Abstract
Global International Relations (IR) seeks to move beyond Eurocentric perspectives by advancing the study of diverse regional histories and world orders. Yet, despite these aspirations, much of IR scholarship continues to revolve around regional cores – civilisations, empires and great powers. I argue that a truly global IR requires a conscious shift away from such centric worldviews by redirecting the disciplinary gaze towards ‘regional peripheries’. Defined as active zones that occupy the interstices between regional cores, regional peripheries maintain partial, indirect and historically variable connections to political centres – whether material, institutional, discursive or epistemic. As such, they offer critical vantage points for analysing how world orders emerge, fracture and transition. This corrective emphasis is not a re-centring of peripheries as fully agentic order-makers; it is intended to make the relational constitution of order at core-periphery interfaces analytically visible. Using Southeast Asia as an illustrative case of a regional periphery positioned between the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds, I identify two pathways through which regional peripheries recalibrate order: by marking the boundaries of core-led orders, where authority weakens due to core inattention; and by functioning as intermediary nodes that connect disparate regional cores. I develop a typology of three strategic orientations – bandwagoning, consolidation and decentring – to analyse how peripheral actors recalibrate the trajectories of order.
Introduction
Global International Relations (IR) emerged as a response to the long-standing critiques that the discipline of IR has been predominantly shaped by Eurocentric perspectives (Acharya, 2014a, 2016; Hobson, 2012). In seeking to broaden this field, scholars have turned to diverse regional histories to challenge traditional Western narratives. Through exploring various regions such as East Asia, Islamicate Asia, Central Asia, Indian Ocean and ancient Mediterranean, Global IR attempts to illustrate that the global past is far more complex than the dominant Eurocentric storylines have typically acknowledged (Acharya and Pardesi, 2024; Kang, 2010; Pardesi, 2017; Phillips and Sharman, 2015; Spruyt, 2020; Zarakol, 2022).
Amitav Acharya’s (2014a: 649–650) notion of ‘pluralistic universalism’ stands at the heart of these efforts to expand IR’s scope. Acharya argues that the discipline must incorporate multiple intellectual traditions, cultural viewpoints and diverse experiences to develop a genuinely inclusive IR grounded in world history. In this vision, IR scholars should not limit themselves to Western-centric frameworks, nor should they simply substitute Western ideas with a singular non-Western perspective. Instead, the aim is to foster a dialogical approach in which diverse regions and traditions mutually inform and enrich one another’s understanding of IR – without reducing them to a single, monolithic framework. Unlike ‘monistic universalism’, in which Enlightenment-era assumptions are taken as universal truth, pluralistic universalism recognises that universal norms and concepts can emerge from multiple centres of knowledge – Western and non-Western alike. This process requires IR scholarship to foreground local contexts, practices and histories in light of insights from Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regional worlds.
However, if we look across the various regional-historical studies published in leading IR journals and major university and commercial 1 presses – illustrated in Table 1 – most scholarship still gravitates towards high-profile regional cores such as civilisations, empires and great powers. These entities – dominant formations that project authority normatively, materially and institutionally within a region – are often seen as the most consequential for shaping regional and global orders, and they come with familiar, ready-made narratives. Only a small proportion of studies explore non-centric regional histories and systems, and even then, they are often treated as secondary or comparative complements rather than primary sites of theorising. By turning to regional cores, Global IR risks replicating the very phenomenon it seeks to dismantle. Instead of a single Eurocentric narrative, Global IR, by current standards, may fracture world histories into ‘multiple centrisms’, where scholars focus on dominant historical forces while overlooking or marginalising other voices and less-studied histories. Indeed, structuring inquiry around core-centric narratives limits how world politics is studied, because such narratives capture only a fraction of world history and populations, reproducing Global IR’s treatment of regions as self-contained units and neglect of ‘lumps’ and nodal points where global connections are forged (Barnett and Lawson, 2023: 505–507). We miss the fringes – those places and peoples who do not fit neatly into a core – yet they constitute an important, though often overlooked, part of world history.
Typologies of regional-historical studies in global IR.
The challenge of pluralising IR into regional histories is preventing the discipline from devolving into a patchwork of dominant narratives, each with its own hegemony and centre of gravity, rather than creating an integrated, truly global dialogue. Research that repeatedly promote these narratives risk treating each regional world as an intellectual silo, downplaying the myriad transregional and subaltern connections that shape regional and global orders. To avoid this pitfall, Global IR must ensure that incorporating new perspectives does not simply create parallel or competing silos. Instead, scholars need to engage in a comparative and interactive process, acknowledging both the distinctive qualities of each region’s history and the linkages that connect them.
While this paper critiques Global IR’s core-centric tendencies, it draws on critical insights from core-periphery scholarship to reveal how core-centric thinking is produced, maintained and normalised across global and regional orders. Core-periphery studies offer valuable conceptual resources for diagnosing how core-centric structures are sustained – not only through material patterns of dependence, but also through normative, administrative and geopolitical mechanisms. A critical engagement with this body of work reveals how scholarly approaches have repeatedly treated peripheries as passive spaces, defined more by their marginality than by their agency. Addressing this limitation requires shifting perspective from focusing solely on the structural power of cores to examining their interactions with peripheries.
Building on this insight, I argue that a truly global approach to IR requires scholars consciously decentring from core-centric frameworks by shifting the disciplinary focus from regional cores to ‘regional peripheries’. Drawing from insights across core-periphery studies while moving beyond their limitations, I conceptualise regional peripheries as active zones that occupy the interstices between regional cores, whose connections to political centres – whether material, institutional, discursive or epistemic – are often partial, indirect and historically variable. Regional peripheries are dynamic sites that illuminate how actors in the margins adapt, contest and renegotiate core-led orders. This paper identifies two ways in which regional peripheries configure and recalibrate order: first, by revealing the outer boundaries of core-led orders – where selective and intermittent core authority produces zones of thin authority; and second, by serving as intermediary nodes that connect and mediate otherwise separate cores, with distinct strategic orientations shaping how order evolves. The analytical focus is with how core-led orders take shape through core-periphery interaction – altering the scope and trajectory – rather than how such interactions might transform the identities or interests of regional cores, the latter being historically exceptional and remaining an important direction for future research.
This paper is divided into four sections. The first section revisits core-periphery studies and conceptualises regional periphery, arguing for its utility in studying the function of international order. The second and third sections draws on and compares Southeast Asia’s early modern and contemporary encounters with diverse civilisations, empires and great powers, illustrating its integral role in configuring a transregional architecture that connects East Asia and the wider world. The paper concludes with an afterthought on advancing knowledge production in Global IR.
In this paper, I define order as the patterned configuration of political authority, normative standards and institutional practices that structure expectations of behaviour across actors. This draws on Evelyn Goh’s conception of order as constituted through ‘core reciprocal bargains’ – mutual understandings of values, rights and duties that legitimise differentiated authority between dominant and subordinate actors (Goh, 2019: 620). These bargains are not merely material; they are often embedded in shared normative understandings and enacted through institutionalised practices, such as hierarchical ranking and status, deference or delegated governance. Goh’s framework informs this paper’s view of order as shaped not only by the distribution of authority but also by the normative and institutional mechanisms through which that distribution is stabilised and contested.
