Southeast Asia's Evolving Security Relations and Strategies

Abstract

Southeast Asian foreign security priorities have shifted from ensuring regime security and coping with intramural conflicts toward managing wider structural transitions after the Cold War. This has entailed innovation in terms of renovating and expanding security concepts and pragmatically novel strategies vis-�-vis great powers. The imperative for most Southeast Asian states has changed from insulating the subregion from the security dynamics of the wider East Asian context, to integrating and ensuring its place within a wider Asia-Pacific security complex that is in rapid transition. Yet Southeast Asian security strategies may be neither sustainable in their judicious aims of enmeshing the great powers nor adequate in their ambitious goal of brokering a stable new East Asian order.