Enduring Mistrust and Conflict Management in Southeast Asia: An Assessment of ASEAN as a Security Community

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Emmers

AbstractThe paper explores whether the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has matured from a weak cooperative arrangement in its early days into a functioning security community by 2016. It first introduces a Deutschian and a constructivist understanding of security communities before examining ASEAN's involvement in the security realm since 1967. The paper claims that the regional body is not yet a security community, partly due to residual mistrust among its members, which undermines ASEAN's ability to address a series of ongoing inter-state disputes in Southeast Asia. While it has contributed to conflict avoidance, the Association has so far failed to conduct conflict resolution in spite of the ASEAN Political and Security Community initiative. The paper concludes that the failure to directly address and ultimately resolve sources of conflict in Southeast Asia has undermined the establishment of a security community in the region.

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 557-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
HIRO KATSUMATA

AbstractThe members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been pursuing new cooperative security agendas – namely, confidence-building measures (CBMs), preventive diplomacy (PD), conflict resolution and a set of agendas associated with security communities. The ASEAN members' pursuit of these agendas should be seen as a set of instances of their mimetic adoption of external norms for the sake of legitimacy. They have mimetically been adopting a set of norms associated with the collective management of conflicts, which have been practiced by the participant states of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). They have been doing so, with the intention of securing their identities as legitimate members of the community of modern states, and of enhancing the status of ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) as legitimate cooperative security institutions.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Idrees ◽  
Manzoor Naazer ◽  
Ashfaq Rehman

The mechanism created by South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) excludes the discussions on bilateral and contentious issues which is said to be the main hurdle in the SAARC to take off. Despite similarities in the South Asian member countries, e.g. cultural, linguistic, and historical, they have not yet been able to evolve cooperative environment and their relations are characterised by varying conflicts. Keeping with the background nominal progress that has been made by SAARC, it will be wise to review the inter-state conflicts which are halting the ways of the South Asian progress. The present study surveys the nature of interstate conflict among SAARC members and their impact on regional cooperation. It also explores various modes of conflict management and conflict resolution. It offers conflict management and multi-track diplomacy as keys to peace in the South Asian region and progress for SAARC.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON KOSCHUT

AbstractWhat doAl-Qaeda, Human Rights Watch, and NATO have in common? They can all be understood as emotional communities. Emotional communities are ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’. This article develops a conceptual framework for a particular type of emotional community in world politics: a security community. It is argued that emotion norms – the expression of appropriate emotions in a given situation – stabilise a security community during inter-allied conflict. The argument is illustrated by an empirical case study of NATO's military intervention in Libya in 2011. The article shows how the conceptualisation of security communities as emotional communities has significant implications for the study of regional peace and security.


2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
DONALD K. EMMERSON

Is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) a pluralistic security community (PSC)? Does community cause security in Southeast Asia? In a PSC, member states are sovereign. So are the members of ASEAN. Before concluding that the ASEAN region is a PSC, however, one should distinguish between two versions: a thin or descriptive PSC, whose members share both a sense of community and the expectation of security, and a thick or explanatory version in which community has actually been shown to cause security. Depending on how a sense of community is defined, one may say that at certain times in its history, ASEAN probably has been a thin PSC. More recently, however, the cooperative identity of regional elites may have frayed, as democratization, especially in Indonesia, has incorporated non-elites into public life. Meanwhile the proposition that the assurance of security in Southeast Asia has resulted from this sense of community, that ASEAN is a thick PSC, remains to be proven.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Angga Nurdin Rachmat

ASEAN as a regional organization is currently in an effort to develop cooperation in the form of the ASEAN Community. The formation of the ASEAN Community is based on three pillars, where one of the pillars is the political-security pillar (ASEAN Political-Security Community / APSC) who faces the most dynamic challenges related to security issues in the Southeast Asia. This security issue certainly has an influence on interactions both among intra-regional states and with extra-regional states. This paper aims to analysis the challenges and opportunities faced by the ASEAN political-security community to strengthen cooperation in dealing with security issues in the Southeast Asian. This paper is based on a constructivism analysis of the formation of a security community. This paper will get an overview of the challenges and opportunities faced in the realization of cooperation to tackle security issues in the Southeast Asia region within the framework of the APSC. The description of these challenges and opportunities can be the basis for analyzing what strategies must be done to encourage the realization of the APSC in accordance with what is expected by the members states.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-58
Author(s):  
Rahdiansyah Rahdiansyah ◽  
Yulia Nizwana

Cultural disputes, and others, often occur between neighboring countries in Southeast Asia and can be the seeds of disharmony, of course, this is not desirable. Southeast Asia as a cultural scope that is interrelated in history, has local wisdom in resolving disputes, resolving this dispute is known as deliberation. Deliberation is an identity that must be prioritized as a wise cultural approach for the ASEAN community. The purpose of this study is to explore the local wisdom of Southeast Asian people in resolving disputes in their communities and implementing them as a solution for the ASEAN community. Recognizing each other as cultural origins often occur between Malaysian and Indonesian communities. As a nation of the same family, this is commonplace, but the most important thing is how to solve it. Interviewing the people of both countries is the first thing to do in looking at this problem, how they understand and see culture in their culture. Questionnaires are distributed as much as possible, each data obtained will be processed and classified according to nationality, education, age, and others. The findings will be a study to see the perspectives of the two countries in understanding history, culture, and cultural results in addressing the differences of opinion that occur. At least the description of the root of the problem is obtained, why this problem occurs, what are the main causes, how to understand it, how to react to it, and lead to the resolution of the dispute over ownership of culture itself


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2019) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Delphine Allès

This article highlights the formulation of comprehensive conceptions of security in Indonesia, Malaysia and within the framework of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), well before their academic conceptualisation. These security doctrines have been the basis of the consolidation of state and military apparatuses in the region. They tend to be overlooked by analyses praising the recent conversion of Southeast Asian political elites to the “non-traditional security”? agenda. This latter development is perceived as a source of multilateral cooperation and a substitute for the hardly operationalisable concept of human security. However, in the region, non-traditional security proves to be a semantic evolution rather than a policy transformation. At the core of ASEAN’s security narrative, it has provided a multilateral anointing of “broad” but not deepened conceptions of security, thus legitimising wide-ranging socio-political roles for the armed forces.


Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-25
Author(s):  
Maryann Bylander

In the Southeast Asian context, legal status is ambiguous; it enlarges some risks while lessening others. As is true in many contexts across the Global South, while documentation clearly serves the interest of the state by offering them greater control over migrant bodies, it is less clear that it serves the goals, needs, and well-being of migrants.


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