Boulder; London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2018. viii, 245 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-62637-685-4.
Southeast Asia is a region that faces multiple risks. However, attention in recent years has tended to focus on more traditional risks related to territorial disputes, regime stability, uneven economic development, financial pressures, and inter-state cooperation. Amy Freedman and Ann Marie Murphy’s co-authored volume is a timely and welcome reminder that other issues are no less pressing. They address five: climate change, food security, water security, health, and migration. There are more, but these topics sufficiently highlight key dangers that populations across Southeast Asia commonly face, regardless of state boundaries. Sadly, as the volume illustrates, a preoccupation with state concerns and interests by authorities across the region not only obscures these troubling phenomena but also complicates attempts to adequately address them.
The authors begin the volume by parsing security threats facing Southeast Asia into military and non-military dimensions on the one hand, and possible benefits into private and public goods on the other (chapter 1). Given the national security focus of almost all Southeast Asian states, regional governments are most adept at organizing themselves around the ability to handle military threats to the state—that is, threats whose successful resolution or management create excludable private, or at least club, goods. Trans-national and sub-state security concerns involving regional public and social goods receive less consideration precisely because they are “nontraditional” from statist perspectives. Such preferences likewise orientate and motivate the work of the main regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Perhaps this conceit is another of the negative externalities of relatively successful state building and sovereign norm creation noted by scholars like Robert Jackson and R.B.J. Walker.
For issues such as climate change, food security, water security, health, and migration, their transnational—even global—nature means effective responses are less excludable public or social goods. Getting to more optimal outcomes on these dimensions involves overcoming collective action and coordination problems. As the empirical chapters in the volume demonstrate, Southeast Asian states have great difficulty both in putting aside individual gains to achieve greater collective gains, and in finding a common focus for cooperatively moving forward. Whether controlling carbon emissions that contribute to global warming and rising sea levels or preventing transboundary haze, states have limited willingness and ability to sanction powerful domestic interests or accept restrictions on their autonomy (chapter 2). ASEAN offers little help since it is beholden to member states and has little scope for independent action.
On issues such as food security and migration, particularly rice distribution and low-wage migrant labour, Southeast Asia contains supplying as well as recipient states that can mutually calibrate their demands more effectively (chapters 3 and 6). Like improvements to rice distribution, price stabilization, and the creation of emergency rice stockpiles, protecting and supplying workers across borders requires not only a liberalization of markets but also better transnational monitoring and enforcement. Water security in mainland Southeast Asia differs in that it involves getting a much more powerful China as well as private corporations to credibly commit to self-restraint in the interests of downstream populations and better environmental protection (chapter 4). Accounting for risks from infectious diseases compels states to enhance monitoring and reporting while ensuring domestic compliance along a common standard, which presents a coordination problem (chapter 5). Freedman and Murphy argue that Southeast Asian states and, by extension, ASEAN have little interest and ability to move ahead on these issues; their reasons range from severe capacity limitations to an unwillingness to subject themselves to oversight and restriction by others.
Given the combination of capability constraints and lack of interest, Freedman and Murphy are relatively pessimistic about the prospects for regional cooperation over nontraditional security challenges in Southeast Asia. Despite instances such as health and food security, where pockets of strong governance exist domestically and internationally, the region at best offers moderately robust institutional responses (198). These limitations often arise from regional states’ general inability to tame powerful domestic commercial and other interests that can affect policy as well as their unwillingness to deconflict overriding and competing state-level concerns (213–214). ASEAN’s lack of leadership on monitoring, compliance, synchronization, and enforcement—common tools for overcoming collective action, coordination, and even commitment problems—is also not helpful (215–217). The authors end by suggesting that citizens could potentially pressure their governments to change; however, asking diverse domestic groups to coalesce around nontraditional issues presents its own problems related to collective action, coordination, and commitment (217).
A theme that comes across from the chapters is that for nontraditional security challenges in Southeast Asia, states are a large part of the problem. Be they aggregate national interests, the shielding of powerful local actors, or unwillingness to directly address internal troubles, Southeast Asian states are at least complicit in preventing cooperation that can alleviate pressing nontraditional security concerns. When such behaviour translates into non-cooperation or the stymieing of collaboration through ASEAN, regional states can even become actively obstructionist. Such dynamics go beyond simplistic notions of realism and liberalism in international politics and deserve a more sophisticated theoretical explanation that can account for when, why, and how the difficulties facing cooperation vary across issue. It is a pity that the authors seem to hold back somewhat in this regard.
Freedman and Murphy capture the necessity but virtual impossibility of ASEAN reform, which also happens to be increasingly apparent in the grouping’s other, more traditional security and political functions such as managing disputes in the South China Sea. The authors repeatedly underline the missed opportunities for greater ASEAN leadership that could address many of the issues the book highlights. These include everything from refugee flows and resettlement resulting from the forced displacement of Rohingya in Myanmar to resource sharing and dam construction along the Mekong (116–117, 181–118). Such omissions stem from the longstanding, self-interested motivations of member states that dominate ASEAN decision making and behaviour, which make even modest regional-level progress and reform challenging to realize. This is a point that merits emphasis given the many readers who are less familiar with the dysfunctional aspects of ASEAN, and whose understanding of the region can benefit from the authors’ clear position.
Ja Ian Chong
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Harvard-Yenching Institute, Cambridge