Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019. ix, 251 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$76.50, cloth. ISBN 978-1-62637-745-5.
Since the end of the Cold War, the relevance of alliances in the Asia Pacific has been questioned, particularly regarding Korean Peninsula-related issues as well as the longstanding US presence in the region. There has been ongoing geographical reconceptualization, such as the Indo-Pacific, and the complicated geographical pictures concerning the rise of China and other neighbouring countries’ responses to it. Analyzing regional security mechanisms in the Asia Pacific through the lens of alignment, Security in Asia Pacific spells out the need for adopting an alternative concept to capture contemporary security dynamics in the region. It addresses the key instruments of security cooperation and its characteristics, as well as the security challenges and threats that the alignments may face. While its author Thomas Wilkins remarks on the need for understanding the processes of security relationships in the region that are not Western-centred explanations, he illustrates the current forms of security alignment in the region by reexamining existing theoretical frameworks in analytically eclectic ways, and then adopts the alignment concept to each respective case study. It is an important book for reunderstanding security alignment in the region as well as the potential of deploying alignment concepts in contemporary security analyses.
Wilkins focuses on the concept of “alignment” as first introduced by Glenn Snyder, which was later adopted in Victor Cha’s analysis of the Japan-South Korea relationship vis-à-vis the US. The two aims of Wilkins’ book are 1) to reconstruct the approach to alignment theory and 2) to apply the reconstituted frameworks to the key regional grouping in Asia Pacific, which are based upon Wilkins’s argument that alignment is “a crucially important facet of international politics and demands greater investigation among the IR scholarly community than it presently perceives” (12). While it is acknowledged that alternative concepts such as “order” and “architecture” may (wrongly) be conflated with alignment, it also enables us to analyze beyond the stagnant view of the traditional form of alliances and go beyond the security bias.
Chapter 1, “Security Alignment in Asia Pacific,” presents the trend of security political dynamics that cannot solely be explained through alliance concepts, and which must also consider the various forms of strategic partnerships and the security community. Tracing the conceptual and theoretical roots of security literature, this theoretical reconfiguration uses the eclectic analytical approach found in chapter 2. Elucidating the need for reconceptualizing alignment and operationalizing it, chapters 2 and 3 concern alliances and Trilateral Security Dialogue (TSD), which is worth examining considering the developing relationship between the US, Japan, and Australia that can be described as a “virtual trilateral alliance” (61). As Wilkins notes, “Given such ‘virtual’ alliances, scholarly attention must be dedicated modifying existing theoretical frameworks or creating a new one better fitted to understanding contemporary examples” (36). These chapters deconceptualize alliances and reconceptualize the security mechanism in alliances, which is an important method to reconsider the changing nature of alliances after the Cold War. Chapters 3 and 4 explore security communities by linking to the case of ASEAN Security Communities (ASC), specifically the ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC). By carefully reexamining the literature of security communities from constructivist and functionalist viewpoints, chapter 3 clarifies the three phases of security communities (nascent, ascendant, and mature) adopted to the case of the APSC. In contrast to the traditional form of alliance, this chapter elucidates that security communities develop and convert into alignment “from the inside out rather than the outside in” (83). Treating the APSC as “a unified alignment ‘actor’” (114), the chapter presents an alternative, constructivist form of alignment by converging ASEAN identity and norms, and reexploring the concept of security communities to demonstrate that alignment is a more useful concept to explain the interaction of ASEAN countries. Chapters 6 and 7 explore strategic partnership (networks) such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—a very interesting case to be considered for the Asia-Pacific region considering the regional influences of Russia and China. Stemming from organizational studies, strategic partnership (however underdeveloped), has been widely emulated by traditional Western powers, thus revealing the pervasiveness of the concept. By examining the SCO case with a particular focus on the Sino-Russian relationship—which has rarely been linked to the idea of alignment—strategic partnerships can consider that the SCO is operated at “the intersection of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership and both powers’ network of bilateral partnerships and individual Central Asian states” (145). By examining the stages of formation, implementation, and evaluation, the chapter clarifies the alignment security dynamics in the case of the SCO by showing the involved actors’ reasons for developing this relationship.
With its presentation of the many “distinctive variations of the phenomenon of alignment” (183), the book has successfully demonstrated the myriad forms of security alignment in the Asia-Pacific region. Even so, Wilkins acknowledges in chapter 8 that the book does not establish a “grand theory” of alignment (the overall explanation of which could have been defined more precisely). However, the book does exhibit the utility of the alignment concept. To further develop alignment theory for the purposes of analyzing security dynamics in Asia Pacific and elsewhere, such variables as joint allied inter-operability—explicated in the cases of the Japan-Australia relationship (49) and the APSC (111)—must be explicitly considered as forms of alignment. Whereas preexisting security concepts are still relevant for security analysis, the book enables us to realize the significance of rescrutinizing such concepts and theories in the face of the changing security environment in the Asia Pacific.
Misato Matsuoka
Teikyo University, Tokyo