From regional core-centric IR to regional peripheries
Diagnosing core-centric thinking
To better understand and address the risks of regional core-centrism within Global IR, this paper draws critically on core-periphery scholarship. Originally developed to theorise global economic inequality, core-periphery studies offer valuable conceptual resources for diagnosing how structures of dominance and marginalisation are produced and maintained – not only through material dependencies but also through normative, administrative and geopolitical mechanisms. Although primarily concerned with capitalist structures of inequality, the evolution of core-periphery thinking – spanning economic dependency, imperial frontier governance, civilisational discourses and great-power politics – offers important insights for analysing the persistence of core-centric structures across different historical and regional contexts. A critical engagement with this body of work highlights both its contributions and its limitations in conceptualising peripheral agency and regional-global order formation beyond the dominance of regional cores.
Early formulations of core-periphery relations in IR stemmed largely from structuralist and economically grounded traditions. Dependency theorists including Frank (1967) and Cardoso and Faletto (1979) argued that global inequality stems from historical processes that structurally condition peripheral states to serve the needs of core economies, producing raw materials and relying on external capital and technology. Building on these insights, Wallerstein’s (1974: 347–348) world-systems theory conceptualised the world system as a capitalist world economy stratified into core, semi-periphery and periphery. In this model, peripheries are defined by their economic subordination and functional dependence, reproducing their marginal position through the unequal exchange of labour and goods. Similarly, Galtung’s (1972: 97–78) structural theory of imperialism described global inequality as sustained through the interaction of metropolitan and satellite states, with the former monopolising power, value and violence. While these frameworks were foundational in highlighting global structural inequality, they often portrayed peripheral actors as passive recipients of external domination, with limited scope for agency or transformation.
Other intellectual traditions expand the analysis of core-periphery dynamics beyond the structuralist focus on capitalist dependency, illuminating how material, normative and administrative mechanisms sustain core dominance. Postcolonial scholarship has exposed the epistemic hierarchies underpinning imperialism, showing how colonial and Eurocentric knowledge practices constructed peripheries as irrational, inferior and subordinated, embedding asymmetries of recognition and authority into global order (Hobson, 2012; Said, 1978). Building on these critiques, plural-civilisational analyses examine how diverse civilisations – Western, Confucian, Islamic and others – project moral authority through coercion, attraction, assimilation and agenda-setting (Huntington, 1996; Katzenstein, 2010). Rather than treating civilisation as a single European standard, this perspective recognises multiple cultural-political centres that seek to define the terms of global belonging, shaping who is recognised, included or subordinated. While postcolonial and civilisational perspectives illuminate the epistemic and normative structures, imperial frontier studies foreground the administrative realities at the margins (Benton, 2010; Perdue, 2005). Peripheries were often governed through ad hoc legal pluralism, delegated authority and local accommodations, rather than through uniform imposition. Imperial frontier studies reveal how core-periphery relations were historically contingent, adaptive and frequently fragmented beneath the overarching claims of imperial or civilisational world order.
These intellectual traditions richly diagnose the mechanisms of core dominance and were shaped by historical contexts in which civilisations and empires constituted the primary forms of ordering authority. Over time, new units – particularly great powers – emerged to project orders across regions and beyond. Early core-periphery studies primarily focused on economic subordination within imperial and colonial structures and often portrayed great powers as political-military extensions of capitalist cores (Wallerstein, 1974: 15–17, 348–349; Galtung, 1972: 98–99), while mainstream IR, emerging from great-power diplomatic traditions, tends to naturalise great-power dominance without critically linking it to broader patterns of core-periphery asymmetry (Vitalis, 2015: 7–8). Although IR increasingly recognises the agency of secondary powers and small states, its foundational narratives privilege great-power centrality (Acharya and Buzan, 2019: 5–7). Recognising these historical and disciplinary limitations allows us to better trace the enduring logics of core dominance and opens space to reconsider how peripheries have been marginalised in regional and global order narratives.
Taken together, these intellectual traditions show that core-centric structures are sustained through a layered interplay of material subordination, epistemic hierarchies, normative ordering and fragmented governance. Each approach highlights different mechanisms through which dominance is produced, maintained and normalised across global and regional orders – whether through economic dependence, the shaping of knowledge systems, the articulation of civilisational standards or the everyday practices of frontier rule. In addition, historical transformations reveal how the dominant forms of cores across disparate regions diversified over time: civilisations project normative standards legitimising conditional inclusion; empires impose administrative hierarchies through indirect rule; and great powers exert geopolitical influence through military, economic and diplomatic means. Although analytically distinguishable, these formations that project authority normatively, materially and institutionally within a region often operate through overlapping logics – as seen in cases like Imperial China, which functioned simultaneously as a civilisation and empire, while contemporary China combines the moral authority of its Han-Confucian tradition with the strategic influence of a modern great power.
However, while these bodies of scholarship deepen our understanding of how various regional cores exercise power and construct order, they often leave the periphery analytically dependent, defined by its absence of core attributes than by its capacity to influence outcomes. Although depictions of peripheral agency vary – from wholesale marginalisation to negotiated adaptation – there remains a shared tendency to frame peripheries primarily in terms of their embeddedness within core-led structures. According to Arlene Tickner (2013: 631–632), core dominance is not limited to empirical focus or thematic scope but is embedded in the very intellectual division of labour that governs disciplinary IR: peripheral contexts are treated as empirical sources or local expertise, while theory-building and interpretation remain concentrated in the core. This entrenched structure of knowledge production reinforces the tendency to overlook peripheral agency and reduces the periphery to a space of data extraction rather than conceptual innovation (pp. 630, 633).
Recent theoretical work in IR has begun to reconceptualise how international order is constituted and how peripheral actors might be reappraised. Jack Donnelly (2021: 11–13) reconceptualises orders not as tightly integrated systems but as ‘assemblages’ composed of relatively separable centres and peripheries, held together through layered historical relations rather than totalising hierarchies. This decentring of systemic coherence opens space for analysing how relational positions – especially at the margins – can shape systemic outcomes. In a related but distinct move, Haluk Özdemir’s (2015: 6–7, 18–19) inter-subsystemic approach shifts analytical attention towards the borderlands between subsystems, arguing that these zones – far from being peripheral leftovers – often generate the disjuncture, innovations and negotiations that restructure broader systemic configurations. While Donnelly focuses on internal fragmentation within systems and Özdemir foregrounds the frictional edges between them, both perspectives challenge core-centric assumptions and point towards the analytical significance of relational and interstitial spaces in understanding how order is constituted and transformed.
Building on these perspectives, the next section explores how peripheral actors are not incidental to international order but constitutive of its evolution. While orders are structured around uneven distributions of authority from cores, peripheral actors variously adapt to, contest and reconfigure these structures by challenging their assigned positions, social hierarchies and ordering logics. IR frameworks must foreground how peripheral actors – despite structural constraints – actively participate in recalibrating the terms of order by engaging, reinterpreting and contesting core-led norms and institutions from within their own regional contexts.
Regional peripheries and the functioning of order
To overcome the biases embedded in core-periphery thinking within Global IR, I propose a conscious decentring from core-centric frameworks by shifting the disciplinary gaze towards ‘regional peripheries’. These are not merely sites of subordination, but active zones situated at the edges of regional configurations, whose connections to cores – whether material, institutional, discursive or epistemic – are often partial (connected in some dimensions but not others), indirect (mediated through third parties) and historically variable (changing across time and circumstance). The concept of regional periphery is analytically distinct from generic uses of ‘periphery’ in core-periphery studies; it emphasises a regionally situated relationality by foregrounding how these zones are embedded in and interact with specific regional cores. Regional peripheries are not residual or derivative spaces but dynamic arenas where core authority is actively negotiated.
