Overview
- Elaborates on secondary powers’ strategy to tame great power politics
- Re-Discovers the strategic utility of secondary power’s regional institutions
- Highlights the ASEAN model of institutional division of labor
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
Part of the book series: Global Political Transitions (GLPOTR)
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About this book
This Open Access book explains ASEAN’s strategic role in managing great power politics in East Asia. Constructing a theory of institutional strategy, this book argues that the regional security institutions in Southeast Asia, ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have devised their own institutional strategies vis-à-vis the South China Sea and navigated the great-power politics since the 1990s. ASEAN proliferated new security institutions in the 1990s and 2000s that assumed a different functionality, a different geopolitical scope, and thus a different institutional strategy. In so doing, ASEAN formed a “strategic institutional web” that nurtured a quasi-division of labor among the institutions to maintain relative stability in the South China Sea. Unlike the conventional analysis on ASEAN, this study disaggregates “ASEAN” as a collective regional actor into specific individual institutions—ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, ASEAN Summit, ASEAN-China dialogues, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit, and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus—and explains how each of these institutions has devised and/or shifted its institutional strategy to curb great powers’ ambition in dominating the South China Sea while navigating great power competition. The book sheds light on the strategic potential and limitations of ASEAN and ASEAN-led security institutions, offers implications for the future role of ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific region, and provides an alternative understanding of the strategic utilities of regional security institutions.
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Keywords
- ASEAN
- Institutional Strategy in Southeast Asia
- Rise of China
- Balance of Power in Southeast Asia
- Secondary Power in Southeast Asia
- Great Power Politics in Southeast Asia
- East Asia
- Power Shift in Asia
- Regional Security Institution
- South China Sea
- ASEAN Regional Forum
- ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting
- ADMM-Plus
- ASEAN+3
- East Asia Summit
- ASEAN Ministerial Meeting
- ASEAN Summit
- Open Access
Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Managing Great Power Politics: ASEAN, Institutional Strategy, and the South China Sea is a useful reminder that one can find power in weakness, as well as strategy. … Koga’s book is a careful, empirically rich, nuanced overview of ASEAN’s long-standing, thankless efforts to preserve relative stability in the South China Sea.” (Stéphanie Martel, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 96 (3), September, 2023) “Kei Koga is one of Asia's most thoughtful observers of regional security architecture. At a time when commentators question ASEAN's effectiveness and the viability of multilateralism more generally, he demonstrates its ability to shape great power behaviour in one of this region's most intractable flashpoints - the South China Sea. Theoretically rigorous and empirically rich, this book is required reading for Asian security scholars and practitioners alike." -Prof Brendan Taylor, Professor of Strategic Studies, Australian National University, Australia
“An empirically rich and distinctive study of small-state agency at the group level. Focusing on the “quasi-division of labor” among the ASEAN-led mechanisms, the book unpacks the ASEAN states’ institutional strategy of maintaining stability in the South China Sea. A timely contribution to understanding weaker-state hedging and the debate on the roles and limits of regional multilateralism amidst the growing big power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific era.”
-Prof Cheng-Chwee Kuik, Associate Professor, National University of Malaysia (UKM), Malaysia
“The South China Sea literature is increasingly dominated by the role of the great powers with too little attention given to other actors. This book fills this gap by bridging security studies and the role of regional institutions. It offers conceptual innovation and convincingly studies the strategic utility of the ASEAN-led institutions in managing great power politics and curbing their ambitions in the disputed waters.”
– Prof Ralf Emmers, Dean of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
“An empirically rich and distinctive study of small-state agency at the group level. Focusing on the “quasi-division of labor” among the ASEAN-led mechanisms, the book unpacks the ASEAN states’ institutional strategy of maintaining stability in the South China Sea. A timely contribution to understanding weaker-state hedging and the debate on the roles and limits of regional multilateralism amidst the growing big power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific era.”
-Prof Cheng-Chwee Kuik, Associate Professor, National University of Malaysia (UKM), Malaysia
“The South China Sea literature is increasingly dominated by the role of the great powers with too little attention given to other actors. This book fills this gap by bridging security studies and the role of regional institutions. It offers conceptual innovation and convincingly studies the strategic utility of the ASEAN-led institutions in managing great power politics and curbing their ambitions in the disputed waters.”
– Prof Ralf Emmers, Dean of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Kei Koga is Assistant Professor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research focuses on International Security, International Institutions, and East Asian/Indo-Pacific security.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Managing Great Power Politics
Book Subtitle: ASEAN, Institutional Strategy, and the South China Sea
Authors: Kei Koga
Series Title: Global Political Transitions
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2611-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-19-2610-5Published: 01 September 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-19-2613-6Published: 01 September 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-981-19-2611-2Published: 31 August 2022
Series ISSN: 2522-8730
Series E-ISSN: 2522-8749
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 284
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 6 illustrations in colour
Topics: Regionalism, Asian Politics, International Organization, Diplomacy, International Security Studies