John D. Ciorciari was a Shorenstein Fellow at APARC in 2007-08 and an affiliate of APARC and SEAF in 2008-09 while a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.   Upon leaving Stanford he took up a position as an assistant professor in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

A main purpose of the Shorenstein Fellowship is to enable post-docs to revise their dissertations for publication.  John did exactly that.  In 2010 Georgetown University Press will publish The Limits of Alignment in the Global South:  Southeast Asia since 1975.  Congratulations, John!

During his association with SEAF John also finished co-editing and co-authoring a monograph on the (in)famous Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia.  In 2009 the Documentation Center of Cambodia published the result:  On Trial: The Khmer Rouge Accountability Press.

On Trial is dedicated to “the victims of [Pol Pot’s grossly misnamed] Democratic Kampuchea and to promoting a legal accountability process that will honor their memories and provide their families with justice.”

Sophal Ear, an assistant professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey) and himself a survivor of Pol Pot’s regime praised On Trial as an “excellent,” “thoughtful,” “timely,” and “essential book.”

The renowned historian of Cambodia David Chandler—a professor emeritus at Monash University (Australia) and a former SEAF speaker—also lauded the book: 

“This invaluable collection of essays, sponsored by the Cambodian NGO that has pioneered research on the Khmer Rouge era, provides a wealth of information about the so-called Khmer Rouge Tribunal.  On Trial is accessible, well researched, and passionately engaged with the innumerable tragedies of the Khmer Rouge period.  Its authors argue that the ongoing trials may possibly lead toward deeper reconciliation and certainly a deeper knowledge of what happened throughout the country in those horrific years.”

Other publications stemming from John’s time at Stanford include these three wide-ranging titles, all published in January 2009: 

“The Balance of Great-power Influence in Contemporary Southeast Asia,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (9: 1), pp. 157-196; International Politics and the Mess in Myanmar, JPRI Working Paper No. 114, Japan Policy Research Institute; and An Asian Monetary Fund in the Making? SCID Working Paper No. 378, Stanford Center for International Development.

While at Stanford in 2008-09 John also gave off-campus presentations on topics including Asian security, Cambodian history, and alignment politics at Columbia, Princeton, and Chicago, among other universities, and the International Studies Association, among other professional-society venues.

Future Shorenstein Fellows take note:  John Ciorciari is a tough act to follow.  SEAF wishes him the best of success in his future endeavors.

Edited by SEAF Director Don Emmerson and co-published in 2008-09 by APARC at Stanford and ISEAS in Singapore, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia continues to attract attention. Excerpted below are two differing but equally thoughtful recent reviews:

Noel M. Morada is a professor of political science at the University of the Philippines-Diliman and director of the Philippines Progamme in the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) at the University Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Writing in Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, 23: 2 (2008), pp. 119-122, Prof. Morada found the title of Hard Choices “apt” because its authors “ask hard questions—including philosophical ones—on the merits and demerits of pushing for a more ‘people-centered’ ASEAN, the challenges and constraints in implementing Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles in the region, as well as the possible directions that ASEAN may take in the near future.”

A “good thing” about the book, in his view, “is that the reader is left to make his or her own conclusions” about “the issues and arguments” that it presents. He notes the variety of backgrounds of the authors: from scholars based far from Southeast Asia, through local analysts on Track II, to an official from inside the ASEAN secretariat itself. Their chapters, in his judgment, contribute significantly to current debates about what balance that ASEAN should strike between “state-centered and society-centered conceptions of security,” including “the dilemmas and constraints” that state and societal actors face in pursuing a more “participatory” kind of regionalism in Southeast Asia.

Among the issues featured in Hard Choices, Morada cites “the thorny problem of intervention in the domestic affairs of [ASEAN] members,” including the challenge to regionalism posed by Myanmar’s rulers, and whether or not the ASEAN Charter can facilitate a response or may itself be an obstacle to reform. While highlighting the relative optimism of Mely Caballero-Anthony’s chapter on non-traditional security, he finds a consensus among the book’s authors that “ASEAN’s traditional norms—i.e., state sovereignty and non-interference—still rule.”

Prof. Morada ends his review thus: “This should be a required reading for graduate students specializing in Southeast Asia and a must have for ASEAN specialists and observers. More importantly, civil society groups would benefit immensely from reading this volume as part of their education about ASEAN, on which many remain uninformed. Many of my friends in the academic community in the region have in fact been quite disappointed with many civil society groups who simply want to push their agenda but have not done their homework on the workings of ASEAN. This book should help enlighten them further.”

Lee Jones is a lecturer in the Department of Politics at the College of Queen Mary, University of London.

Writing for a future issue of the ASEASUK Newsletter, a publication of the Association of Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom, Dr. Jones, unlike Prof. Morada, misses a firmer editorial hand. “Theoretical engagement is relatively sparse,” writes Jones, “and the book would have benefited from an overarching framework to help structure and guide the contributions. Particularly given many contributors’ focus on Myanmar, ASEAN’s policies towards it, and ASEAN’s recent institutional evolution, an early chapter agreeing [to] a collective account of these matters would have left more space for analysis and argumentation.”