This conceptualisation resonates with Barnett and Lawson’s (2023: 508) global historical-sociological approach, which emphasises that regions emerge through asymmetrical, transboundary entanglements rather than as pre-formed, self-contained units. It also aligns with Tickner’s (2013: 633–634) call to rethink how and where theory is produced, and by whom; without addressing these epistemic hierarchies, Global IR risks pluralising its cases while reproducing the same disciplinary exclusions. It challenges the notion that peripheral actors merely ‘fill gaps’ left by cores. Regional peripheries should thus be understood not as passive margins or recipients of core influence, but as generative sites of order-making. By paying close attention to their relational features – partial, indirect and historically contingent linkages to core actors – we can better apprehend forms of peripheral agency that core-centric frameworks have often obscured. My analysis concentrates specifically on order-functional recalibration – how core-periphery interaction affects the boundary, density and connectivity of core-led orders – rather than on how such interactions might directly reshape core identities and ordering practices. While it is important to acknowledge such transformative feedback (as Berger, 2022 and Go, 2023 highlight), these dynamics are historically exceptional and better treated as a complementary line of inquiry. The paper does not seek to capture isolated episodes of peripheral acts, but to identify recurrent, historically grounded patterned behaviours that are comparable across regional histories.
I identify two ways in which regional peripheries recalibrate core-led order. First, regional peripheries delimit the boundary of core authority. Regional peripheries are contested sites that expose the limits of core attention, norm diffusion and institutional reach, which can affect the density and durability of core-led orders. While existing core-periphery frameworks highlight the tendency of regional cores to project hierarchical orders, in practice, such projections are often incomplete. Regional cores often prioritise inner-core concerns, and peripheries tend to matter most when and where they intersect with core actors’ interests. Even when strategic or normative agendas exist, engagement with peripheries is typically selective and intermittent, as cores ultimately pursue their own priorities rather than sustained peripheral investment. This pattern reflects a deeper structural asymmetry, in which peripheries remain highly attuned to cores while cores can afford relative inattention. Drawing on Brantly Womack’s (2016: 3–4, 10–11) theory of asymmetry in international relationships, power disparity creates structural incentives for the stronger actor to be relatively inattentive to the concerns of the weaker actor, while the latter must remain highly attuned to the former. This is because the stronger actor has relatively little at stake – facing minimal threat – while the weaker actor must remain vigilant to safeguard its autonomy and survival.
Asymmetry does not always translate into neglect. The same power disparity that permits inattention also enables selective hyper-engagement when peripheral developments are perceived to endanger core interests. Cores oscillate between neglect and intervention, producing what may be termed ‘disciplinary asymmetry’: the prerogative and perceived responsibility of cores to reshape or discipline peripheral orders in line with preferred visions of stability or progress. This dynamic is evident in Cold War-era interventions that reconfigured domestic regimes, as well as in later liberal interventionist projects. Yet even under such conditions of hyper-attention, intervention rarely amounts to unilateral control. Core involvement, while forceful, has historically depended on collaboration with local actors whose interests only partially align with external designs (Ngoei, 2019; Westad, 2005). Core intervention, in this sense, is co-constituted – a relational process of brokerage rather than simple imposition – so that even disciplinary asymmetry remained compatible with, and indeed generative of, peripheral agency.
While Womack’s theory centres on material disparities and is applicable to empires and great powers, civilisations exhibit a comparable form of normative asymmetry. As noted earlier, civilisational standards determine who qualifies as ‘civilised’. This enables moral exclusion or subordination without proactive intervention. Recognition becomes conditional, and neglect of regional peripheries becomes morally permissible. For peripheral actors, exclusion from civilisational recognition carries tangible stakes: it can block access to diplomatic and economic networks, limit regional participation and diminish political standing in the eyes of both external and internal audiences. Civilisational standards thus act as gatekeepers of recognition, determining who is worthy of engagement and who may be ignored, coerced or subordinated. This normative asymmetry reinforces a broader pattern: core-periphery relations tend to be sporadic, unpredictable and less formally institutionalised than relations within the core. These patterns of uneven engagement actively demarcate the outer edges of core-led orders, making consequential where authority holds and where it thins.
Second, regional peripheries function as intermediary nodes that connect and mediate disparate regional cores, facilitating the globalisation of order. Situated at the outer edges of regional configurations, these zones mediate transregional flows – commercial, cultural, diplomatic or strategic. While not all peripheries are equally vital, many configure exchanges that transcend the boundaries of a single regional core, building compatibility across multiple spheres of influence. Buzan and Wæver’s (2003: 61–62) distinction between ‘insulators’ and ‘overlays’ illuminates this intermediary role. Insulators are marginal areas that remain too geographically remote or disconnected to serve as meaningful nodes of contact, while overlays are zones intersected between competing core influences and thus become sites of interregional exchange and geopolitical contestation. Yet, unlike their depiction of overlays as passive sites of great-power penetration, I argue that peripheral actors often exercise structured agency within these zones. Imperial and great-power penetrations are historically contingent, fluctuating with shifts in military technology, economic modes of production and ideological ambition (Kennedy, 1988: xv–xvi). Meanwhile, legal pluralism, jurisdictional ambiguity and uneven normative projection by regional cores create openings through which local actors contest authority, forge alternative linkages and negotiate recognition (Benton, 2010).
To capture the patterned ways in which regional peripheries respond to core inattention, this paper identifies three strategic orientations: bandwagoning, consolidation and decentring. 2 These are not one-off tactics, reactive behaviours or isolated episodes, but recurring modes of structured engagement – forms of agency embedded in historical and institutional practice. By pursuing these orientations, peripheral actors do not merely assimilate into a core-led order; they reconfigure how core authority circulates, how norms are institutionalised and how regional trajectories evolve.
First, bandwagoning refers to alignment with regional cores for material, institutional and prestige benefits, not just survival-driven and threat-based logics (Kang, 2003; Schweller, 1994). This orientation extends core authority not through unilateral projection, but through the participation of peripheral actors who legitimise core leadership and embeds its practices in wider networks. A useful illustration is the Chinese tributary system. As Zhang and Buzan (2012) argue, it was more than a hegemonic construct: China actively socialised others by coaxing and coercing them into accepting favourable institutional practices, while neighbouring entities engaged, contested, adapted, and internalised norms and values. The tributary system thus became a dynamic social space rather than a one-sided imposition. Bandwagoning underscores that core-led orders expand only insofar as peripheries partake in them – joining institutions, emulating statecraft and entering material dependencies in exchange for protection, investiture or access to trade (Huang and Kang, 2022; Kang, 2010). Far from passive alignment, peripheral participation is integral: by legitimising and embedding core practices, it reaffirms core authority and enables its wider recognition.
