Stanford University

Will the Real ASEAN Please Stand Up? Security, Community, and Democracy in Southeast Asia

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In 2007 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will be forty years old. Yet the most basic questions about it remain controversial. What exactly is it? An organization? A discourse? A regime? A concert? A community? A facade? None, one, some, or all of the above? Has it succeeded? Has it failed? Both? To what extent? How? Why? In the context of these uncertainties, this talk will explore three topics: (1) the controversy over whether ASEAN is, or is not, a "security community"; (2) the incompatibility of member sovereignty versus member democracy as principles of ASEAN cooperation; and (3) the implications of (1) and (2) for US-ASEAN relations. The talk will draw mainly on two sources: a paper that can be downloaded; and a March 2005 research-and-conferencing trip to Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.

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Donald K. Emmerson

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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Affiliated Faculty, CDDRL
Affiliated Scholar, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
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At Stanford, in addition to his work for the Southeast Asia Program and his affiliations with CDDRL and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Donald Emmerson has taught courses on Southeast Asia in East Asian Studies, International Policy Studies, and Political Science. He is active as an analyst of current policy issues involving Asia. In 2010 the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded him a two-year Research Associateship given to “top scholars from across the United States” who “have successfully bridged the gap between the academy and policy.”

Emmerson’s research interests include Southeast Asia-China-US relations, the South China Sea, and the future of ASEAN. His publications, authored or edited, span more than a dozen books and monographs and some 200 articles, chapters, and shorter pieces.  Recent writings include The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (ed., 2020); “‘No Sole Control’ in the South China Sea,” in Asia Policy  (2019); ASEAN @ 50, Southeast Asia @ Risk: What Should Be Done? (ed., 2018); “Singapore and Goliath?,” in Journal of Democracy (2018); “Mapping ASEAN’s Futures,” in Contemporary Southeast Asia (2017); and “ASEAN Between China and America: Is It Time to Try Horsing the Cow?,” in Trans-Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia (2017).

Earlier work includes “Sunnylands or Rancho Mirage? ASEAN and the South China Sea,” in YaleGlobal (2016); “The Spectrum of Comparisons: A Discussion,” in Pacific Affairs (2014); “Facts, Minds, and Formats: Scholarship and Political Change in Indonesia” in Indonesian Studies: The State of the Field (2013); “Is Indonesia Rising? It Depends” in Indonesia Rising (2012); “Southeast Asia: Minding the Gap between Democracy and Governance,” in Journal of Democracy (April 2012); “The Problem and Promise of Focality in World Affairs,” in Strategic Review (August 2011); An American Place at an Asian Table? Regionalism and Its Reasons (2011); Asian Regionalism and US Policy: The Case for Creative Adaptation (2010); “The Useful Diversity of ‘Islamism’” and “Islamism: Pros, Cons, and Contexts” in Islamism: Conflicting Perspectives on Political Islam (2009); “Crisis and Consensus: America and ASEAN in a New Global Context” in Refreshing U.S.-Thai Relations (2009); and Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (edited, 2008).

Prior to moving to Stanford in 1999, Emmerson was a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he won a campus-wide teaching award. That same year he helped monitor voting in Indonesia and East Timor for the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center. In the course of his career, he has taken part in numerous policy-related working groups focused on topics related to Southeast Asia; has testified before House and Senate committees on Asian affairs; and been a regular at gatherings such as the Asia Pacific Roundtable (Kuala Lumpur), the Bali Democracy Forum (Nusa Dua), and the Shangri-La Dialogue (Singapore). Places where he has held various visiting fellowships, including the Institute for Advanced Study and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 



Emmerson has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale and a BA in international affairs from Princeton. He is fluent in Indonesian, was fluent in French, and has lectured and written in both languages. He has lesser competence in Dutch, Javanese, and Russian. A former slam poet in English, he enjoys the spoken word and reads occasionally under a nom de plume with the Not Yet Dead Poets Society in Redwood City, CA. He and his wife Carolyn met in high school in Lebanon. They have two children. He was born in Tokyo, the son of U.S. Foreign Service Officer John K. Emmerson, who wrote the Japanese Thread among other books.

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Southeast Asia Program

Islam Is not the Solution (Or the Problem): A Rationalist Approach to Islamists and Democracy

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Dr. Brumberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He received his BA in French and Political Science from Indiana University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. From 1991 to 1993 he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, and a Visiting Fellow in the Middle East Program in the Jimmy Carter Center.

He lived and studied in Egypt for three years, and has also conducted field research in Iran, Indonesia and Kuwait. The author of many articles on political and social change in the Middle East and wider Islamic World, his Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran was published in April 2001 by The University of Chicago Press.

A member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Democracy and the Advisory Board of the International Forum on Democratic Studies, Dr. Brumberg is also Chairman of the non-profit Foundation on Democratization and Political Change in the Middle East. In 1998-1999 he was a Randolph Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, where he pursued a study of power sharing in the Middle East and South East Asia.

Drawing from this research, Dr. Brumberg is now writing a comparative study of successful and failed power sharing experiments in Algeria, Kuwait and Indonesia.

