Charting into New Waters: Towards ASEAN Political Security Community 2015 (original) (raw)

As the deadline of the ASEAN Community Blueprint approaches, it is important for academics and policy-makers in the Southeast Asian region (SEAR) to reassess the process of integration that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is taking. As ASEAN takes a step further into realizing its vision of "deeper community", this paper interrogates the SEAR's prospects for integration into a political-security community in which relationship between members of a community is regulated by norms and an institutional mechanism for pacific settlement of disputes at a regional level. It primarily argues that the role of political-security norms and identity is quintessential in SEAR's integration in the political-security dimension. Accordingly, a constructivist framework of analysis is employed in assessing the prevailing regional norms and identity in relation to the formative function in regional integration.