Consolidation pluralises core-led orders by grounding them in localised authority and hybrid institutional forms. Peripheral actors strategically adapt core-led ideas and practices such as civilisational or cultural-religious norms, legal codes and administrative models to consolidate authority, build state capacity and secure regional recognition (Acharya, 2004: 244–246; Chai, 2025: 257–261). While consolidation occasionally produces rival cores – such as the Khmer Empire (Vickery, 1998: 391–393) or the Germanic confederations (Heather, 2005: chapters 5 and 9 on Visigoths and Ostrogoths) – more often it pluralises and layers order at the margins. By embedding the norms of regional cores within diverse local traditions, peripheral actors create regionally embedded forms of order that not only resist core-led standards but also promote congruency (through selective normative alignment) and compatibility (by enabling coexistence with minimal friction). Consolidation recalibrates how order is expressed at the margins – even if these embedded forms do not match core-led orders in scale or universalism.
Decentring promotes a distinct logic of order-making. Rather than resisting regional cores, regional peripheries engage multiple core-led orders simultaneously by embedding themselves in cross-cultural, commercial and diplomatic networks. Through these networks, they position themselves as desirable and legitimate nodes of regional exchange, attracting flows of goods, ideas and recognition (Pardesi, 2022). Sustained interactions within these networks routinise standards of appropriate conduct, such as diplomatic protocols or trading norms, 3 and enable peripheral actors to assume relational roles – mediators, cultural translators, alliance-builders or brokers – who reconcile differences and facilitate negotiated coexistence (Adler-Nissen, 2014: 19–25). While some traditions suggest that civilisational divides and dense interdependency networks inhibit stable cooperation (Farrell and Newman, 2019; Huntington, 1996), sustained engagement by peripheral actors enables pragmatic norm brokerage and patterned coexistence across boundaries – without presuming homogenisation or the resolution of underlying strategic tensions. Through these practices, regional peripheries progressively configure core-led regional orders into a broader transregional architecture. This architecture is polycentric, comprising multiple centres of authority bound by networks sustained by regional peripheries; and heterarchical, in that regional cores coexist within overlapping authority structures without forced homogenisation. 4
Together, these strategic orientations highlight the varied ways in which regional peripheries recalibrate core-led orders. As summarised in Figure 1, under the condition of asymmetry, which often create incentives for core inattention, order may emerge not solely from the grand design of regional cores, but just as crucially from how peripheral actors navigate, reinterpret and repurpose core influences. Specifically, peripheral actors are afforded the strategic latitude to bandwagon, consolidate or decentre – each recalibrating order in distinct ways: bandwagoning extends core-led order; consolidation pluralises core-led order by producing localised, layered formations within the regional periphery; and decentring facilitates a transregional order marked by polycentricity and heterarchy.
How material and normative asymmetries permit different strategic orientations among peripheral actors that recalibrate core-led regional orders.
While these strategic orientations are analytically distinct, they are not mutually exclusive in practice. Peripheral actors often navigate overlapping civilisational, imperial and great power cores, adapting their approaches in response to shifting external and internal environments. The choice to bandwagon, consolidate or decentre is shaped by a constellation of situational factors, including the degree of core inattention or engagement (which affects strategic latitude), relationship between regional cores; geostrategic position near trade chokepoints or crossroads, state capacities for consolidation political incentives and exogenous shocks such as war or regime change. These variables underscore that peripheral agency is historically contingent and relationally conditioned but not predetermined. Recognising such complexity, the paper aims to identify dominant tendencies rather than prescribe fixed behaviours, enabling us to theorise how different orientations – whether coherent or hybrid – restructure order. Because regional peripheries are relationally and historically constituted, the framework applies across time and space, accounting shifts in actors’ positions and patterned behaviours under conditions of asymmetry. Having outlined the conceptual framework, the next section explores how these dynamics unfold in practice.
How Southeast Asia recalibrated core-led orders across the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds
To advance theory-building, this paper explores Southeast Asia’s historical role as a regional periphery. Southeast Asia is uniquely generative. Its civilisational entanglements (Confucian, Buddhist and Islamic), imperial frontier status (non-subjugated yet semi-integrated into the Indian, Chinese, and later European imperial cores) and great power interactions (during the colonial interlude, the Cold War and the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) make it an ideal lens for theorising structured agency at the periphery. For the sake of historical depth and conceptual clarity, the analysis focuses on Southeast Asia’s interactions with the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds during the early modern period (c. 1400–1800), 5 with implications for contemporary Southeast Asian security. This section operationalises two pathways: boundary-marking, where selective core attention produces zones of thin authority that delimit the extent and density of core-led order; and intermediation, where brokerage and translation by peripheral actors configure connectivity and compatibility across cores.
In this section, I use the term ‘regional core’ to encompass two overlapping but analytically distinguishable forms: civilisational cores, which project authority through normative frameworks (e.g. Confucian, Indic, Islamic); and imperial cores, which govern through bureaucratic-administrative or military extension (e.g. Imperial China, the Mughal Empire, European empires and trading companies). These forms often coexisted or evolved within the same actor – such as the Ming-Qing operating simultaneously as a Confucian civilisation and an empire. They do not correspond to the modern nation-states of India, China or Europe, but to historically evolving constellations of authority, ideas and practices that extended beyond any single polity. Each of these cores constituted an assemblage-like structure of overlapping political, economic, military and civilisational domains – sometimes internally fragmented, sometimes peripheral to one another. Within Southeast Asia, these regionals cores were often engaged not as monoliths, but as plural sources of ordering authority with shifting salience over time.
Defining Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia has long functioned as a regional periphery situated between the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds – each centred on distinct yet overlapping civilisational and imperial orders: the Han-Confucian world of imperial moral authority in the north, and the Indic-Buddhist, Islamic and later European commercial-imperial networks to the west. For millennia, it witnessed complex entanglements of religions, cultures, ethnicities and empires. Southeast Asia was often considered a peripheral zone of contact between these cores and a region uniquely shaped by maritime connectivity, whose placid waters and commercial centrality invited centuries of transregional exchange. The depiction of Southeast Asia as an ‘in between’ made it difficult for earlier European geographers and voyagers to give it a coherent identity and name. Before the modern-day invention of the term ‘Southeast Asia’, it was known variably as the ‘peninsula beyond the Ganges’ or ‘exterior India’ by the Indians, ‘Southern China’ or ‘Southern Ocean’ (Nanyang) by Han Chinese, and ‘the land below the winds’ by the Persians and the Arabs, reflecting external civilisational lenses (Emmerson, 1984; Reid, 1988: 6). Nonetheless, since the inhabitants of this region have periodically been subject to the Han-Confucian civilisational empire, and since most of them resembled the Han – whether in physiognomy, customs or language – Europeans came to identify the regional periphery as ‘Indo-China’ to encapsulate the duality of its complex intercourse between proto-Indian and proto-Chinese civilisations and communities (Brocheux and Hémery, 2009: 3). This long-standing ‘in-between’ positioning is precisely what made Southeast Asia a privileged site for boundary-marking and intermediation.
Inattention by Chinese, South Asian and European imperial cores
Despite Southeast Asia’s geographic proximity to the imperial formations associated with the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds, these regional cores did not exercise consistent civilisational and imperial influence. Their engagement was selective and intermittent, shaped by material and normative asymmetries. Within the Indic world, rulers had, over the course of millennia, maintained a laissez-faire approach to maritime trade and security, allowing Brahmins and traders to venture into remote domains and spread Brahmanism (Majumdar, 1948: 21). The mandala political system in early India – a spatial-political model of order characterised by radiating, overlapping and non-territorial sovereignty where political authority diminished with distance and coexisted with competing centres of power – spurred inward competition for dominance, granting neighbouring areas like Southeast Asia significant autonomy (Shahi, 2019). Later, with the rise of the Mughal Empire, competition with inland Islamic empires (Safavids and Ottomans) kept South Asia’s engagement with the Indian Ocean sporadic and commercially driven rather than politically dominant (Pardesi, 2017: 256). Although southern coastal polities such as the Cholas possessed strong maritime traditions, their military forays into Southeast Asia were exceptional and short-lived compared to the overwhelmingly cultural and commercial exchanges (Acharya and Pardesi, 2024: 80; Reid, 1988: 6), revealing the thin authority of Indic and Islamic cores.
