121–24, 145 Ebola, 144 –45. See also pandemics epistemology, 3, 15 –16, 35 –36 European Union, 6 – 8, 63. See also dialogue partners

expansion, of ASEAN, 68 –70 flexible engagement, 70 –71 Foucault, Michel, 40 –41, 44, 48 genealogy, 44 –45 gender: mainstreaming, 36; gendered insecurity, 148, 157–58. See also Women, Peace and Security governance: global, 9 –10; 12; 44; 61; regional, 6, 10, 43, 63; security, 11–12. See also multilateralism; regionalism Hatoyama, Yukio, 120 High Council, The, 61, 63, 74 human rights, 68 – 69; 142; 146; 154; 157–158;175; ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights, 153, 157 human security, 19, 22, 175; civil society, and, 141, 148 –49, 152 –58, 170; integration of, 76, 107, 137–42, 161– 62; human dimension of security, 142; non-traditional security, and, 100 –3, 107, 143 –45 Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR), 114, 145 –47; ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance, 145, 147 humanitarian intervention, 142, 145 –46, 169 India. See also dialogue partners Indo-Pacific, 4, 108, 118 –20, 123 –27, 178; ASEAN Outlook on the, 64, 126, 168; Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), 64, 125 –26 Indonesia, 52, 55 – 62, 73 –74, 118 –20, 126, 129, 147, 153 inter-state conflict, 108 –9, 120. See also South China Sea INTERFET, 72. See also peacekeeping intertextuality, 44 –45, 176 interviews, 19, 42 –43, 47 Japan, 120 –21. See also dialogue partners Khoman, Thanat, 54, 56, 69. See also Thailand Laos, 61, 68 – 69, 100, 129, 135, 151 Lee Kuan Yew, 52 –53, 62. See also Singapore Malaysia, 52, 54, 56 – 62, 70, 73, 89, 93, 127, 132, 135, 146 –47, 159, 160, 171

Index methodology, 17–20, 33, 42 –45; See also discourse analysis Milk Tea Alliance, 153 multilateralism, 3 –7, 10, 17, 97, 118, 121 multi-track diplomacy: in the Asia-Pacific, 18 –19, 21, 46, 83, 111; track 1, 141–42; track 2, 64 – 66, 70, 89, 101–3, 105, 108, 112; track 3, 154, 162 – 63. See also ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum; APA; civil society, CSCAP Myanmar, 68 –71, 146 –47, 159 – 61; 259. See also Rohingya narratives: crisis narrative, 136; identity narrative of ASEAN, 13, 15 –16, 50; security community, and, 20, 72, 109 –10, 120; selfnarrative, 20, 52 –53, 59, 109 –10, 115 –16, 139. See also ontological security; discourse analysis; security community Natalegawa, Marty, 74, 125, 129 –30. See also Indonesia NATO, 28 –29 neutralization, 57– 60 New Security Concept, the, 89, 123 –24 norms: identity formation, 9 –10, 14 –15, 43 –44, 76; shared understandings, 28, 110, 131 non-traditional security, 86, 93 –100, 103 –5; 172; community, 67, 81– 83, 90 –94, 98 –100, 104 – 6; comprehensive security, 94, 102 –3, 168; Joint Declaration of ASEAN and China on Cooperation in the Field of Non-Traditional Security Issues, 88; state security, and, 92, 100 –1, 138, 142; transnational, 94 –97, 146 NTS–Asia Consortium, 89, 100, 143 One Southeast Asia, 67– 69, 173 Ong Keng Yong, 100, 102, 130, 132 ontological security, 32, 40, 49, 69, 161, 170 otherness, 37, 40, 45 pandemics, 92 –93, 144 –45, 169. See also Covid–19; Ebola peacekeeping, 72 –73, 146 –47 people-driven, 155 –56 Philippines, 74, 129 –35, 142. See also South China Sea Pitsuwan, Surin, 70, 140, 147. See also Thailand practice turn, 27–31, 42. See also constructivism

