As evidenced by Southeast Asia’s enduring peace, ASEAN’s mission statement of “one vision, one identity, one community” clearly resonates with its member states. The gradual spread of enthusiasm for co-operation among nations and the adoption of localised forms of regionalism is an unambiguous good, particularly so as the formal obligations and responsibilities of ASEAN membership are, owing to its structure and general remit, relatively few compared to other regional intergovernmental organisations. That such stability has been achieved in the context of Southeast Asia’s remarkable heterogeneity – reflected in both its cultural diversity and the wide range of state forms and regime types present – is no small achievement.
This peace among nations, however, belies multiple ongoing conflicts involving non-state actors taking place within their borders, and often spilling across them.
Globally, respect for sovereignty is a longstanding post-Westphalian norm. This applies in Southeast Asia as it does anywhere. Post-colonial nationhoods have their own character, however: one shaped by a particular historically contingent experience of self-determination. Southeast Asian nations’ ongoing acceptance of ASEAN – and its advancement of an agenda of integration – is thus knowingly contingent on their confidence that their membership will not force them to compromise on their right to self-determination. Even with this caveat, enthusiasm for deeper integration prevails: as ASEAN expands and develops, it is increasingly identifiable as a clearly rules-based organisation. The difficulty in reconciling an increasingly procedure-oriented ASEAN with a dominant regional norm of protecting autonomy at home is apparent in how Southeast Asian governments handle their respective subnational conflicts.
Malaysia and the South Thailand insurgency
For the past two decades, Thailand’s southern reaches have been the scene of a violent irredentist movement that emerged from the interplay between a politically and geographically circumscribed ethnoreligious minority and a policy programme of nationalistic cultural homogenisation initiated in the 1930s. Many Thai citizens living in the southern provinces of Songkhla, Narathiwat, Yala, and Pattani are Muslims who identify as Malay. For many in this region, Thai citizenship is of lesser importance than their historical connection to the historical Pattani Kingdom whose holdings were formally absorbed into the territory of Siam in the early twentieth century – a move that laid the groundwork for a century of political tensions. As Thailand embarked on its “Thaification” programme in the 1930s, seeking to remake itself as a ‘modern’ nation state with a clearly defined unifying culture, anxieties grew in the South as it became clear that this vision of nationhood made no provisions for their distinct culture. These populations experienced Thaification as coercive and assimilatory, and despite decades of petitions and protests, the Thai state would brook no dissent. Secessionist sympathies gradually increased over the following half-century.
Since 2004, the area has been wracked by periodic attacks carried out by separatist groups. The insurgency was not instigated by a single group; rather, it grew out of a loose constellation of tendencies advocating for disparately articulated and often mutually incompatible goals: some factions seek unification with Malaysia, others persist in the demand for greater autonomy within the existing Thai state structure, and others still imagine that their struggle might win them outright independence and full sovereignty. Through extreme measures as drive-by shootings and bombings targeting both state property and high-traffic public spaces, the insurgency has caused thousands of deaths and untold injuries. The security challenge for the Thai state is significant and authorities have responded with aggressive military crackdowns and the imposition of martial law.
And so Malaysia finds itself a stakeholder in a putatively “domestic” issue: owing to the porosity of the Thai-Malaysian land border, and the historical and practical associations that connect the culturally Malay communities residing on either side of it, animosity towards Thai state has become a transboundary phenomenon, serving as a force for political speech and action that animates even those not bound by its constitutional authority. There is therefore political pressure on the Malaysian government to take an explicit stance on Thailand’s treatment of its Malay population, forcing Putrajaya to balance electoral contingencies with regional political realities: committing exclusively to the Southeast Asian norm of non-interference would risk alienating ethnic Malays as a voting bloc and losing ground to opposition parties who have less to lose by taking an explicit position on the crisis; meanwhile, assuming a critical and confrontational stance against Thailand would fall foul of ASEAN members’ commitment to respect one another’s sovereignty.
Whereas Bangkok is reluctant to allow the issue of the insurgency to become internationalised, Malaysia has signaled at various junctures that it has no such reservations: at the 2004 ASEAN summit, tensions flared when Malaysia raised the issue as a point of order and Thailand responded by threatening a walkout, and subsequently Malaysia quietly entreated Indonesia to assist in establishing contact between Bangkok and the insurgents in the hope of brokering a peace deal. Though Malaysia’s desire to resolve the security crisis in its northernmost border regions is clear in both cases, there is also an inferable contradiction: in the former case, it looked to regional institutionalism as a site of arbitration for disputes among ASEAN member states; in the latter, it hedged instead on backchannel diplomacy.
