Bringing communities back: Security communities and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ plural turn

Abstract

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is building a people-oriented community in Southeast Asia and it has all the hallmarks of a Deutschian security community, with its emphasis on people-to-people contact and the involvement of civil society organisations in the community’s creation. In this article the argument is made that it is precisely the involvement of the masses that creates the peace inertia associated with security communities, and thus ASEAN’s plural turn is an essential first step in making ASEAN’s community a security community. Whether ASEAN can actually do this, and indeed whether the membership are united in this objective, is not the focus for this article. Instead, and contrary to the security community literature, which identifies ASEAN as a non-liberal security community and has emphasised the practice of self-restraint, this article argues that past ASEAN practice has prevented a security community forming in Southeast Asia, and using self-restraint as an explanation for why security communities create dependable expectations of peaceful change for members has resulted in the agency of ‘community’ being neglected. Hence, this article argues for the need to bring ‘community’ back.