Perspectives on the emerging ASEAN political-security community: motivations, barriers, and strategies

In 2003, ASEAN issued the Bali Concord II. In this declaration, ASEAN set the goal of creating the people-oriented ASEAN Community (AC) by 2015. The ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC) is a pillar of the AC. The APSC’s blueprint addressed several security issues that are central to ASEAN’s own objectives, which are prominent in the ASEAN Charter and which play no less an important role in the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). However, although ASEAN has pledged to address these security issues, many Southeast Asians continue to suffer from significant security threats. This study will explore why ASEAN has not brought adequate security to the region’s peoples despite ASEAN’s decision to create the people-oriented APSC.
The research question guiding this study is simple, but no comprehensive answer is readily forthcoming because so diverse a population of actors and security issues has been involved in the creation of the APSC. Hence, rather than adopt a traditional state-centric approach, this study starts from the human-security concept to explore the creation of the APSC. I argue that traditional state-centric approaches have failed to rigorously explore security issues in Southeast Asia, owing to discrepancies between the state-centric approaches and Southeast Asian security culture. The human-security concept discursively embraces both the diversity of threats in the world and the wisdom of having diverse actors address these diverse threats. Because the human-security concept is not a theoretical approach, I endeavour in this study to transform the concept into a theory before embarking on an exploration of the ongoing effort to create the APSC.