While they are often used interchangeably, Southeast Asia and ASEAN are conceptually and historically distinct. Explaining ASEAN as the central platform for East Asia’s regional architecture-building, commonly known as ‘ASEAN centrality’ requires understanding Southeast Asia as a diverse collection of multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious societies and peoples whose governments resemble an equally wide array of regime types. Southeast Asia was recognised more as a region in the 1940s-1980s when ASEAN had yet to be constructed or had been in its formative stages. But as the regional organisation gained coherence after its establishment in 1967, fully expanded its membership from five to ten member states by 1999, and picked up its pace of engagement and cooperation in the 2000s, it increasingly became the central organising vehicle for the promotion and maintenance of peace and prosperity, building on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in 1989 and the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1994 to the East Asia Summit in 2005 and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meetings-Plus in 2010. Thereafter, however, ASEAN began to lose its way. By the mid-2020s, ASEAN is split on salient issues ranging from the United States-China conflict and Myanmar’s military coup in 2021 and subsequent civil war to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East. This seminar sets out to investigate the sources of ASEAN’s divisions and weaknesses with the premise that ASEAN can only be strong and effective when the great powers in its neighbourhood are at a relative peace and in a moving balance. When the major powers are in an outright conflict, ASEAN is weakened and susceptible to co-optation and clientelism despite hedging manoeuvres to maintain individual space and regional autonomy.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Professor of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University’s faculty of political science and Senior Fellow at its Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok. Thitinan has held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Victoria in New Zealand, and Yangon University, and currently serves on several editorial boards of academic journals, including Journal of Democracy. He has authored a host of articles, books, book chapters and over 1,000 opinion articles in mass media such as Project Syndicate, The Bangkok Post, Nikkei Asian Review, The Straits Times, South China Morning Post, International New York times, and Financial Times. As an analyst on Thailand/ASEAN-Southeast Asia, his comments and views have appeared regularly in international media, including Aljazeera, BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, NHK, DW, among others. Prior to his academic and think-tank career, Thitinan worked at The Nation newspaper in Bangkok, the BBC World Service and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London. His current work focuses on the comparative politics and geopolitics/geoeconomics of ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific in view of the US-China rivalry and competition. In 2015, he was recognised for excellence in opinion writing by Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA). During 2017-present, he holds the appointment as International Advisory Board Member of Asia-New Zealand Foundation (ANZF). In March 2018, he was appointed ASEAN@50 Fellow by New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade. In May 2019, he was selected as Australia-ASEAN Fellow at Sydney’s Lowy Institute. From 2021-present, he is senior advisor for geopolitics with Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES). From January 2023-present, he is appointed an independent expert of ADMM+ Cybersecurity and Information Centre of Excellence (ACICE). In January 2024, Thitinan was awarded a commendation by the Japanese government for his work on Japan-Thailand and Japan-ASEAN relations. For the past two decades, he has been a columnist with The Bangkok Post. He completed degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara (with Distinction) and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a PhD from London School of Economics which won the UK’s best dissertation prize in 2002.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).