ASEAN’s constructed dichotomies: the ongoing need for complexity-sensitive research agendas

Abstract

How best to assess ASEAN as a collective enterprise are longstanding. Producing often polar assessments of the organization and its activities, the question has been a recurrent one in the scholarship on ASEAN and any retrospective on the organization. Stubbs’ (2019) article does not resolve the question, but it does offer ways to make sense of the debate. It also identifies ways forward with its identification of analytic criteria by which ASEAN’s performance as an international organization has been assessed. How well his two-camp categorization of the literature captures the state of play, however, can be debated. It is also not without potential costs.

Keywords:

• ASEAN
• regional institutions
• eclecticism
• contextual analysis
• great debates
• academic identity

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I’ve argued elsewhere that theory’s expectations of what institutions should do, including ASEAN, are coloured by international relations theory’s distinctly American standpoints and preoccupations. See Ba 2014.

2 On this point, I think Stubbs’ review of the ‘ASEAN proponents’ literature could have drawn greater distinctions between assessments made by ASEAN’s policy community and those made by academic analysts, as these groups have different tasks and purposes.