Security and Southeast Asia: Domestic, Regional, and Global Issues (review)

Book Reviews Security and SoutheastAsia: Domestic, Regional, and Global Issues. By Alan Collins. Colorado, USA: Lynne Rienner, 2003. 245pp. This study by Alan Collins offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of Southeast Asia's international relations and foreign policies from the standpoint of critical or non-traditional security theory. Invoking concepts such as human security and securitization (the discursive process by which specific issues become framed as matters of national security), the work provides a useful and well-informed survey of the evolution of Southeast Asia's security agenda. In a clear, accessible literature review in Chapter 1, Collins summarizes the critical security approach as advancing two core propositions: the need to broaden the scope of security analysis from traditional politico-military affairs to embrace non-traditional security issues like environmental degradation and socio-economic stability, and second, the importance of considering multiple security referents — not simply the state, but civil society, ethnic groups, individuals. The author asserts that critical security theory is particularly relevant in studying security practice in the "Third World", where state-society relationships are often more contested than in better-institutionalized polities. In this crucial respect, Southeast Asia qualifies as a Third World region, despite the fact that several of its constituent nations have a comparatively successful record ofsocio-economic development. According to Collins, at the core of Southeast Asia's security dynamics lies ongoing contestation between elites and broader societal constituencies over the processes of state- and nation-building. He writes (p. 10), "The primacy of internal threats to state security, and 376 Book Reviews377 especially regime security, most readily makes Southeast Asia a part of the third world ... The key to understanding the security issues in Southeast Asia is legitimacy; and the legitimacy in question concerns both the regimes in power and the state's borders." The book thus focuses first on internal threats to security. Chapter 2 takes up what the author terms "societal security" and focuses on the ethnic and other communal tensions that menace social stability in many Southeast Asian countries. The discussion touches on themes well known to students of Southeast Asia's comparative politics, as when it contrasts assimilationist or accommodationist approaches towards the task of nation building in plural societies. Political or regime security is addressed in Chapter 3. This chapter's key claim is that regime security depends upon legitimacy, which in turn relies on well-institutionalized political systems that allow popular demands to be expressed and satisfied through existing political frameworks. Democracy is neither necessary nor sufficient. Rather, the key is a regime's capacity for "self-renewal", meaning some form of elite circulation in response to popular demands for improved performance in solving social or economic problems and delivering development. In such systems, the expression of political opposition need not threaten the continuation of the regime itself, and thereby need not become "securitized". Alas, the author avers, the requisite level of institutionalization is frequently lacking, and the region's otherwise dissimilar political systems face similar syndromes of chronic regime insecurity. In contrast to most writing on political institutionalization, he suggests significant commonalities between the Singaporean state and other Southeast Asian polities in this regard (pp. 71-74). The remaining chapters take up regional security issues. Chapter 4 surveys Southeast Asian states' pursuit of military-strategic security, their responses to environmental damage, resource scarcity and competition, and their efforts to secure economic prosperity through trade cooperation and combating piracy. Chapter 5 analyses ASEAN's record, accomplishments, and weaknesses, while Chapter 6 considers Southeast Asia's relations with external powers in the context of international relations in the wider Asia-Pacific. Chapter 7, the book's final one, presents case studies of territorial disputes in the South China Sea and initial post-September 11 responses to the threat of trans-border terrorism. As the Preface states, the book is aimed at a wide audience including undergraduate students (Collins refers specialists to his 1999 book, The Security Dilemmas ofSoutheast Asia). The author's main purpose is to demonstrate the general utility ofcritical security studies in interpreting Southeast Asia's international relations. Critical security theory is thus 378Book Reviews employed as an analytic lens for a tour d'horizon survey, rather...