Diplomacy in the ASEAN

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the focal point for regional diplomacy and interstate governance in Southeast Asia. Since its foundation in 1967, the organization’s membership, institutional footprint, and mandate have expanded markedly. The now ten member states—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—and its professed ASEAN Community are engaged in an ever-expanding array of regional initiatives across political-security, economic, and sociocultural concerns. The organization is of growing importance for states beyond the region as well, given the region’s place within the wider “Indo-Pacific” region and ongoing tensions between the United States and China. The literature on diplomacy in ASEAN is vast and varied. Much material centers on the origins, evolution, and efficacy of ASEAN as a regional organization and its diplomatic principles and norms, the so-called ASEAN way. The literature surveyed here examines the institutional and normative context within which ASEAN diplomacy operates and highlights major contemporary issues in the study of ASEAN diplomacy. This article is structured in eleven sections. It begins with a series of general, canonical accounts of ASEAN diplomacy and governance. The second section highlights literature engaged in a debate over the efficacy and consequence of ASEAN and its diplomatic norms. The third section surveys literature that centers attention on a core element of the study of ASEAN diplomacy: the prospects of a security community in Southeast Asia. The fourth section surveys a growing and related literature that examines the practice and discourse in ASEAN diplomacy. The fifth section highlights literature that situates ASEAN diplomacy within the context of the institutions of the wider Asia-Pacific region, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), East Asian Summit (EAS), and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting Plus (ADMM+). Section six focuses on regional peace and conflict management between ASEAN member states. The seventh section explores two additional intraregional issues: leadership in ASEAN and relations with the so-called CLMV states of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam, with a focus on Myanmar. Section eight centers on track two diplomacy and the role of civil society organizations in regional diplomacy and governance. Section nine examines institutional evolution with a focus on the changing organizational and normative context of ASEAN diplomacy. Section ten highlights ASEAN-China relations with a focus on the diplomatic management of the South China Sea disputes. The final section surveys a growing literature that places ASEAN diplomacy and governance in a comparative context.

Al-Shabaab

The Somali militant Islamist and proto-state insurgent organization known as “Al-Shabaab” (Harakat Al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen in Arabic and Xarakada Mujaahidiinta Al Shabaab in Somali) is a group with multiple layers of identity. Ranging from the local and national to the regional and transnational, it is a group whose multifaceted self-perception and public portrayals have been some of its greatest sources of endurance since its emergence in 2006. On the one hand, Al-Shabaab’s ideology, goals, and membership are grounded in the domestic Somali context, though it has been able to localize and establish networks of sympathizers and recruits in neighboring East African states, including in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. On the other hand, Al-Shabaab is also the official East African affiliate of the transnational militant Islamist group al-Qaeda. Al-Shabaab first emerged publicly in 2006 as the most radical faction within the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The ICU succeeded in forming a coalition that led to the establishment of an environment of both relative law and order as well as economic stabilization. When, in 2006, the Ethiopian military invaded Somalia and occupied parts of the country to prop up the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), the ICU collapsed. Al-Shabaab emerged as an independent group spearheading a growing insurgency against Ethiopian military forces and, later, African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) peacekeepers. Beginning in 2008, as Al-Shabaab started to rapidly capture territory, it pursued the establishment of civil-governing mechanisms in areas it controlled. These mechanisms and institutions included a judiciary, police force (the Jaysh al-Hisba), a military wing (the Jaysh al-Usra), and offices of taxation, political affairs and clan relations, education, religious affairs and missionary propagation (daʿwa), health services, agriculture, and social services and charity programs, including a drought and humanitarian relief committee. Alongside its domestically rooted identity, Al-Shabaab also has a transnational, globalist aspect to its organizational identity and is an official affiliate of al-Qaeda, with its leadership having pledged allegiance to the group publicly in February 2012, an oath accepted by al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. As of 2021—and despite national, bilateral, and multilateral efforts to combat it—Al-Shabaab continues to operate as both an insurgency and a proto-state power, controlling and governing wide swathes of land within the southern, central, and western parts of the country. This article seeks to provide an overview of the best literature available on the history, evolution, activities, and multifaceted identity of Al-Shabaab as an organization with local/domestic Somali, regional East African, and transnational/globalist markers. While existing literature on the group is heavily focused on security issues, more-recent studies have also begun to pay more attention to other aspects of the group, including its proto-state governance and engagement with domestic Somali and local dynamics in other East African countries.

