Admirers of ASEAN are impressed with the fact that it continues to exist and that an outright war has never broken out between its members. Also often praised is the value to the region of promoting cooperation through the consensual process known as the ‘ASEAN Way’. If ASEAN is a talk shop, these observers say, talking is at least better than fighting. ASEAN's increasingly numerous and vocal critics reply that by valuing process more than product, consensus over accomplishment, the organization is failing to respond to urgent real-world challenges in Asia. Not least among such challenges is Chinese expansion in the South China Sea (SCS) and the stated intention of incoming US president Donald Trump to pull his country out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Only four ASEAN members have claims in the SCS and only four are in the TPP, but the sea's and the treaty's futures matter for the rest of the region as well. The fact of Chinese advancement and the risk of American disengagement are endangering the autonomy and relevance of ASEAN, not to mention the repercussions of Sino-American escalation. Already weakened by internal dissensus, the group's ability to negotiate as a group with China on maritime security has been blocked by Beijing's insistence on bilateral talks. Chinese material largesse has coopted Cambodia into vetoing any ASEAN agreement to restrain, moderate, or even question China's designs on the heartwater of Southeast Asia. The ASEAN Way is being used against ASEAN itself. Heightened uncertainty as to America's future role in and commitment to the region further heightens security concern. In its 50th anniversary year, Southeast Asians would do well to think outside the increasingly marginalised, internally divided, and procedurally restricted box that ASEAN has become. Three ideas already in circulation illustrate the kind of creativity that ASEAN will need if it is to sustain its acknowledged historical success in fashioning an independent political and economic identity for Southeast Asia.

On 31 December 2015, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) announced the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). In theory, this agreement has produced association-wide economic integration. However, following the announcement and for the foreseeable future, ASEAN member states will continue to have significantly less than full regional economic integration. Why? Some observers believe that the AEC plans involve an overly ambitious timeline and too many ill-thought-out initiatives. Others point to ASEAN's traditional aversion to legally binding agreements. While progress has been made in reducing or eliminating intra-ASEAN trade tariffs, substantial non-tariff barriers to trade persist. However, for most member states, the ASEAN market is relatively small, while external markets, especially China, are growing rapidly. Given this outward orientation for ASEAN trade, is the lack of an unhindered regional market really a problem?

With the resignation of President Soeharto in 1998 and subsequent democratization, Indonesia's foreign policy underwent major changes. More stakeholders than under Soeharto's New Order regime are now participating in foreign-policy making. The country seemed to make democracy promotion a hallmark of its foreign policy, especially under the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–2014). This raises the questions of whether and, if so, to what extent Indonesian democratization changed the country's established foreign-policy role conceptions and how much impact Indonesia's democratization had on the democratization of regional governance. The paper seeks to answer these questions by developing a theoretical framework based on a constructivist version of role theory. On the basis of speeches held by Indonesian political leaders in the United Nations General Assembly and major domestic foreign-policy pronouncements, it documents changes in Indonesia's foreign-policy role concepts. It shows that, indeed, in the Era Reformasi, democracy became a major component in the country's foreign-policy role concept, although many elements of the role concept such as development orientation, Third Worldism, peace orientation, and a mediator's role remained constant. However, the litmus test for a democracy-oriented foreign policy, that is, the democratization of regional governance in Southeast Asia, remains ambiguous, and concrete policy initiatives often declaratory.

The paper explores whether the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has matured from a weak cooperative arrangement in its early days into a functioning security community by 2016. It first introduces a Deutschian and a constructivist understanding of security communities before examining ASEAN's involvement in the security realm since 1967. The paper claims that the regional body is not yet a security community, partly due to residual mistrust among its members, which undermines ASEAN's ability to address a series of ongoing inter-state disputes in Southeast Asia. While it has contributed to conflict avoidance, the Association has so far failed to conduct conflict resolution in spite of the ASEAN Political and Security Community initiative. The paper concludes that the failure to directly address and ultimately resolve sources of conflict in Southeast Asia has undermined the establishment of a security community in the region.

