AEI Insights

In this challenging environment of declining trust in the Washington Consensus and its institutional frameworks—the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO)—Global South states must navigate beyond the hub-and-spokes system that underpins the current world order, with the United States as the custodian and hegemonic power holding the system together. These states increasingly witness the diminishing authority of the United Nations (UN) Security Council and its functionaries, such as the International Court of Justice, which was originally conceived to promote peace but is now perceived as being weaponized by powerful leaders to safeguard their hegemonic interests.

In this edition, K.S. Nathan examines the economic, political, and security nexus between Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. He argues that India, Japan, Australia, the European Union, and the United States can legitimately claim it is in their core interests to ensure a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), countering China's purported "peaceful rise" in the South China Sea (SCS). Examining the regionalism and securitization of porous borders in the SCS, Gayathri A. Muruga Subramaniam and Kevin Fernandez contend that by integrating security enforcement with sustainable development and regional diplomacy, Malaysia can strengthen its governance in Sabah and reinforce its role as a key security actor in Southeast Asia.

Peter Brian M. Wang's regionalist perspective advocates for greater economic integration within ASEAN by strengthening regional value chains and regulatory cooperation, reinforcing member countries' economic fundamentals and reinventing, restructuring, and recalibrating their economies, while leveraging each other’s strengths, thereby strengthening its resilience against the impact from the intensifying of US-China competition . Johan Savaramuthu proposes that ASEAN could address the Myanmar crisis by instituting more efficacious processes toward establishing a legitimate Myanmar state and more robust procedures to validate the sovereign accountability of member-states. He argues that, as demonstrated during the Cambodian crisis, ASEAN has room to evolve and play a more pivotal role in establishing its own rules-based order for maintaining sovereignty and political legitimacy among member states. Building on the argument of ASEAN centrality, Geetha Govindasamy contends that ASEAN, with Malaysia as chair, can also contribute meaningfully to reviving inter-Korean relations.