Coups and Mutinies

The violent and sudden overthrow of governments has caught the attention of many scholars from various disciplines and placed the incidence of coups at the center of such studies. The result is the emergence of a rich literature that has used a multitude of methods and factors to explain the incidence of coups and control of the military. Although the interest in the incidence of coups and coup-proofing has waxed and waned depending on the waves of democratization and occurrence of the coups, the literature continues to evolve as the recent scholarship has introduced different variables to understand coups. Parallel with coup research, scholars also have started to look into the other ways that a military interferes in politics as well as the impact of coups on other issues, such as democratization and military effectiveness. A military can interfere in politics in subtle ways, which can be within the bounds of the legal order of the state. What is more, even if the military engages in direct disobedience, such as mutinies, these acts do not necessarily turn into an attempt to overthrow the government. Thus military mutinies have started to draw attention. Especially the impact of loyalty and disobedience of militaries on the success and failure of civil unrest has become an important research area following the Arab Spring, and the effects of past coups, the threat of coups, and coup-proofing on other issues, such as democratization and military effectiveness, have become another research avenue within the literature. This literature focuses on how coups and coup-proofing have an overarching effect on the militaries and the political structure of states. The fear of coups can shape the democratization path and the choices that decision makers have. It has a direct impact on military policies, which can end up decreasing military effectiveness. Therefore, this article mainly focuses on the recent scholarship to present the most recent debates in the field. To this end, in the first section, the article presents a list of articles that present a general overview of the field and how the debates have changed over the years. In the second section, we will focus on the various ways that a military interferes with politics and debates on Controlling the Military. The third section delves into the causes of coups and presents a wide range of factors and approaches in understanding coups. The fourth section focuses on the overlooked aspect of military behavior: mutinies and rebellions. The fifth section brings all the previous sections together and investigates the impact of coups and rebellions on Democratization and Military Effectiveness. The final section provides an overview of the Datasets on coups and military participation in politics.

Economic Coercion and Sanctions

Since at least the Athenian trade ban on Megara, in the run-up to the Peloponnesian War, states have used economic sanctions to pursue their foreign policy goals. Using a definition popularized by Hufbauer, et al. (Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 2017, p. 3), political scientists consider economic sanctions to be the “deliberate, government-inspired withdrawal, or threat of withdrawal, of customary trade or financial relations.” Sanctions are imposed by a sender country on a target country. While praised by Woodrow Wilson as a way to force the target government to change its policies while sparing its civilians from the scourges of war, by the end of the 1990s critics charged that sanctions were impotent to change the target government’s behavior but were deadly for civilians. Sanctions have been credited with ending apartheid and preventing nuclear proliferation, and have been criticized for facilitating genocide in the former Yugoslavia and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq (although the latter claim has since been proven to be false). In order to go beyond considering only a handful of examples and consider sanctions comprehensively, political scientists have developed mathematical models to examine how sanctions work in theory, and comprehensive data sets of sanctions cases to study them statistically. They have examined why senders impose sanctions, how targets respond, and what sanctions do to the civilians who live under them.

Comparative Regionalism

Comparative regionalism refers to the study of (“world”) regions and regionalism in comparative perspective. The field emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and the keyword was “regional integration,” which reflected the dominance of European integration theory and practice. Although the early debate—later referred to as “old regionalism”—took comparison seriously, a general belief emerged that regionalism in the rest of the world deviated from the European integration experience. After a general decline of regionalism in the 1970s and 1980s, the phenomenon reemerged after the end of the Cold War. The explosion of literature on regionalism in the 1990s and early 2000s—often referred to as “new regionalism”—emphasized that regionalism was a global and multidimensional phenomenon, involving both state and nonstate actors across a growing number of policy fields and in a variety of forms and institutional designs. The research field remained fragmented in the 1990s and early 2000s, characterized by rivalries and a lack of dialogue between theoretical and methodological standpoints as well as regional and thematic specializations. Since the latter half of the 2000s, the intellectual landscape changed again and comparative regionalism has consolidated as a research field, with greater acceptance of contrasting theoretical and methodological perspectives and with more advanced comparisons across both regions and policy fields. The result has been that the research field is no longer structured in a hub-and-spoke fashion around Europe versus the rest. By implication, the concept of regional integration has been subsumed under a broader and more general conceptual umbrella, and it has become established to refer to the research field as comparative regionalism.