Myanmar and the Rohingya crisis
The Rohingya, a marginalised Muslim ethnic group, historically originate in modern Myanmar’s western Rakhine state. As in the rest of the country, Buddhists comprise the majority of Rakhine’s population; however, its demographics are considerably more diverse than the rest of the country, owing in large part to patterns of transborder migration historically linking it to populations situated in and around South Asia. Besides being physically separated from the rest of Myanmar by a mountain range, Rakhine was, historically, also politically and culturally distant from the antecedent Burmese kingdoms. Significant Muslim cultural influences predominated in the area, and highly syncretic local norms emerged that blended elements of Buddhism and Islam.
In the late eighteenth century, the neighbouring Burmese kingdom took control of Rakhine state, precipitating a gradual build-up of resentment among the Muslim population directed against their Buddhist rulers, and spurring waves of migrations westward into British-controlled Bengal. Post-independence Myanmar inherited this legacy of ethnoreligious friction, and despite early indicators of more inclusive official policy regarding the Rakhine Muslim population – which had by this point adopted the “Rohingya” self-identity label – policy was shaped primarily by the cultural anxieties of the Buddhist majority. As relations deteriorated, the Rohingya were gradually pushed further into the margins as the state continually articulated political theories of citizenship that specifically excluded its Muslim population from full integration into the Burmese nation. The government came eventually to officially classify them as “stateless Bengalis”, and so animosity – and violence – towards them has escalated since, legitimated by their designation as intractably “foreign”.
The present state of the conflict has followed an escalation of state violence perpetrated against the Rohingya ongoing since 2012, in what has been condemned across the international community as a campaign of ethnic cleansing inducing vast numbers of Rohingya to flee the country to escape persecution. The main migration pattern of these displaced populations is southward, travelling by boat over the Andaman Sea and seeking refuge in countries perceived as potentially more amenable to their presence, principally Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The persecution of the Rohingya is possibly the highest-profile subnational conflict currently taking place in Southeast Asia, and their plight has become an issue of worldwide political and cultural concern. While condemnations of the Burmese government are commonplace within the wider international community and global media apparatus, intra-regional responses have been relatively muted.
In the initial years following the outbreak of the present crisis, during which it was at its most intense, ASEAN member involvement was limited, and when governments did take action, they did so only after significant international pressure. While Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia eventually agreed to host displaced Rohingya on a temporary basis, they launched joint appeals for the international community to take an active role in combatting the crisis, and, notably, did not make any effort to condemn the role of the Burmese government in instigating it. Further meetings saw the participation of more ASEAN members, but yielded no commitments to address the crisis under its organisational aegis. Unfortunately, this type of response has remained the norm, and is often taken as an indicator of ASEAN’s institutional impotence in mediating intra-regional conflicts.
Cyclone Nargis and the capacity for responsible sovereignty norms
Commentary on potential and actual courses of action taken in response to the above discussed conflicts largely focuses on states as the point of reference; attention is drawn to ASEAN’s capacity to serve as a means by which states might engage in discourses of collaboration and consensus-building, rather than to act as a reliable guarantor of regional resiliency. The responsibility to address subnational conflicts is, under the current paradigm, therefore on the shoulders of the states themselves.
This is a significant challenge. ASEAN’s own founding document articulates norms that prioritise the interests of states themselves over those of the populations they represent. That ASEAN is apparently steered less by its participatory mechanisms than it is by the material pressures faced by its member states might suggest a need for serious and radical alterations to its institutional authority, but this outcome could, realistically, be produced only as an end goal of a long-term, iterative project. Any position on what role ASEAN should take in addressing such crises must therefore account for this deficiency in its capacity to deal with human security issues, and any suggested solutions must work within the bounds of the Association’s present capabilities.
There is some precedent for ASEAN taking a more assertive and even interventionist role in its members’ domestic affairs: in 2008, it prevailed in its efforts to pressure the government of Myanmar into permitting the delivery of international aid in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. This episode remains exceptional, however, and it can only cautiously be treated as an indicator of progressive change. It is also difficult to make a case for it having any implications for how ASEAN might deal with politically-charged localised conflicts, as it lacks the specific capacity to effectively mitigate transboundary security issues. Despite the governments of both Thailand and Myanmar resisting the internationalisation of the cases discussed above, the reality is that they continue to have impacts across and far beyond their respective borders. Other Southeast Asian countries are forced to cope with a security issue whose origins they themselves could not have done anything to avert, and the hot-button significance they have for identity-based constituencies overseas – in these instances, Muslim minorities in majority non-Muslim societies – have led them to become contentious political issues in the domestic politics of multiple countries.
