ASEAN and Regional Order: Revisiting Security Community in Southeast Asia

Founded in 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has emerged as one of the most successful regional organizations in the world. This book discusses the future of ASEAN against a backdrop of a growing US–China rivalry and the security implications of COVID-19.

Chapters in this book move through a history of ASEAN and its multilateral institutions, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the East Asia Summit (EAS), featuring rare photographic material to contextualize both recent developments in regional security and projections for ASEAN’s prospects. Key concepts and terms are unpacked throughout, with the chapters focusing on rapidly changing international and regional environments, economic insecurities such as trade conflicts, human rights, and ASEAN identity, and providing extensive analysis of the factors challenging the principle ASEAN Centrality and the Indo-Pacific security architecture. The concept of security community frames this book, despite being subject to change if intraregional discord and institutional stagnation take hold.

As a discussion of the role and future of ASEAN in a pivotal period of world history, ASEAN and Regional Order will prove vital to both students and scholars of international relations, regional organizations, and Asian studies more broadly.

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. He is also the Chair of the ASEAN Studies Initiative at American University. He is an Honorary Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. Previously he taught at York University, Toronto, University of Bristol, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He also held the inaugural Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University in 2016–18 and was elected to the Christensen Fellowship at Oxford. Among his major works on Southeast Asia are Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problems of Regional Order (3rd edition, 2014), The Making of Southeast Asia (2013), Whose Ideas Matter?: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (2009), and East of India, South of China: Sino- Indian Encounters in Southeast Asia (2017). He is the first non-Western scholar to be elected as the President of the International Studies Association (ISA), the most respected and influential global network of scholars in International Relations. He is the recipient of two Distinguished Scholar Awards from the ISA for his scholarship and contributions to international relations theory in the Global South (2015) and the study of international organizations and global governance (2018).