The Politics and Diplomacy of the First World War

The politics and diplomacy of First World War are a complex topic. Tens of thousands of books, articles, and editions of primary sources were published on many aspects of the question, but very few works try to cover the ground comprehensively. The reason is the sheer complexity. The attempt to cover the topic in its entirety and in depth would fail to amalgamate the enormous amount of information. There is not a simple “line of events” to follow. A thorough analysis of the politics and diplomacy of First World War has to cover the events and the political intentions and actions of key protagonists, and then to link them with internal politics, with military events and strategic expectations—and this for the entire duration of the war. The task is massive; over thirty states fought in this war. Many neutrals as well as non-state-actors, like for example the churches, would have to be included in such a survey. It is evident that it is very difficult to deliver such an analysis for the entire period of the war in reasonable depth; and maybe it would not even be sensible to try. Many studies analyze developments in politics, strategy, and war aims on the level of single states or on the level of wartime alliances, or they examine single political events of international nature. What is missing are not the “unit level” studies, but “system level” analysis of First World War diplomacy and political relations covering the entire war. We have to pay a significant price for the non-existence of thorough international studies of the war. It leads to serious and unavoidable shortfalls in interpretation because the “unit level” view—let’s say, the view of the contemporaries living during the Great War—tends to survive and perpetuate itself and to dominate research up to our present times. This bibliography reflects this state of research, by offering first an introduction to some key works on the start of the war (i.e., the July crisis) and introducing then some useful studies which cover the entire topic of international politics and wartime diplomacy. It will then turn toward the politics and diplomacy of First World War on a “unit level,” state by state. It ends with literature on the armistice in 1918. It abstains from covering the Versailles peace negotiations which are a closely linked but separate topic.

Mercantilism

The notion of “mercantilism” or the “mercantile system” as a formal idea was identified by Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations. Smith had in mind a set of writers (the mercantilists) who were active in the 16th and 17th centuries, primarily but not exclusively in England. As commonly stated, mercantilist thought supported a policy position that countries should attempt to achieve trade surpluses that result in an inflow of “precious metals” or gold. In some renderings, this inflow of gold was seen as supporting royal treasuries. Mercantilism was often expressed as a system of economic nationalism. As such, it also had elements of a “zero sum” approach to international economics relations, although whether this “zero sum” thinking extended into the domestic realm is a matter of some debate. In recent decades, interpretations of what exactly mercantilism stood for have diverged significantly. This is perhaps a positive development as it provides layers of nuance to what had become a simplification of what mercantilist writers really stated, as well as differences of opinion among these writers. The origins of mercantilism are wrapped up with another school of thought—that of “bullionism,” which focused directly on transactions in precious metals. These two schools of thought had a significant temporal overlap, although mercantilism eventually prevailed. Mercantilism also became wrapped up in European colonial activities, from the British East India Company, some of whose spokesmen were mercantilist writers, to Prince Leopold’s Belgian Congo disaster. For this reason, it is important to consider the impacts of mercantilism both within the Western European context and within Western European colonial systems. While in the end the mercantilist emphasis on the balance of trade and, more broadly, economic nationalism was incorrect, modern analysis of the school of thought has revealed that the mercantilist writers were indeed engaged in real economic analysis. Key concepts uncovered by mercantilist writers included balance of payments accounting, trade in services, monetary theory, aggregate employment, exchange rate determination, and others. These insights secure mercantilism a place in the history of economic thought.

Psychoanalysis in Global Politics and International Relations

Critical and poststructural theories were introduced to global politics in early to mid-1990s. Since then there has been a proliferation of critical thinking in global politics with Derridean and Foucauldian approaches being the most popular. While psychoanalysis made its appearance and gained in popularity alongside other critical approaches to international politics in mid-1995, it has never become one of the “go to” theories. However, since 2010 psychoanalysis has been slowly reemerging on the global politics scene. If initially psychoanalytic approaches focused on a number of different theorists such as Castoriadis, Jung, Freud, and Lacan, the most recent thinking draws most significantly on the contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis and thinkers such as Žižek, Butler, or Kristeva, all of whom heavily rely on Lacan. In postcolonial studies a distinct psychoanalytic account was also developed by Frantz Fanon. This contribution provides an overview of psychoanalytic approaches in the study of global politics with a focus on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and its derivatives (Žižek, Fanon, Butler, and Kristeva). The reason for the selected focus is simple—this has been the most popular approach since the introduction of this thinking to the discipline. Lacanian theory revolves around concepts such as desire, jouissance (radical/excess enjoyment), fantasy, and drive, and is concerned with explaining the social bond—that is how the subject comes to existence and what social factors determine the subject’s existence in society. Its distinct contribution to the field of global politics is its focus on conscious and unconscious factors. In other words, it focuses on that which can be represented and that which remains unrepresented but still impacts the world. Affects, symptoms, or unconscious material impact the way the subject (and society) behaves. While the theory’s foundations are in psychiatry (and many critiques of psychoanalysis point that out vehemently), psychoanalysis is not a theory of the individual and neither is it concerned with the individual psyche. It is a theory of society; Lacan even characterized it as antiphilosophy. Psychoanalysis has appeared in a number of different contexts in global politics. The presented selection is not exhaustive though the aim was to include the most significant contributions the theory has made to the discipline’s different subfields. Key areas include the state, sovereignty, ontology, Political Subjectivity, law and foreign policy; and subdisciplines such as postcolonialism (the theories of Frantz Fanon), racism, affect, Radical Politics and Cultural Criticism, and development and aid, as well as trauma, populism and nationalism.