215

poststructuralism, 34; 36; 48. See also constructivism; discourse analysis Quad, The, 118, 126. See also Indo-Pacific Rajaratnam, S., 55 –56 rationalism, 9, 12 –14: rationalist-constructivist divide, 10 –14, 39. See also constructivism regionalism: alternative regionalism, 149, 151, 162; multilateral regionalism, 5, 163; security, 54, 57, 99, 110 –11, 123; tracks of, 18, 21, 162 – 63; trends in, 6 –7, 10, 76, 124. See also ASEAN centrality; multitrack diplomacy regional resilience, 57, 59, 61, 85 Responsibility to Protect, 22, 146 –47, 158, 162, 174 Rohingya, 146 –47, 146 – 61; See also Myanmar Rudd, Kevin, 118 –20 Russia, 63, 75, 122 –24. See also dialogue partners S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), 116 security community, 20 –23, 71, 73 –75: building, 5 –18, 28 –45, 49, 164; non-traditional, 67, 81– 83, 90 –92, 98 –100, 104 – 6; people-centered, 19, 22, 46, 107, 137–48, 153 –56, 177; traditional, 122, 128 SEANWFZ (Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons–Free Zone), 60 – 62, 68, 72, 74, 76 securitization, 11, 29, 38; non-traditional security, and, 168; transnational crime, and, 85, 106, 177; pandemic / disasters, and, 145 Shangri-La Dialogue, 111–12 Singapore, 52, 55, 58, 60, 62, 70, 74, 89, 98, 111, 123, 130, 133 social agents: agency of, 30 –33; discursive power, 7, 15 –18, 35, 51, 166, 174 –77. See also constructivism; discourse analysis Solidarity for Asian Peoples’ Advocacy (SAPA), 149. See also civil society; multitrack diplomacy; regionalism South China Sea: ASEAN–China negotiations, 128 –29, 134 –35; ASEAN’s approach to the, 127–28; 132 –36; China’s new assertiveness, 115; Code of Conduct (CoC), 72, 114, 117, 128 –30, 133 –34; Declaration on the Conduct of Parties, 2002, (DoC),

216

Index

South China Sea (continued) 76, 129; non– / traditional security, and, 114, 116, 168; Phnom Penh Fiasco, 129 –32, 135; regional stability, 109 –10; Six Point Principles, 130 South Korea. See dialogue partners spillover effect, 110, 116 –18, 136 Sukma, Rizal, 73 –74, 94, 101, 142 terrorism, 83, 85 – 86, 88 – 89, 104; ASEAN Declaration on Joint Action to Counter Terrorism, 88 Thailand, 52, 56, 58, 60, 62, 70 –71, 73, 101, 104, 125, 142, 150, 159 Timor, 70, 73, 147, 151, 167. See also INTERFET traditional security, 22, 109, 111, 114 –17, 127, 131–32, 136; major power rivalry, 19, 128. See also South China Sea; defense cooperation trafficking in persons, 72, 81, 86, 143, 156; ASEAN Convention Against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, 157–58

transnational crime, 91–92, 94 –97, 101; ASEAN Declaration on Transnational Crime, 86; ASEAN Plan of Action to Combat Transnational Crime, 87; Manila Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Transnational Crime, 85, 87; priority areas, 81– 83, 93; securitization of, 85 – 88, 105 –7, 167, 177. See also non-traditional security Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, 60 – 63, 126 Troika, 73 United States, The, 19, 22, 75, 128. See also dialogue partners Vietnam, 61, 68, 129, 132, 133, 135, 147 Women, Peace and Security, 22, 148, 170 Xi Jinping. See also new security concept Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), 57– 62, 65, 74, 76 –78

Studies in Asian Security Amitav Acharya, Chief Editor, American University David Leheny, Chief Editor, Waseda University

Overcoming Isolationism: Japan’s Leadership in East Asian Security Multilateralism Paul Midford, 2020 These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia Alexander Bukh, 2020 Asia’s Regional Architecture: Alliances and Institutions in the Pacific Century Andrew Yeo, 2019 Rebranding China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order Xiaoyu Pu, 2019 The Reputational Imperative: Nehru’s India in Territorial Conflict Mahesh Shankar, 2018 The Indonesian Way: ASEAN, Europeanization, and Foreign Policy Debates in a New Democracy Jürgen Rüland, 2018 Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, 2017 The Supply Side of Security: A Market Theory of Military Alliances Tongfi Kim, 2016 Protests Against U.S. Military Base Policy in Asia: Persuasion and Its Limits Yuko Kawato, 2015 How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora, Geopolitics Itty Abraham, 2014 Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China Manjari Chatterjee Miller, 2013

Looking for Balance: China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia Steve Chan, 2012

spo n so r e d b y t he e as t-we s t ce n t e r , 2 0 0 4 – 2 0 1 1 mu thiah al agap pa, f oundin g s e r i e s e d i t o r Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism? Paul Midford, 2010 The Making of Northeast Asia Kent Calder and Min Ye, 2010 Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia By Edward Aspinall, 2009 Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence Across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond Scott L. Kastner, 2009 (Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Alice D. Ba, 2009 Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity, and the Evolution of Security Practice Andrew L. Oros, 2008 Reluctant Restraint: The Evolution of China’s Nonproliferation Policies and Practices, 1980 –2004 Evan S. Medeiros, 2007 Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity Alan M. Wachman, 2007 Beyond Compliance: China, International Organizations, and Global Security Ann Kent, 2007 Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia S. Paul Kapur, 2007 Minimum Deterrence and India’s Nuclear Security Rajesh M. Basrur, 2006 Rising to the Challenge: China’s Grand Strategy and International Security Avery Goldstein, 2005 Unifying China, Integrating with the World: Securing Chinese Sovereignty in the Reform Era Allen Carlson, 2005 Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency. J. J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, editors, 2004