Jones singles out the chapter by “veteran official Termsak Chalermpalanupap” as “a highly informative overview of ASEAN’s institutional development which will be useful for all students of ASEAN.” Chapters by Simon Tay (on air pollution) and Michael Malley (on nuclear energy) are also praised by Jones as demonstrating that “democratisation does not (as other contributors imply) automatically produce either more liberal policies or enhanced regional cooperation.” On the contrary, writes Jones, “democratisation can give vent to illiberal, nationalist and uncooperative sentiments, particularly when dominated (as ASEAN polities are) by cynical oligarchs. It is disappointing, therefore, that none of the chapters engages in systematic analysis of the domestic social forces at work in ASEAN states.”

“On balance,” for Jones, “the evidence in Hard Choices seems to favour the pessimist viewpoint. The basis for concluding that civil society has shattered elites’ monopoly on policymaking is rather weak. None of the pro-intervention authors sufficiently counter[s] the pragmatist challenge that ASEAN coherence could not withstand the adoption of a more liberal-interventionist posture. However, this is a contingent judgment which should not lead us simply to endorse the status quo. … [T] he fate of individual countries and the overall direction and content of ASEAN regionalism depends ultimately on the struggles of ASEAN’s own citizens.

Concludes Jones: “A clear-sighted analysis of the respective strengths and weaknesses of the force of movement and reaction, without succumbing to the defeatism of endorsing authoritarianism or the romanticism of believing that democratic institutions alone imply the victory of civil society (or that ASEAN can do much to create such institutions), is therefore vital for understanding the region’s prospects.”

It is widely acknowledged that Southeast Asia stands at a fork in the road. The ratification and adoption of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Charter in 2008 has given the regional body new found legal status, and the proposed establishment of an ASEAN Political-Security Community, Economic Community, Socio-Cultural Community and human rights body raises the potential for the rise of a strengthened form of regionalism in Southeast Asia, where ASEAN becomes not merely a forum for communication between Member States but an actor in its own right. However, working against this momentum has been a discernible stalling of democratisation and continuing commitment to traditional principles such as non-interference and consensus decision-making, which, in the eyes of some critics, produced a lowest common denominator approach to drafting the Charter. Both of these positions are canvassed and reviewed in this excellent collection, which offers sober and well-informed analysis of the predicaments that the region now confronts. Combining broad assessments of the relationship between security, democracy and regionalism with detailed analysis of the Charter and reform process, and telling insights into major controversies, such as the question of human rights in Myanmar, the problem of the haze in Indonesia, and the question of nuclear security, this is a model of balanced and sensible analysis.
 
The book is organised into four main sections, the first being a deeply insightful introduction by the editor. Too often, editorial introductions do little other than summarise the preceding chapters, but in this volume, Emmerson carefully places the key concepts in their proper context, neatly sets out the nature of the dilemmas currently confronting the region and provides insight into some of the most important contemporary crises – especially that relating to Myanmar. Subsequent sections focus on: ‘Assessments’ – of ASEAN and its reform process; ‘Issues’ – spanning democratisations, Myanmar, non-traditional security, the haze and nuclear security; Sukma’s discussion of democratisation and Caballero-Anthony’s account of non-traditional security stand out here; and ‘Arguments’ – namely, David Martin Jones’ calling for the privileging of prudence and decency over idealism and hasty democratisation, and Erik Martinez Kuhonta’s setting out the pros and cons of non-interference and intervention for human rights.
 
Overall, this book is very hard to fault. It combines a range of perspectives, including academic and policy perspectives, canvasses a number of relevant issues and provides the reader with a very good sense of the critical concerns. In short, those interested in understanding Southeast Asia’s contemporary fork in the road should start by reading this excellent volume.
 
Reviewer: Alex Bellamy, Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.  This review is reproduced with the permission of Asia Pacific Viewpoint.

In Southeast Asia, and particularly for for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), security has long trumped democracy as a priority. But the brutal dictatorship in Burma/Myanmar, political pluralism in Indonesia, and the global growth of democratic norms have led some Southeast Asians to question ASEAN’s habit of turning a blind eye to domestic abuses by member states. The concept of regional security, meanwhile, is being reoriented from military threats toward new dangers to health and the environment, and from state security toward human security.

Will promoting democracy cause local autocrats to hunker down, and split ASEAN into hostile camps? Will ignoring demands for democracy allow domestic pressures to rise to dangerous levels? Should Burma/Myanmar be expelled or engaged? How should ASEAN respond to nontraditional threats to security in which member states are themselves implicated? In Hard Choices, expert authors—including a foreword by Surin Pitsuwan, the current secretary-general of ASEAN—grapple with these and other key and controversial questions for Southeast Asia today—and tomorrow.