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Daniel Brumberg Associate Professor of Government Georgetown University
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Military-backed militia sets up Aceh relief effort; critics fear Laskar group will undermine ceasefire

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Donald K. Emmerson, director of Stanford University's Southeast Asia Program, said elements within the Indonesian military have "a reputation for corruption and brutality" and, in East Timor and Papua, have shown a "willingness to work with what might be called entrepreneurs of violence."

Though he said he could not confirm the presence in Aceh of the Laskar Merah Putih militia, he said, "It would be a worst-case scenario if someone in the military were trying to use militias to help carry out repression."

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Worsened by war: Two hard-hit areas beset by civil strife

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For the two regions hardest hit by the Asian tsunamis, international relief efforts are being complicated by more than the rising death tolls and physical devastation: They are also war zones. APARC's Donald K. Emmerson comments.

Washington -- For the two regions hit hardest by the Asian tsunami waves, international relief efforts are being complicated by more than the rising death tolls and physical devastation -- they are also war zones.

In the Indian Ocean nation of Sri Lanka and Indonesia's western Aceh province, bitter conflicts threaten to slow even further the painstaking work of locating victims, repairing infrastructure and caring for hundreds of thousands of refugees, according to relief workers and regional experts.

The Sri Lankan government and the rebel Tamil Tigers, which have fought a two-decade civil war, Tuesday traded barbs over the relief efforts and refused to work together -- and instead launched competing efforts.

Across the Indian Ocean, at the northern tip of Sumatra Island in Indonesia, the province of Aceh has been a no-go zone for most international aid organizations and journalists since May 2003, when a new government crackdown was launched in the 28-year struggle against the Free Aceh Movement.

Aid organizations scrambled to get into Aceh while former residents seeking to go back to find relatives complained Tuesday that the Indonesian government, which has been accused of widespread human rights violations in the area, continued to limit access, providing only two-week visas.

Academic analysts expressed hope that the tsunami tragedy might spur some badly needed progress in the two conflicts by creating opportunities for humanitarian cooperation. But at least in the short term, the warring factions were jockeying for advantage -- and in the process slowing rescue and relief efforts and putting more lives at risk.

"The contending sides, both in Sri Lanka and Aceh, are racing to provide relief," said Donald Emmerson, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies and director of the Southeast Asian Forum.

"At stake is the legitimacy of the government on the one hand -- Colombo and Jakarta -- and the Tamil Tigers and the Free Aceh Movement on the other. If the response of the Sri Lankan and Indonesian governments is insufficient, there could be a crisis of legitimacy in those two areas, which have been engaged in civil war for some decades," he said.

In Sri Lanka, the minority Tamils, who are Hindu, have waged civil war against the country's majority Buddhists since 1983, and a 2002 cease-fire remains brittle. "Tens of thousands have died in an ethnic conflict that continues to fester" since the cease-fire, according to an unclassified report by the CIA.

The Tamil rebels control much of the country's north and east, including coastal areas severely damaged by the tsunami. The Tamil Tigers are conducting their own relief efforts and have made separate appeals to donor countries and the United Nations for assistance.

Even the immense scale of the tsunami damage did not appear to tamp down the deep-seated atmosphere of confrontation.

The Tamil Rehabilitation Organization said in a statement that "assistance channeled through the government of Sri Lanka has failed to reach the displaced in the northeast." It said that one-fourth of the people killed in the northeast were in Tamil-controlled areas.

A military spokesman, Brig. Daya Ratnayake, responded that the government was doing everything it can to help those affected in government-controlled areas and criticized the rebels for trying to score points amid the suffering.

In Aceh, where rebels are waging a fight for independence, there were some hopeful signs in the face of the horrific destruction. The Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement reportedly agreed to a cease-fire Tuesday to let aid efforts reach those in need.

However, aid officials worried that it would take days to get assistance to Aceh, where the majority of Indonesia's deaths occurred. And they said the conflict already has constrained aid efforts by limiting access to the region.

"International nongovernmental organizations have not been allowed into the conflict area since May 2003," said Michael Beer of the Washington-based Nonviolence International, whose field office in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh was lost, along with three of its four staff members. "This has hampered efforts already. The conflict has set back the international community, because they are starting from zero and have been excluded for political reasons."

"Even without the rebellion it is a tough area for the government to go in," said Blair King of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a nonprofit in Washington. "That is exacerbated by the political situation."

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Picking Fights: Interpreting State Repression in Southeast Asia and Beyond

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Often those who report or analyze state repression emphasize its intensity without exploring its logic. Drawing on his latest book, Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia (2004), Prof. Boudreau will treat state repression as a strategic activity designed to undercut threats, defeat rivals, and strengthen new regimes with reference to the dictatorships of Ne Win in Burma, Suharto in Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. He will highlight state capacity, social challenges, and how they interact in struggles for power. By asking what state repressions seems designed to accomplish, Boudreau seeks to develop a more fully political understanding of state violence in relation to social resistance.

Vincent Boudreau heads the Department of Political Science and the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York. His many publications include a unique study of the internal dynamics of anti-regime activism in the Philippines, Grassroots and Cadre in the Protest Movement (2001). He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1993.

