The Security Dilemmas of Southeast Asia utilises a key security concept to examine one of the most dramatic regions of the world. Focusing on ethnic tensions, intra-ASEAN rivalries and the emergence of Chinese hegemony, the security dilemma is used to provide insights into a wide range of the region's contemporary security issues. In addition, the book expounds upon some of the new uses of the security dilemma, exploring both its applicability to ethnic tensions and a new variant, a state-induced security dilemma.
From internal oppression in Burma to interstate conflict in the South China Sea, the people of Southeast Asia face a range of threats. This book identifies and explains the security challenges -- both traditional and nontraditional -- confronting the region. Collins addresses the full spectrum of security issues, discussing the impact of ethnic tensions and competing political ideologies, the evolving role of ASEAN, and Southeast Asia's interactions with key external actors (China, Japan, and the United States). The final section of the book explores how the region's security issues are reflected in two current cases: the South China Sea dispute and the war on terrorism.
The book examines ASEAN's mechanisms in managing challenges and threats to regional security. Its extensive analyses of the ASEAN story of managing regional security cover the different phases of ASEAN's development as a regional organization and explore the perceptible changes that have occurred in regional mechanisms of conflict management. The book also examines the roles of relevant actors beyond the states of ASEAN and the key interactions that have evolved over time, which have been instrumental in moving regional mechanisms beyond the ASEAN way. The book argues that the ASEAN way has not been impervious to change. As the association finds its way through periods of crises and continues to confront the many challenges ahead, ASEAN and its mechanisms are already being transformed beyond the narrow confines of the modalities associated with the ASEAN way. The changes in the political and security landscape of the region, as well as the democratic transitions taking place in some member states, have set the stage for a much more dynamic set of regional actors and processes that bring into question the kind of regionalism that is now taking place in the region. the way regionalism is changing in Southeast Asia.
"The contributions to this volume, covering the areas of Globalisation and Security, Regional Institutions and Security, Governance in Plural Societies an Security, and Environmental Security, present stimulating analyses and insights to various non-traditional security issues that are of scholarly and policy relevance to Southeast Asia." -- BOOK JACKET.
The security issues confronting Asia are both complex and diverse. Given the increasing trend towards an expanding security agenda beyond the military dimension of inter-state relations, this volume provides an extensive study of emerging non-traditional challenges to this region. New realities and new challenges have come to the fore including environmental degradation, illegal immigration, infectious diseases, transnational crime, poverty and underdevelopment. Drawing upon the concepts of securitization and de-securitization, this book brings together regional perspectives from across Asia to examine how these challenges are perceived and managed. It is a valuable contribution to both security and Asian studies and will be ideally suited to those interested in security studies, international relations and development studies.
The region's most powerful organisation, ASEAN, is being challenged to ensure security and encourage democracy while simultaneously reinventing itself as a model of Asian regionalism. Ten analysts from six countries address the pressing questions that Southeast Asia faces in the 21st century.
This book explores the tensions within Cambodia's foreign policy between a tight alignment with China, on one hand, and Cambodia's commitment to ASEAN as well as its delicate foreign policy diversification towards other major powers, on the other hand.
Questions of who can access land and who is excluded from it underlie many recent social and political conflicts in Southeast Asia. Powers of Exclusion examines the key processes through which shifts in land relations are taking place, notably state land allocation and provision of property rights, the dramatic expansion of areas zoned for conservation, booms in the production of export-oriented crops, the conversion of farmland to post-agrarian uses, “intimate” exclusions involving kin and co-villagers, and mobilizations around land framed in terms of identity and belonging. In case studies drawn from seven countries, the authors find that four “powers of exclusion”—regulation, the market, force and legitimation—have combined to shape land relations in new and often surprising ways. Land debates are often presented as a conflict between market-oriented land use with full private property rights on the one side, and equitable access, production for subsistence, and respect for custom on the other. The authors step back from these debates to point out that any productive use of land requires the exclusion of some potential users, and that most projects for transforming land relations are thus accompanied by painful dilemmas. Rather than counterposing “exclusion” to “inclusion,” the book argues that attention must be paid to who is excluded, how, why, and with what consequences. Powers of Exclusion is a path-breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond.
This book analyses the origins of security dilemmas in the South China Sea (SCS) and the significance of China’s actions in asserting its claim from the perspective of defensive realist theory. In its analysis, the book argues that security dilemmas in the SCS first arose between China and other SCS claimants, and then between China and the United States. Research in this book provides significant support to the defensive realist theory vis-à-vis offensive realism. It encourages adopting a reassurance policy to reach a peaceful resolution to the SCS disputes between China, the other claimants, and the United States. The book will be useful for policymakers, academics, researchers and students.
Enacting the Security Community illuminates the central role of discourse in the making of security communities through a case study of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Despite decades of discussion, scholars of political science and international relations have long struggled to identify what kind of security community ASEAN is striving to become. Talk about security, Stéphanie Martel argues in this innovative study, is more than empty rhetoric. It is precisely through discourse that ASEAN is brought into being as a security community. Martel analyzes the epic narratives that state and non-state actors tell about ASEAN's journey to becoming a security community, featuring a colorful cast of heroes and monsters. Chapters address a wide spectrum of current regional security concerns, from the South China Sea disputes to the Rohingya crisis, and nontraditional challenges like natural disasters and pandemics. Through fieldwork and in-depth interviews with practitioners, Martel provides clear evidence that discourse is key to sustaining regional organizations like ASEAN. Enacting the Security Community is an incisive contribution to debates among scholars and practitioners about security communities as well as the role of discourse in the study of world politics, and essential reading for students of Southeast Asian International Relations, politics, and security.