Moving to Southeast Asia’s encounter with East Asia, which was historically centred on the Han-Confucian world order, proximity made mainland polities more exposed overland to Chinese imperial forces than maritime polities (Reid, 2009: 12). However, Ming-Qing influence in Southeast Asia was neither uniform nor consistently hegemonic. Chinese emperors were focused on legitimating their throne and prioritised subjugating northern and western barbarians over the southern frontier due to the greater military threat posed (Dai, 2004; Wang, 1968: 302–303, 311–312). The difference in security priorities often resulted in sporadic attention to Southeast Asia, where tributary diplomacy based on Confucian rites and virtue was generally pursued for the emperor’s symbolic legitimation as the Son of Heaven. The Ming-Qing empires limited their territorial reach to the two immediate frontiers, Yunnan and the Red River Delta, which served as buffer zones that protected the inner, civilised core of the empire from barbaric and foreign threats (Sun, 2010: 45; Tarling, 2012: 26–27, 53). In these immediate areas, they attempted to weaken neighbouring polities by encouraging the rulers to adopt the role of ‘pacification superintendency’ and by forcibly integrating them into the ‘native office’ (tusi) system (Stuart-Fox, 2003: 91–92; Wade, 2008; Zhou, 2011). Native offices were subjected to Ming demands for gold and silver in lieu of labour and were obligated to contribute troops to support further Ming-Qing frontier campaigns.
Beyond the immediate southern frontiers, Ming-Qing relations with distant Southeast Asian polities were far from uniform, marked by instances of non-compliance, partial deference and non-emulation of Han-Confucian statecraft. First, Southeast Asian rulers in Burmese and Siamese (Thai) kingdoms refused to perform Confucian rituals, often viewing themselves as equal, if not superior, to Chinese emperors (Sun, 1977: 10; Wade, 2000: 254–255). Siamese, Malay, Javanese, Bugis and Bruneian chronicles also depicted rulers skilfully navigating diplomatic interactions to avoid conceding their authority to the Chinese emperor – some even recorded the emperor paying homage to Southeast Asian rulers after bestowing a Chinese princess and retainers (Reid, 2009: 11–12). Such patterned non-compliance caps the scope of Han-Confucian procedural authority even where tribute is symbolically exchanged.
In terms of European empires and trading companies, attention to Southeast Asia was both spatially uneven and institutionally fragmented. European engagements, led by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British were driven more by commercial logic than by civilisational or imperial ambition. These powers established maritime footholds but rarely projected sustained authority into Southeast Asia. Even in Melaka – long considered a symbol of early European assertiveness – Portuguese territorial control extended little beyond the fortified port city. This reflected a broader pattern across the Estado da Índia, which, despite its hierarchically stratified network of maritime enclaves and command nodes organised around graded authority, encompassed ‘no more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia’ and functioned as a naval thalassocracy reliant on coastal forts and the Cartaz licensing system rather than territorial consolidation (Phillips and Sharman, 2015: 72–73, 79). Similarly, the Dutch East India Company often treated local rulers as tributaries or allies rather than subjects, entering suzerain arrangements that preserved indigenous autonomy. In Java, for example, although the Dutch became formal overlords of Mataram in 1677, Javanese rulers retained internal sovereignty, military command and diplomatic rights (pp. 132–133). The Dutch initially portrayed indigenous rulers as sovereigns in legal terms – for instance, by asserting ‘leenverhoudingen’ (fief-like treaty relations) – but this status was later denied when Dutch material dominance grew (Spruyt, 2020: 312–313). These early treaty-making practices reflected a logic of negotiated coexistence, producing heteronomy and jurisdictional pluralism in which imperial actors operated within and alongside existing political orders, rather than replacing them (Phillips and Sharman, 2015: 139–140). Ultimately, intermittent engagement by these European imperial-trading formations in Southeast Asia stemmed not merely from distance or capability, but from strategic preferences that prioritised nodal trade dominance and pragmatic accommodation over territorial empire-building.
Consolidation: localisation of core models
Core inattention created structured latitude for peripheral agency in Southeast Asia. Rather than passively emulating civilisational and imperial models from the East Asian and Indian Ocean worlds, Southeast Asian polities engaged in localisation – adapting external symbols, ideas and institutions into regionally embedded forms that enhanced local authority. As Oliver Wolters observed, imported Indian materials – texts, artefacts, religious symbols – were ‘fractured and restated’, losing their original meaning as they were reconstituted into new cultural and political complexes (Wolters, 1982: 53, 55). Localisation emphasises how regional peripheral actors shaped both the process and outcome of combining local (peripheral) and external (core) elements to suit existing traditions, beliefs and social systems. This process generated diverse political systems drawing from Indic, Islamic and Sinic traditions, without extending the core’s own institutional reach.
In the Indic Buddhist-Brahmanic world, rulers influenced by ideas organised political space cosmologically into a mandala schematic: the capital as Mount Meru, with the king’s palace representing the central pillar connecting the material and spiritual realms (Heine-Geldern, 1942: 23–24; Tambiah, 1976: 102–108). Political authority radiated outward from the core, with the king assuming the role of the Chakravartin – the universal monarch responsible for upholding the moral law of the universe. Due to ambiguities surrounding the theoretical incarnation of the Chakravartin, rulers pragmatically pursued status legitimation through various means, including royal marriage, lineage, possession of cultural-religious artefacts, demonstration of leadership, accumulation of wealth and victories in war (Heine-Geldern, 1942: 26–27; Tambiah, 1976: 75). The concept of Chakravartin seamlessly fit into the localised context of ‘men of prowess’, as coined by Wolters, describing individuals with extraordinary charismatic and spiritual qualities in Southeast Asia (Wolters, 1982: 115–117).
Islamisation, particularly in the Malay and Javanese worlds, did not displace the spatial-cosmological logic of mandala kingship but reconfigured it through Islamic symbols and idioms. Rulers integrated Islamic notions of daulat (spiritual power), divine sovereignty and moral order into existing frameworks of charisma, sacral kingship and radiating authority. As Anthony Reid notes, Islamicised polities such as Melaka, Aceh and Mataram portrayed the ruler as God’s shadow on earth – an embodiment of both spiritual and worldly authority, while integrating sharia-based institutions within existing royal governance frameworks (Reid, 1993: 170–171, 182–183). In Java, the ruler of Mataram (1613–1648) pursued a spiritual campaign to consolidate charisma, linking himself to local holy sites like Tembayat, adopting Meccan titles such as Sultan and Sunan, and being venerated as prabu-pandita (king-priest) – a fusion of Islamic and Javanese cosmological rule (pp. 180–181). These formations reflected not rupture but continuity: a localisation of Islamic moral legitimacy within enduring mandala models.