This seemingly flies in the face of ASEAN members’ reverence for non-interference in one another’s affairs, illustrating a key inadequacy in regional norms that disproportionately emphasise sovereignty and self-determination: sovereignty is articulated primarily as freedom from outside influence, without sufficient consideration of how it might be wielded in a responsible fashion. This conception of sovereignty is therefore single-minded, and this single-mindedness is a vulnerability that produces undesirable outcomes: Malaysia and Indonesia lack the confidence to take an overt position on Thailand’s treatment of its Malay population, as defying the heretofore sacrosanct non-interference norm could threaten a cascade of states being newly willing to (e.g.) declare explicit support for irredentist tendencies within their neighbours’ territories.
ASEAN’s mandate
Such a profusion of norm alteration need not be a threat to ASEAN’s integrity, however; rather, considering its history of being amenable to flexibility and facilitating the establishment of regional norms via consensus, this potential for a foreign policy domino-effect could instead be harnessed to promote greater regional integration. ASEAN’s successes largely relate to it serving as site of co-operation and reaffirming of common values; therefore, making progress towards a more engaged ASEAN and effecting policy decisions based in responsible sovereignty norms among its members could be best achieved via leveraging its existing features and appealing to its historical relevance. The circumstances of ASEAN’s formation were shaped in part by its founders’ will to present a united front against the spread of communist insurgencies, a challenge that casts a shadow over the region’s multiple ongoing ethnic conflicts.
This broad consensus on the need to resist a common threat was a regional norm once, and it can be invoked again and adapted for contemporary circumstances. As an international organisation, ASEAN is well-positioned to advocate for a shift in local attitudes by pointing towards existing international commitments: specifically, the peace among Southeast Asian nations enshrined in the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), and the commitment to prevent the most serious human rights abuses outlined by the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which was formally endorsed by all UN member nations in 2005. The key to pushing for a more active ASEAN lies in the interplay between these two articulations of sovereignty: a 2014 report to the UN on ASEAN cooperation draws a line between the two as it calls for ASEAN to make a proactive effort to push for responsible sovereignty norms, and affirms that such goals can indeed be reached without the need for a radical overhaul of its values and component institutions.
A distributed future?
So, if ASEAN is to tackle subnational conflict via a strategy of norm diffusion among its members, how can this be achieved? Caution must be urged against assuming that the spread of these new norms will proceed mechanistically from stakeholders using ASEAN as a platform for promoting them. Instead, deeper strategic considerations that account for ASEAN’s weaknesses are required. Calling back to ASEAN’s state-centric approach, one longstanding criticism of its operations is its tendency to privilege the voices and perspectives of political elites rather than their constituents. The prescription is one of distributed democratic sovereignty: by working to engage more deeply with stakeholders across multiple societal strata, ASEAN can gain a greater foothold in the popular consciousness of its member states’ ordinary citizens and thereby foster a culture of cooperation and participation that will, over time, emerge in its greater institutional will.
Proactive efforts to court civil society and potential vectors for “track two” diplomacy will inevitably lead to a stronger, more participatory ASEAN, with greater awareness of and respect for citizen-centred perspectives. The more specific institutional reforms advocated for by some commentators, such as the establishment of a hypothetical ASEAN Human Rights Court with the authority to enforce the organisation’s Human Rights Declaration, would be a far more practical (eventual) possibility under this more widely inclusive paradigm.
ASEAN faces significant structural and mandatory barriers that currently prevent it from taking a more active role in mitigating subnational conflicts. These barriers do not, however, impede it from making progress in this domain, and by making use of its existing capabilities in concert with a campaign for more citizen-oriented participation, ASEAN can cultivate its potential to take more decisive action in ongoing conflicts and avert the outbreak of future ones. This will inevitably be a long-term project that requires greater collaboration between those political elites who are currently able to fully participate in the organisation’s statist architecture, and the elements of civil society more directly impacted by subnational conflicts, who remain frozen out of its participatory mechanisms. While such an initiative could eventually entail significant reform of ASEAN, such radical change is not necessary for it to be more effective in resolving non-traditional security threats in Southeast Asia. In this sense, ASEAN is structurally ‘good enough’ – but perhaps lacking in the institutional will necessary to animate such reform.