China's "Belt and Road" in Southeast Asia: Constructing the Strategic Narrative in Singapore
Asian Perspective2019
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is viewed by most as symbolic of a new era of Chinese initiative and ambition. But while much attention has focused on how the BRI fits into China's—and specifically Xi Jinping's—grand narrative of national rejuvenation, less has been said about regional narratives—that is, the narratives of China's target audiences. Toward addressing this oversight, I consider the case of Singapore in relation to BRI. Specifically, I give attention to strategic narratives that offer analytic windows into the complex relationships being negotiated between China and Southeast Asian states. Strategic narratives, as instruments of policy, also play roles in constructing the strategic space in which BRI enters, with implications for the opportunities and constraints faced by China in Southeast Asia.
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ASEAN’s constructed dichotomies: the ongoing need for complexity-sensitive research agendas
The Pacific Review2019
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.
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Multilateralism and East Asian transitions: the English School, diplomacy, and a networking regional order
International Politics2020
This article traces East Asia’s evolving multilateralisms and role in transitioning East Asia away from “US hub-and-spokes” bilateralism toward a more networked system of security arrangements. Drawing on the English School, it argues for revisiting multilateralism’s diplomatic foundations as a way to direct attention to (1) the practice’s region-specific content and (2) the ways that multilateralism has introduced system-transitioning changes that include system-level dynamics associated with membership, actor hood, and the types of security at stake. The result is a more complex security environment and normative context that calls for more multifaceted responses from all, including the United States and China whose current multilateral diplomacies both draw from and challenge the multilateral norms and practices that have been created. Theoretically, re-attention to multilateralism’s diplomatic foundations also offers the English School an opportunity to make more distinctive contributions to ongoing debates about East Asia’s networking processes and security arrangements.
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Vietnam's Cautious Response to China's Belt and Road Initiative: The Imperatives of Domestic Legitimation
Asian Perspective2021
China's Belt and Road may be China's "Project of the Century," but for Vietnam it encapsulates an age-old predicament, namely, how best to respond to the mix of opportunity and challenge represented by its very large neighbor next door. This article finds in Vietnam's response a mix of caution and engagement reflective of Vietnam's distinctive positionality on the asymmetry-authority framework outlined in the introductory essay. It gives special attention to how ongoing maritime disputes intensify the challenge on both asymmetry and especially, domestic authority dimensions, but also how Vietnam's response to BRI illustrates elites' dynamic adjustments between four key sources of domestic legitimacy—welfare, anticorruption, nationalism, and autonomy. While the domestic nationalist challenge posed by China largely explains Vietnam's caution and ambivalence about BRI, these tensions also make BRI's diplomatic and political functions and thus, Vietnam's engagement more important beyond the economic opportunities it may offer.
Diversification's legitimation challenges: ASEAN and its Myanmar predicament Get access Arrow
International Affairs2023
International organizations (IOs) confront complex legitimation challenges with the diversification of audiences and actors asserting judgment and input. Drawing on Lenz and Söderbaum's agents-audience-environment (AAE) conceptualization of legitimation strategies, this discussion advances understandings of how diversification affects IO legitimation and legitimation strategies. Particular attention is given to their special sensitivity to internal IO diversification processes whose constitutive changes affect both the agent and audience ends of strategy. It especially highlights three commonly found sources of internal IO diversification: domestic change, new membership and new purposes. Providing illustration is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its 30+ year-long efforts to defend and legitimate the organization's choices vis-à-vis its most internationally criticized member, Myanmar, and to manage the delegitimating effects of association.
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