| Summary: | Southeast Asia is a fertile ground for “non-traditional” security threats. The development of multilateral cooperation is widely seen as the best way to address these issues. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has attracted important criticism, which focuses on its inability to progress beyond a certain level of mutual confidence among its members. ASEAN’s diplomatic culture has been pointed out as the main source of the regional grouping’s difficulty to contribute to the peaceful resolution of territorial conflicts, especially in the South China Sea. Nonetheless, the so-called ASEAN Way shows promise in the framework of non-traditional security cooperative mechanisms at the subregional level. This paper reviews the elaboration of non-traditional security cooperative mechanisms at the sub-regional level. It argues that these are compatible with regional security objectives, and that it is possible to delineate consensual aspects around which to build regional cooperation. More generally, this paper sheds light on the importance to include non-traditional security in the study of Southeast Asian regionalism.
|
|---|