Regional Entanglement and Heterarchy in Mainland Southeast Asia, 1800-1988

Abstract

This thesis examines why successive great-power projects of hierarchical ordering--European colonial expansion, Japanese wartime occupation, and Cold War bloc formation--repeatedly failed to consolidate in mainland Southeast Asia between 1855 and 1988. It argues that each ordering project encountered a deeper structural condition: regional entanglement, in which political authority is constituted through positional interdependence among neighbouring polities, such that shifts in any actor's standing altered the authority and security of others. Successive interventions activated relational positionality in acute ways: the mechanism through which regional actors interpreted external hierarchies by reference to their standing among neighbours, localised external categories into regionally meaningful claims, and repositioned themselves diplomatically to defend or enhance their rank.

The thesis adopts a regional-synthetic approach, triangulating two centuries of historiographical material with archival sources. It traces interactions among dominant and subordinate actors--Siam/Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, and their Lao, Cambodian, and upland neighbours--from 1800 to 1988 and reconstructs the entangled regional field prior to 1855 against which subsequent external ordering projects are evaluated. The cumulative pattern reveals that persistent non-consolidation was not episodic failure but the durable reproduction of heterarchy: overlapping, continuously renegotiated, non-exclusive authority relations sustained by regional entanglement across successive eras of global transformation. The thesis contributes to IR theories of international structure by demonstrating that heterarchy constitutes a third structural form alongside anarchy and hierarchy, with its own generative condition. It reframes how security, great-power management, and regionalism should be understood in Southeast Asia, and challenges prevailing narratives of hierarchical succession in Asia's modern international order. Show more