Polities influenced by Han-Confucian ideas embraced a spatial and cosmological framework of the tianxia schematic (Lieberman, 2003: Chapter 4; Wolters, 1982: 36–38). In this framework, the polity was envisioned as an unbounded space representing a unified political realm that extended beyond the confines of a specific community. While in Imperial China this referred to Han-Confucian civilisation, in the Vietnamese context, the literati class aspired to develop a neo-Confucian bureaucracy with distinct Vietnamese characteristics, especially in language and customs. Much like the Ming-Qing empires, political authority emanated from the royal capital, with the ruler claiming the status of the Son of Heaven and adhering to Confucian principles of virtue and rites. Virtue and rites were crucial to the expansion of a civilisational polity that favoured indirect control. In exchange for acknowledging the cosmological centrality of the Vietnamese Son of Heaven, the ruler would recognise barbarians as civilised and engage in tributary relations with them (Lieberman, 2003: see Chapter 4).
Through localisation, Southeast Asian rulers pluralised order at the margins by embedding selected core norms into locally legitimate institutions. The localisation of Indic-Islamic and Han-Confucian orthodoxies served as the normative underpinnings of a distinctive regional order, reflecting pluralist and layered hierarchical characteristics. Rather than being wholly subordinated to either East Asian or Indian Ocean world orders, Southeast Asian polities created embedded political forms that selectively integrated elements of both traditions, producing orders that coexisted alongside, but were not reducible to, external cores. This localisation of core-led orders is highlighted in Chai’s (2025: 260–261) study of Southeast Asia’s competition for local hegemony. Rulers generally presided over subjects with limited territorial reach that rarely matched their universal cosmological claims. The Burmese, Siamese, Angkorian, Lao, Javanese kingdoms navigated a highly competitive environment throughout the early modern period, fending off rival dynasties and succession crises. This political struggle became entangled with regional contestations – a hegemonic contestation that hinged on social recognition via rituals and tributary relations, rather than direct territorial control. Rulers that integrated the corrective processes of Buddhist, Islamic and Confucian practices into kingly conduct were motivated to lead by example, seeking social recognition through the ritualistic subordination of followers.
In the Buddhist-mandala and mandala-Islamic worlds, ritual subordination was enacted through symbolic tributary offerings – such as bunga mas (golden flowers) or the delivery of elephants and brides – often following military victory or dynastic submission (Lieberman, 1984: 73; Winichakul, 1994: 82, 84–85). These ceremonies legitimated the hegemon as a righteous ruler upholding dharma (the corrective process by which rulers practice ‘righteous’ kingship), reinforcing moral order through compassion (karuna) and restraint (ahimsa or nonviolence) (Tambiah, 1976: 46–47). In addition, the investiture of titles, the distribution of court regalia and the imprint of a sultan’s seal on subordinate chiefs affirmed authority and spiritual prestige while enabling localised governance under Islamic moral leadership (Reid, 1993: 171; Tambiah, 2013: 518). In the Han-Confucian world, tributary rites such as the kowtow, gift exchange and formal investiture by Ming-Qing emperors marked the civilisational inclusion of vassal rulers (Chai, 2025: 250; Kang, 2010: 56; Zhang and Buzan, 2012). Compliance with these rituals affirmed the Son of Heaven’s virtue and reinforced a moralised hierarchy anchored in procedural propriety and benevolent recognition. Across these traditions, ritual acts sustained the symbolic centrality of power, where political authority was recognised not through territorial command alone but through ceremonial validation of moral standing.
In this context, economic accumulation and ritual recognition were intertwined: the amassing of material resources not only strengthened military and economic bases but also reinforced a ruler’s spiritual standing within a competitive, polycentric regional order. The result was the formation of layered, localised orders led by local powerhouses at the regional periphery – rooted in local adaptations of external civilisational standards but shaped by the distinct strategic needs and normative logics of Southeast Asian polities.
Decentring: promoting the status of intermediary
Beyond consolidation, Southeast Asian rulers sought recognition as valued conduits, functioning as crucial intermediaries connecting disparate regional cores. Rather than bandwagoning exclusively with a single civilisational or imperial project, Southeast Asian polities maintained partial, selective and plural ties to multiple regional cores. In some areas, the localisation of civilisational ideas and practices facilitated hybridisation, producing distinctive political forms that fused Indic and Sinic elements. Đại Việt’s (Vietnam) southward expansion into Champa reveals how the southern region (Đàng Trong) developed distinct political and social structures – potentially even a unique ethnic or political identity – that set it apart from the northern region (Đàng Ngoài), approaching the formation of a new society (Chai, 2025: 259; Lieberman, 2003: 413). In the central Tai world, Lan Na combined Yuen-Ming administrative models with Mandala traditions (Chai, 2025: 259–260). While nominally adopting the Ming vassalage title of pacific superintendency, it retained a mandala-style spatial structure with layered, semi-autonomous domains. Similarly, in the maritime world, hybrid polity forms emerged through royal marriages between indigenous and Han populations in Malay and Javanese ports (Reid, 2010: 307–332).
In addition, Southeast Asian rulers actively positioned themselves as attractive nodes of transregional connectivity to decentre from core-led regional orders. Capitalised on their strategic geography – controlling maritime chokepoints like the Malacca Strait – ports like Melaka, Palembang and Ayutthaya marketed themselves as indispensable intermediaries for commerce linking Imperial China, South Asia, Arabia and Europe (Andaya and Andaya, 2001: 56–60). By offering security, religious tolerance and access to lucrative trade networks, these polities attracted flows of goods, ideas and diplomatic recognition, reinforcing their political and spiritual legitimacy. In parallel, routinisation of standards emerged through sustained exchanges with multiple regional cores. Regularised tribute missions to Imperial China, coupled with patterned gift exchanges among mandala and Islamic polities, created expectations of ceremonial behaviour, diplomatic hierarchies and access norms without requiring full political subordination (Andaya and Andaya, 2001: 53–54; Wade, 2009: 48–50). Tribute, although symbolic for Imperial China and Sinic polities in Southeast Asia, held profound material and spiritual stakes within the mandala world: the exchange of high-value commodities (gold, elephants, horses, rare artefacts) served both as tangible demonstrations of allegiance and as religious acts of karmic merit accumulation, validating rulers’ claims to Chakravartin status (Stuart-Fox, 2003: 32). These practices institutionalised a culture of flexible allegiance, where deference could be performed without full political subordination, and access to commercial opportunities could be negotiated through ritual acts. 6
Through their strategic positioning and routinised practices, peripheral actors also assumed brokerage roles. Melaka intermediaries brokered ties between Imperial China and the Islamic world, allowing Chinese imperial envoys to engage with Islamic ports, while South Asian and Arab merchants accessed Chinese markets via Southeast Asia (Andaya and Andaya, 2001: 44–45, 49; Pardesi, 2022: 8–9). In the mainland, Tai polities like Lan Na and Sipsongpanna operated as intermediaries between the Burmese and Ming-Qing courts, mediating competing authorities while maintaining autonomy (Grabowsky, 2008: 36–41; Kato, 2016: 1–16). Such brokerage did not merely reflect happenstance nodality; it structured the pathways through which goods, norms and diplomatic recognition circulated, actively configuring the connectivity and scope of order. These patterns reveal that Southeast Asia did not merely absorb external influences but actively wove together disparate civilisational and imperial world orders. Through strategic embedding, brokerage and routinisation, these performative positionings contributed to the emergence of heterarchical system: a fluid structure characterised by what historians describe as ‘multiple overlordships’ and ‘overlapping loyalties’ (Tarling, 2012: 20). This relational mode of order-making prioritised exchanges between authority and autonomy, political favours and loyalty, and tribute and investiture, allowing Southeast Asian polities to navigate shifting regional hierarchies with flexibility (Winichakul, 1994: 81).
