International Institutions
The region’s premier regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has markedly expanded its membership, institutional structure and fields of cooperation in the past two decades. In the process of modernizing its existing repository of cooperative norms, the age-honored ASEAN Way, seemingly liberal cosmopolitan norms such as democracy, human rights, good governance and rule of law have increasingly found their way into the discourse on Southeast Asian regionalism. What impact do these new and largely externally propagated norms have on Southeast Asian regionalism? Did they transform ASEAN into a more people-centered regional organization? How do reformers frame these new norms and how do they adapt them to extant norms of regional cooperation? Who are the agents propagating these new norms, who resist their adoption? These and similar questions are asked with regard to the policy fields of security, environment, migration, social policy and welfare, and human rights.
ASEAN as an Actor in International Fora - Reality, Potential and Constraints
Project Director: | Prof. Dr. Joseph Weiler (New York University) |
Project Co-director: | Prof. Dr. Michael Ewing-Chow (National University of Singapore) |
Executive Director: | Dr. Tan Hsien-Li (National University of Singapore) |
Principle Researchers: | |
Duration | September 2011 - December 2012 (First Phase) May 2017 - February 2018 (second phase) |
Funding: | National University of Singapore (2011-2013) |
The study is part of a larger research project titled Integration through Law (ITL), which is organized and led by the Center for International Law (CIL) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). The project involves about 80 researchers. The project’s objective is to study the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia’s premier regional organization, from a legal and institutional perspective. Triggering the project was the implementation of the ASEAN Charter in 2008, which many observers regard as a quasi-constitutional document. The Integration through Law project seeks to explore the opportunities and limits of increased rule-based regional cooperation in Southeast Asia.
- Nguitragool, Paruedee & Rüland, Jürgen (2015), ASEAN as an Actor in International Fora – Reality, Potential and Constraints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Review
Constructing Regionalism Domestically: Local Actors and Foreign Policymaking in Newly Democratized Indonesia
Project Director: | Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland |
Duration: | February 2010 - October 2011 |
Funding: | National University of Singapore and Stanford University (Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Scholarship for Southeast Asia 2010) together with the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) |
There is a dearth of studies exploring the construction of ideas on regionalism outside Europe. This project sought to make a contribution to close this gap. It examined the construction of ideas on regionalism in Indonesia, the largest member country of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Theoretically, the project drew from Amitav Acharya’s concept of “constitutive localization” which it developed further. It offers an alternative explanation to studies which argue that as a result of mimetic behaviour, social learning, and cost-benefit calculations, regional organizations across the world become increasingly similar. While this may be the case in terms of rhetoric and organizational structure, it is not necessarily the case at a normative level. The Indonesian case shows that even though foreign policy stakeholders have increasingly championed European ideas of regional integration after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997/1998, they have skilfully amalgamated them with older local worldviews through framing, grafting, and pruning. European ideas of regional integration thereby served to modernize and re-legitimize a foreign policy agenda which seeks to establish Indonesia as a regional leader with ambitions to play a major role in global politics.
- Rüland, Jürgen (2017), The Indonesian Way. ASEAN, Europeanization and Foreign Policy Debates in a Newly Democratizing Country, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Rüland, Jürgen (2014), “Constructing Regionalism Domestically: Local Actors and Foreign Policymaking in Newly Democratized Indonesia,” Foreign Policy Analysis 10(2): 181-201.
- Rüland, Jürgen (2014), “The limits of democratizing interest representation: ASEAN’s regional corporatism and normative challenges,” European Journal of International Relations 20(1): 237-261.
- Rüland, Jürgen & Bechle, Karsten (2014), “Defending state-centric regionalism through mimicry and localization: regional parliamentary bodies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Mercosur,” Journal of International Relations and Development, 17(1): 61-88.
Democratization through migration?
Project Director | Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rüland |
Principal Researchers | Dr. Christl Kessler, Dr. Stefan Rother |
Duration: | October 2005 - September 2007 |
Funding: | Foundation for Population, Migration and Environment (Switzerland) |
The connection between democracy and migration has been examined with a standardized survey in cooperation with Social Weather Stations, a leading Philippine polling institute, together with a qualitative survey in cooperation with the University of the Philippines. Project results did not fully confirm our initial propositions, but brought additional insights instead: rather than the political system of the destination countries, the political space granted for migrant engagement facilitated the politicization of migrants both at home and abroad.
Publication:
- Kessler, Christl & Rother, Stefan (2016). Democratization through Migration? Remittances and Participation of Philippine Return Migrants. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Asian-European Interregional Dialogues on Human Rights: ASEAN-EU relations and ASEM
PhD candidate: | Maria-Gabriela Manea |
Duration: | September 2005 - August 2007 |
Funding: | Konrad Adenauer Stiftung |
“Asian-European Interregional Dialogues on Human Rights: ASEAN-EU Relations and ASEM” is the working title of Gabriela Manea's doctoral dissertation. Theoretically, the thesis rests on a social constructivist framework accounting for collective identity, region-building through inter-regionalism and human rights norms diffusion. The main argument is that the EU-ASEAN and ASEM interregional dialogues on human rights have opened up a process of intra-regional communication on human rights in Southeast Asia that fosters ASEAN’s regional identity construction. The study thus looks into “interactions” and “discourses” on human rights, which are simultaneously embedded in several layers of the international system (global, inter- and intraregional, domestic), as part of and in relation to the constitution of ASEAN’s regional identity. Interactive and discursive fields correspond to micro and macro-structures of collective identity building. State and non-state actors as well as official and societal contributions to inter- and intraregional dialogues on human rights are the focus of an in-depth analysis of “modes” of interaction and of discourse analysis that includes newspapers, policy documents, interviews and scholarly texts.