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 institutionsASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting, ASEAN Summit, ASEAN-China dialogues, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit, and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plusand 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.

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

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: IntroductionASEAN's Strategic Utility Redefined.- Chapter 2: The Concept of Institutional Strategy and Change.- Chapter 3: Four Phases of South China Sea Disputes 19902020.- Chapter 4: Institutional Strategies of ASEAN/ASEAN-led Institutions.- Chapter 5: ConclusionFuture Implications of ASEAN's Institutional Strategies.