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Vince Boudreau Associate Professor of Political Science City College of New York
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Southeast Asia Program

Asian Melodrama: Does China's Development Threaten Southeast Asia's?

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China's rapid growth and increasingly close integration with world markets is transforming Northeast and Southeast Asian regional production and trade. Southeast Asia's relatively resource-abundant economies are expected to lose comparative advantage in low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing activities while gaining comparative advantage in natural resource products. The latter shift will increase incentives to exploit and export the products of forestry, fisheries, and agriculture.

What are the implications for long-run growth and welfare, particularly in the poorest and least industrialized economies, including Indonesia and Vietnam? How will this trend interact with the other major phenomenon sweeping through Southeast Asia, i.e., decentralization? With reduced national authority and minimal local accountability, the potential for disastrous rates of resource exploitation is high. A race to liquidate natural resource assets, if sufficiently pronounced, could expose parts of the region to a new variant of the "natural resource curse" - the idea that resource-abundant economies grow more slowly than others.

Ian Coxhead is an economist and serves as director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His specialty is the economic development of Southeast Asia. His many publications on trade, development and the environment include The Open Economy and the Environment: Development, Trade and Resources in Asia (2003, with Sisira Jayasuriya). Prof. Coxhead's current research features the impacts of globalization, regional growth, and domestic policy reforms on the structures of production and employment, issues of poverty and the environment, and the exploitation of natural resources in Vietnam and the Philippines.

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Ian Coxhead Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Southeast Asia Program

Using Climate Models to Improve Indonesian Food Security

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El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events exert significant influence on Southeast Asian rice output and markets. This paper measures ENSO effects on Indonesia's national and regional rice production and on world rice prices, using the August Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) to gauge climate variability. It shows that each degree Celsius change in the August SSTA produces a 1,318,000 metric ton effect on output and a $21/metric ton change in the world price for lower quality rice. Of the inter-annual production changes due to SSTA variation, 90% occur within 12 provinces, notably Java and South Sulawesi. New data and models offer opportunities to understand the agricultural effects of ENSO events, to reach early consensus on coming ENSO effects, and to use forecasting to improve agencies' and individuals' capacity to mitigate climate effects on food security. We propose that Indonesia hold an "ENSO summit" each September to analyse the food-security implications of upcoming climate events.

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Blood, Sweat, (Oil), and Tears: Corporate Responsibility, Human Rights, and Foreign Policy in the Asia-Pacific Region

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Bennett Freeman is a managing director in the Washington, DC office of Burson-Marsteller, where he leads the firm's Global Corporate Responsibility practice advising multinational corporations on issues ranging from human rights and labor practices to the environment and sustainable development. Prior to joining Burson-Marsteller in May 2003, Freeman advised companies, international institutions and NGOs on corporate responsibility and human rights as Principal of Sustainable Investment Strategies. In 2002, he co-authored an independent Human Rights Impact Assessment of the BP Tangguh project in Papua, Indonesia, the first such assessment undertaken in advance of a major energy project in the world.

Freeman served as a presidential appointee in three positions in the State Department across the full span of the Clinton Administration. As U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1999 to early 2001, Freeman led the State Department's bilateral human rights diplomacy around the world under Assistant Secretary Harold Koh. In that capacity, he was the principal architect of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, the first human rights standard forged by governments, companies and NGOs for the oil and mining industries. Previously he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and chief speechwriter for Secretary of State Warren Christopher from early 1993 to early 1997.

A buffet lunch will be available to those who reserve with Debbie Warren dawarren@stanford.edu by Friday, November 12.

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Bennett Freeman former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
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Walter H. Shorenstein Forum for Asia Pacific Studies

Indonesian President Yudhoyono's First Thirty Days: An Evaluation + Prospects for the Future

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Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is Indonesia's new president. He and his vice presidential running mate, Jusuf Kalla, were elected by a landslide on 20 September 2004 and inaugurated one month later. On 18 November, when Prof. Liddle speaks, the new government will have been in office for nearly a month. What can be said about its performance to date - and in the future? Prof. Liddle will cover a range of topics related to the new leadership in Jakarta, including the prospects for democratic consolidation.

R. William Liddle is a well-known Indonesia specialist. He has written about Indonesian politics since the early 1960s. His recent scholarly publications include: "Indonesia's Approaching Elections: Politics, Islam, and Public Opinion" (with Saiful Mujani), Journal of Democracy (January 2004) and "Indonesia's Democratic Transition: Playing by the Rules," in Andrew Reynolds, ed., The Architecture of Democracy (2002). Prof. Liddle writes and speaks often for international and Indonesian media.

Bahtiar Effendy has written widely on Islam and politics in Indonesia. His latest book is Islam and the State in Indonesia (2003). He is deputy director of the Institute for the Study and Advancement of Business Ethics. He also co-hosts a popular Indonesian television talk show on public affairs.

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R. William Liddle Professor of Political Science Speaker Ohio State University
Bahtiar Effendy Lecturer Commentator University of Indonesia and Islamic State University, Jakarta
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Southeast Asia Program
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