Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific

This book provides practice-oriented insights into the agency of two previously underestimated actors in Southeast Asian regionalism: the ASEAN Secretariat and ASEAN’s dialog partners. In doing so, it offers an inside view of the policymaking processes in the ASEAN Political-Security and the ASEAN Economic Community, analyzing the interplay and agency by both actors in agenda setting, formulation, decision-making, implementation, and monitoring. Drawing on a trove of novel data, including never-before analyzed sources and numerous interviews with ASEAN insiders, the book showcases a number of concrete cases of policymaking, including competition and counterterrorism policies. The chapters focusing on the ASEAN Secretariat address aspects related to institutional autonomy, capacity, and reforms within the bureaucracy. In the chapters on ASEAN's dialog partners, the book provides insights into the bilateral management of institutional support programs, as well as the impacts of support on ASEAN's policymaking processes.

The book addresses the urgent need for rethinking the geopolitics and ecology in the Himalaya, by emphasising the entanglements between these two factors. Most international relations analyses of the Himalaya emphasize the central role of the region’s states and their great power struggles. By reducing the region to its state actors, however, we miss the intense more-than-human diversity of the region, and the crucial role that the mountains play in the global environment.