Heterarchy can be observed in the way Southeast Asian actors partially deferred to several regional cores. In the Malay Peninsula, Melaka simultaneously engaged the Ming tribute system while integrating Islamic commercial and religious networks tied to South Asia and the Middle East (Pardesi, 2022: 2–4). Similarly in the Indonesian archipelago, Aceh participated in both Islamic diplomatic circuits, receiving envoys and scholars from the Ottoman Empire, and maintained tributary trade relations with Ming China (Reid, 1993: 129–131). Meanwhile, mandala polities like Siam (from Sukothai to Ayutthaya) selectively manipulated Confucian tributary rituals for commercial advantage (Viraphol, 1977: 3). European powers, when they entered the region, were likewise drawn into this heterarchical field. Local rulers treated Portuguese, Dutch and English companies as one of several external powers to be engaged through diplomacy, alliance and treaty-making. They signed formal treaties with European companies as juridical equals, invoking diplomatic conventions that predated colonial subordination (Phillips and Sharman, 2015: 139–143; Spruyt, 2020: 307–308). This selective and plural engagement demonstrates how peripheral actors mediated the compatibility of core-led orders and prevented any single core from monopolising authority – marking the boundaries of what each core could claim while simultaneously linking them into a wider, polycentric structure.
Historical variations over time
The preceding subsections have illustrated how regional peripheries like Southeast Asia adopted varied strategies – primarily consolidation and decentring – to engage and navigate core actors. However, these strategies were not static. They were affected not only by the structural conditions of peripheral status and geographic location but also by shifts in the external identities, priorities and normative claims of the cores themselves. To fully appreciate the structured agency of peripheries, we must consider how they responded to evolving civilisational and imperial configurations across time. Transformations in the identities of civilisational cores conditioned the external normative and material environments in which Southeast Asian actors operated.
While premodern Southeast Asian polities had primarily interacted with merchants and Brahmins travelling from Indic-Brahmanic empires, by the 13th century these imperial formations had been reconfigured through Islamisation, giving rise to the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughal Empire, whose Persionate courtly traditions differentiated them from the Indic world (Pardesi, 2017). This transformation did not erase earlier Indic influences in Southeast Asia but introduced a layer of core-periphery interaction through maritime trade, diplomatic networks and religious diffusion. When Southeast Asian actors engaged with South Asia during this period, they increasingly encountered Islamic trade diasporas and religious networks shaped by South Asian powers but transmitted through the Indian Ocean (Reid, 1993: 132–133, 146–147, 172).
This shift had uneven effects across Southeast Asia. Maritime polities – such as Melaka, Aceh and Brunei – engaged deeply with these new Islamic networks, blending Islamic forms of legitimacy with residual mandala political structures to enhance authority and access to transregional trade, and connecting to broader diplomatic circuits spanning Arabia, Persia and the Ottoman Empire (Reid, 1993: 128–130, 132, 170–171). Rulers of these ports repositioned themselves as intermediaries in a transregional Islamicate order while maintaining ritual cosmologies and court structures inherited from earlier Indic traditions. In contrast, mainland polities such as Ayutthaya, Lanna and the Burmese kingdoms remained largely resilient to Islamisation (Lieberman, 2003: 273). They consolidated Buddhist-Brahmanic and Mandala-Confucian hybrid state traditions, despite growing commerce with Muslims. These responses were shaped not only by geography – insulating them from maritime currents – but also by the institutional depth of established literati classes and monastic orders that ensured normative continuity.
Transformations in the identity and priority of Imperial Chinese rulers similarly reshaped the opportunities and constraints faced by Southeast Asian rulers. Ming-Qing emperors exhibited varying degrees of peripheral attention. Under Emperor Yongle, 15th-century Southeast Asia witnessed intensive Ming projection of maritime power, including Zheng He’s expeditions across the region (Wade, 2008: 582–583). However, this activism was short-lived. Subsequent Ming emperors dismantled the naval fleets and deprioritised Southeast Asia in favour of court consolidation and managing northern threats (pp. 608–609). Bureaucratic resistance to foreign entanglements grew, exemplified by the Ministry of War’s 1515 refusal to send envoys to Đại Việt due to disinterest in distant barbarians (p. 613). These internal shifts narrowed China’s regional footprint, enabling Southeast Asian rulers to reframe tributary diplomacy with greater autonomy.
After the Manchus took power, concerns over Confucian legitimacy stemming from their non-Han status led them to devote increasing attention to the conquest and consolidation of the Inner Asian frontiers, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang (Dai, 2004: 148–154). While they adopted Confucian practices to assert civilisational superiority, frontier campaigns were often driven less by Confucian universalism than by dynastic assertion. The costly military intervention in Konbaung Burma – launched under Qianlong not for material gain but to defend imperial prestige – exemplified this shift (pp. 145–146, 160–161). Qing China’s engagement with Southeast Asia was largely reactive, symbolic and disconnected from any sustained projection as a Confucian polity. Its behaviour catalysed ideological realignments within Southeast Asia. In Đại Việt, the Manchu’s overthrow of the Ming prompted a re-evaluation of Confucian-civilisational authority. Drawing from Confucian texts and cosmology, the Vietnamese literati claimed that Đại Việt, rather than Qing, was the rightful bearer under heaven, reframed as a morally superior ‘domain of manifest civility’ (Kelly, 2003: 65–69).
These are some of the transformations that reveal how peripheral agency must be understood as historically situated, responsive not only to structural asymmetry but also to the transformations within regional cores. Far from being static margins, Southeast Asian actors continually reoriented their responses to core transformations.
Contemporary legacy
The structured agency of Southeast Asia’s regional periphery – conditioned by core inattention and strategic orientations of consolidation and decentring – continues to inform the region’s international engagements today. These orientations have not faded with the early modern era. Rather, they are rearticulated through contemporary institutional practices, great-power management strategies and evolving core-periphery relations. Peripheral actors, rather than subsuming under core authority, recalibrate core-led orders in patterned ways.
Today, the dynamics of core inattention persist – though the identities of cores have transformed. Where Southeast Asia once sat at the edge of Han-Confucian, Indic-Brahmanic, Islamic and European civilisational and imperial spheres, it now lies between the ambitions of multiple great powers and coalitions: China, India, Japan, the United States, the European Union and, historically, the Soviet Union. Despite growing external interests, these core actors remain variably attentive and inconsistently committed. Strategic initiatives – China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), India’s ‘Act East’ policy, America’s Indo-Pacific strategy and Japan’s regional infrastructure funding – represent overlapping but bounded efforts to embed influence. Each, however, reveals its limits: China’s BRI has spurred backlash over debt dependency and political opacity; India’s regional footprint, though normatively appealing, often lacks scale and institutional heft; America’s commitments oscillate with leadership changes and domestic politics; European developmental aid is frequently conditioned on liberal and democratic reforms; and Japan’s aid and investments, while broadly welcomed, remain shadowed by unease over military normalisation, shaped by enduring postwar memories and regional ambivalence. These patterns echo long-standing trajectories of core inattention to peripheral sensitivities.