In this article, I argue that to capture ASEAN's importance in the promotion and protection of human rights requires embedding the analysis of what ASEAN says and does into an awareness of the broader human rights space of which it is a part. The Southeast Asian human rights space has four dimensions: ASEAN, domestic institutions, civil society, and the global United Nations system, all of which are increasingly linked together in a complex whole. Revealing this human rights space suggests three conclusions. First, ASEAN is important as an educator, enabler, standard setter, and mobiliser of human rights, often despite its flawed institutional design. This importance is the product of its own activities and how it is used by other actors. Second, ASEAN member states engage with each other on questions of human rights broadly, and not only through ASEAN, which illustrates the limits and resilience of the ‘ASEAN Way’ as a set of procedural norms. Third, ASEAN, despite its growing importance to human rights promotion, has become increasingly de-centred in that field, with serious consequences for its own security agenda.

Private sustainability standards for palm oil – RSPO certification and especially the POIG/No Deforestation standards – show more promise than ASEAN in addressing the political-economic drivers of the fires/haze in Indonesia. ‘Sovereignty-free’ private actors – global NGOs, philanthropic foundations, and social investors – harnessed transnational markets and used consumer product multinationals and Asian palm oil traders/processers as intermediaries to reach oil palm growers previously shielded from private regulation. Exclusion of state actors gave regulatory entrepreneurs a freer hand to institute more stringent standards. This contrasts with ASEAN regional governance where state control of regional governance deflects global and local pressure for change. There are limitations, however, to the reach of voluntary private standards, which cannot address irresponsible cultivation practices in illegal supply chains and those catering to the domestic market, despite NGOs and other private regulatory entrepreneurs acting as ‘functional equivalents’ of state authorities in driving change. Nevertheless, palm oil's economic importance to Indonesia and the global market transformations underway mean that global private standards have a first-mover advantage. However, central state actors have denounced private standards as intrusions on national sovereignty. While private standards have sparked national conversations on sustainability, the political bargaining between state authority, private regulators, and their proponents is only just beginning.

A paradox lies at the heart of the biennial Southeast Asian (SEA) Games. On the one hand, the region's premier sporting event has consistently celebrated themes of regional friendship and cooperation; on the other, the SEA Games are synonymous with controversy and poor sportsmanship, especially over the strategic selection of sports by host nations. Yet the Games go on – every second year – just as they have done since 1959. In introducing sport to existing debates on regional community in Southeast Asia, this article seeks to understand the key features of the sporting community of the Southeast Asian Games, particularly the emergence and development of the institutions and norms that help this event to thrive in the face of national self-interest. Through this analysis, the article argues for a distinctive approach to regional community in Southeast Asia, based not on notions of unity but principles of reciprocity and exchange.

What drives institutional reforms in regional organisations? And what explains the institutional design of ASEAN? Despite many differences, conventional approaches to the institutional design of regional organisations more generally and ASEAN in particular are united in regarding them as either determined by factors endogenous to the region − such as varying state interests or collective norms − or as exogenously driven, most importantly by hegemonic states like the US or China. This article offers a diffusion account of ASEAN's institutional design. Building on a more recent strand in the diffusion literature emphasising that diffusion rarely leads to convergence, the article makes two genuine contributions. First, it argues that members of regional organisations engage in modular adoption: they select institutional templates from a variety of regional as well as international organisations thereby taking advantage of available information on the costs and benefits of alternative institutions. Second, it argues that contextual conditions and cognitive priors influence what templates are chosen. The argument will be illustrated with a case study on ASEAN's adoption of a single market and a dispute settlement mechanism. Finally, and contrary to arguments that institutional borrowing might increase the expectations-deliverance gap within regional organisations, it argues that if conducted consistently, modular adoption can lead to substantial innovation and success.