Politics of Resilience

The resilience of urban populations has been a state concern at least since the US strategic bombing surveys of World War II, but resilience really entered national security strategies and “all hazards” approaches to security and disaster management in the mid-2000s, when it was adopted as a concept for resolving the insecurities of the “war on terror” and climate change. The entry of resilience-thought into politics has several intellectual roots. Psychologically, the notion refers to individuals’ and societal groups’ capacity to recover from, or resist, misfortune speedily and easily. In the political uses of resilience, it has come to denote not only recovery from stresses and disturbances, or “bouncing back” to a previous normalcy, but also a “bouncing forward” effect through adaptation that can be considered desirable despite the general negativity attached to being vulnerable to continuous external shocks. While resilience has been a political concern since the 2000s, much of resilience research does not take politics into account when discussing, analyzing, and promoting resilient systems and practices for societies. This can lead to a normative contestation of resilience that stems from the normalization and essentialization of resilience as a universal and neutral public good for all, when it in actuality is saddled with conflicting values and involves both power and politics. Furthermore, resilience can also take on “perverse” forms where the resilience of internal elements of a system can work against the sustainability or viability of its whole, or where resilience maintains socially unjust or ecologically unhealthy practices. Even authoritarian political orders can display resilience. Accordingly, studies that focus on the politics of resilience tend to take a critical view of it, and of the politics it produces or maintains. When examining resilience with such critical awareness, questions such as resilience of what, to what, and for whom become relevant. Furthermore, when researching resilience, it is prudent to ask what it does politically and socially, what kinds of subjectivities and objectivities it produces, what kinds of values are inscribed and prescribed in its use, and who or what puts forth resilience speech and practices. One of the main critical viewpoints on the politics of resilience has been that it is a form of neoliberal governmentality that shifts responsibility to individuals and vulnerable groups for their own survival while simultaneously removing their political agency to affect change in regard to the continuous perturbations they face. Still, some suggest that resilience as such should not be conflated with the resilience politics of particular states and societies, but instead be examined more broadly, maintaining the possibility that it can also serve progressive agendas. To get a grasp on such angles of approach to resilience, the present bibliographical article presents an overview of what the politics of resilience is thought to be in its literature, what the origins and genealogy of resilience are, and what kind of debates and topics the literature has produced on the politics of resilience.

Terrorism and Poverty

Terrorism and poverty have multiple definitions. Terrorism is the premeditated use or threat to use violence by individuals or subnational groups to obtain a political or social goal through the intimidation of a large audience. Poverty is lacking sufficient material possessions or income to satisfy a person’s needs. Terrorism and poverty are multifaceted magnitudes. Terrorism can be domestic or transnational and rooted in ethnic, religious, economic, or political factors. Extreme poverty corresponds to a situation where the individual’s basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter are not met. More generally, poverty refers to failure to achieve these living standards along with education, health, and other necessities. Poverty is strongly and negatively associated with income. Both terrorism and poverty are related through social, economic, and political elements, making their association complex. Despite the intrinsic difficulty in appraising the relationship between terrorism and poverty, their connection is intriguing. This article compiles bibliographic references to empirical research related to two questions: Does terrorism cause poverty? Does poverty cause terrorism? There is a consensus on the answer to the first question: Terrorism has a negative impact on the economy, thus making individuals poorer. Hence, the research focuses on how to measure such negative impact and to assess its magnitude in various dimensions. However, the causal link from poverty to terrorism is not as easy to establish as intuition might suggest. Economic conditions do play a role in explaining terrorism outcomes, but their effect is mediated through other determinants making the causal relation from poverty to terrorism, if existing, much more complex. This article is organized as follows: After a section summarizing the general overviews of the field of terrorism studies in general and the Political Economy of Terrorism in particular, two sections organize the annotated bibliography regarding first the causal connection from terrorism to poverty and then from poverty to terrorism. The multiple economic consequences of terrorism are referred to in various subsections devoted to the aggregate economic cost of terrorism and its impact on investment, market valuation of firms, and the tourism sector. The role of poverty in causing terrorism is then analyzed including Aggregate Studies, some Explanations, and an analysis of the Policy Response to terrorism.