Southeast Asian nation-states find themselves navigating ambitious yet inconsistent regional cores, whose competing logics often leave space for peripheral agency. Crucially, these gaps are not passive openings; they are actively constructed. When great power initiative stalls – whether due to local resistance, opaque governance or exploitative structures – peripheral actors often seize the opportunity to question their normative leadership, delegitimise such efforts as failures of responsibility rather than capacity. This framing allows Southeast Asian states to pivot towards alternative patrons without overtly antagonising the neglected power. In contemporary strategic terms, this dynamic resonates with the concepts of ‘hedging’ and ‘complex balance of influence’. Hedging involves simultaneously engaging and offsetting multiple great powers, cultivating ties across rival poles to maximise room for manoeuvre and manage risks under uncertainty rather than committing to a single alignment (Goh, 2005; Kuik, 2021). This approach creates the diplomatic and material conditions for consolidation, preserving Southeast Asia’s autonomy while sustaining a plural field of external linkages through which diverse core norms can be selectively localised and embedded into regional institutional life. Complex balance of influence involves leveraging indirect military balancing aimed at deterring potential threats with a bundle of ‘regional complex balancing’ policies that mobilises institutional and diplomatic instruments – across multiple media and multiple targets – to manage the distribution of influence among great powers (Goh, 2007–2008: 131–148). This behaviour contributes to decentring by drawing multiple great powers into regional frameworks where their interactions are mediated and routinised. In doing so, Southeast Asian states expand cross-core connectivity and institutionalise plural sites of influence, producing limited but durable forms of polycentric order.
At the same time, Southeast Asia often steps into global governance gaps, proposing initiatives and hosting summits that assert peripheral influence. Its normative role can be traced to its participation in the 1955 Bandung Conference, a periphery-led convening that articulated an anti-imperial vision of decolonisation, sovereignty and non-intervention. 7 While emerging regional cores such as India and China were present, Bandung’s collective agenda was advanced by newly independent postcolonial states seeking autonomy from both imperial and Cold War superpower dominance. These values later provided the normative foundations for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose approach to regionalism centres on agenda-setting, procedural consensus and institutional convening rather than power projection (Ba, 2009). ASEAN does not simply mediate great-power relations but, as Goh (2007–2008: 120–131) observes, enmeshes multiple great powers into a sticky web of regional institutions and norms. This strategy of ‘omni-enmeshment’ aims to shape great-power expectations and interests through sustained socialisation in overlapping diplomatic and institutional frameworks. While it is anchored in sustaining American hegemony and socialising regional powers like China, Japan and India into cooperative conduct, over time ASEAN’s pluralist and inclusive practices have opened possibilities for more post-hegemonic configurations. At this further end of the spectrum, Pardesi (2026) characterises Southeast Asia’s evolving diplomacy as part of a ‘non-hegemonic multiplex order’ in the Indo-Pacific – a configuration of multiple cores that coexist within interlocking, rules-based arrangements without conceding normative primacy to Western liberalism or illiberal alternatives.
Southeast Asia, therefore, does not merely reproduce the twin strategic orientations of consolidation and decentring but has, since the Second World War, increasingly extended them into an emergent order-transformation capacity, shaping the identities and interests or regional cores. However, this capacity is not simply shaped by its decolonisation experience but reflects the accumulated legacies of consolidation and decentring. On the one hand, consolidation forged internal coherence within Southeast Asian countries by localising Western norms and Cold War ideological alignments and synthesising communitarian ‘Asian values’. Crucially, ‘Asian values’ were not borrowed wholesale from regional cores such as China or Japan but co-constructed by Southeast Asian leaders as a postcolonial ideology of development and order (Thompson, 2001). Across a heterogeneous region of monarchies, military regimes, developmental states and semi-democracies, such localised adaptations produced normative compatibility without subordination to regional cores. On the other hand, decentring enabled ASEAN to position itself as a translator, broker and convenor among regional cores through initiatives such as ASEAN-China Free Trade Area, the ASEAN-India Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum, disincentivising great powers from dominating Southeast Asia’s strategic landscape. Together, these legacies – consolidation’s internal coherence and decentring’s external brokerage – constitute the structural foundations that enable Southeast Asia’s contemporary capacity to recalibrate, and, at times, transform, great-power orders.
Conclusion
This paper has advanced a conceptual reorientation in Global IR by shifting attention from regional cores – civilisations, empires and great powers – to regional peripheries as generative sites of regional and global order-making. Against the tendency in Global IR to reproduce multiple centrisms, this study foregrounds the structured agency of actors inhabiting the margins – those whose positions are marked not by complete exclusion, but by partial embeddedness, normative flexibility and historical variability in their relations with regional cores. Regional peripheries are not inert spaces waiting to be acted upon, but relational zones where core authority is filtered, recalibrated and selectively embedded.
Southeast Asia exemplifies this proposition. Situated at the intersection of civilisational, imperial and great-power spheres, the region’s polities developed long-standing orientations – consolidation and decentring – to navigate, engage and recalibrate core-led ordering projects. These orientations are not reducible to adaptation or resistance; they are patterned responses to enduring asymmetries in material power and normative recognition. Southeast Asian actors did not merely absorb civilisational or imperial influences; they participated in shaping how authority circulated, how norms were embedded and how linkages were configured. In doing so, they sustained a polycentric and heterarchical transregional architecture that resisted the totalising pull of any single hegemon.
This account unsettles the disciplinary geography of Global IR in three ways. First, it offers a historically dynamic understanding of peripheries – not as frozen categories of marginality, but as shifting and responsive actors that continuously recalibrate their orientations in response to changing external configurations. Second, it proposes a relational ontology of core-periphery relations in which the functioning of core-led order – its boundaries, density and linkages – is co-constituted through interactions with peripheral actors. Imperial ideologies, civilisational grammars and liberal ordering principles have all been recalibrated through encounters with the periphery – whether through friction, translation or selective appropriation. Third, it moves beyond regional exceptionalism. While Southeast Asia provides an empirically rich case, the proposed conceptual framework has wider applicability, offering analytical traction across diverse world-historical contexts. Zones such as the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Korean Peninsula and the Horn of Africa have similarly mediated overlapping core interests through practices of brokerage, localisation and hybridisation. These comparative possibilities merit further theorisation.
In centring the regional periphery as an analytical category, this paper contributes to Global IR by offering a framework that is at once relational, historically grounded and pluralist. It invites IR scholars to revisit foundational questions about agency, authority and order not from the perspective of regional cores, but from the edges – where world politics is often most visible in its complexity, contingency and creativity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2025 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in Chicago and the Graduate Research and Development Network on Asian Security (GRADNAS) online seminar at the Australian National University (ANU). I am grateful to Professor Evelyn Goh, Associate Professor Manjeet S. Pardesi, Quah Say Jye, and the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive feedback, which helped sharpen the conceptual framing and empirical arguments of the paper. I also thank the ISA panel and participants in the GRADNAS seminar for their thoughtful questions and engaging discussions, which prompted further reflection and revision. I further acknowledge the generous financial support provided by Professor Evelyn Goh through the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, which enabled my travel to and participation in the ISA Annual Convention.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
