For an institution such as ASEAN, subject to long-standing critique of its ineffectuality, the apparent lack of progress made on the security dilemmas facing South-East Asia and its member states suggests to many that it is struggling to assume a role in regional security governance. In Enacting the Security Community: ASEAN's Never-ending Story, Stéphanie Martel offers an alternative perspective, arguing that the much-derided process of consensus-building and dialogue in ASEAN governance acts as an instrument of discursive power that constitutes its self-identity as a security community. In doing so, she sheds light on how ASEAN constructs a sense of self through the practice of discourse that has granted it the resilience to survive repeated “foretellings of [its] demise” (p. 6). Turning to theory development, Martel leverages the case of ASEAN to explore broader questions on what it means to form security communities and the processes involved in bringing one into existence.
Martel situates the book in what she describes as the nascent “neo-constructivist” (p. 13) area of scholarship on ASEAN, along with security community-building more broadly. The book represents a novel examination in theoretical and empirical respects, and is thus a welcome expansion of security community literature beyond the EU and NATO, which tend to dominate it. The choice to employ discourse analysis to examine ASEAN's security community identity is also praiseworthy. The common critique that ASEAN serves largely as a talk-shop, producing more rhetoric than concrete action, almost invites a focus on language and discourse. If it produces talk, than what potential power or actual repercussions do that talk hold?
By focusing on the practice of discourse and the “social agents” involved, Martel develops a central premise asserting that three features characterise security community-building. Firstly, it is polysemic, where there are multiple interpretations of what the pursuit of security entails inside the community and where its boundaries or remit exist. Secondly, it is omnidirectional, because these distinct interpretations lead to different and, at times, conflicting agendas unfolding simultaneously. Debates arising from diffracted versions of the security community lead to the third point of it being a contested process, with a cast of “social agents” participating in competitive deliberation over priorities, meanings, and appropriate policy options.
These three characteristics together develop a picture of security-community building as a discursive practice which results in a “multiplicity” (p. 15) of visions coexisting at once, with all the ambiguity and incoherence that that entails. However, Martel makes the point that unravelling these visions creates a “productive tension” (p. 17) that provides security communities with a discursive power, allowing them to adapt and evolve even in the face of continual crises. The constant reformulation of ASEAN's security goals is a form of “ontological security” in this respect; because the absolute fulfilment of a security community's purpose – the absence of insecurity – would lead to its non-existence, ASEAN is in the process of creating a “never-ending story”, as the book's subtitle suggests, to guarantee its continued relevance.
The book consists of six substantive chapters arranged in two parts. The first part sets up the theoretical approach of the book's argument and places it within the contemporary debates on ASEAN as a security community. Chapter 2 focuses on those debates and provides the theoretical and methodological justification for a discourse analysis-based approach. Chapter 3 reviews the internal security discourse created by ASEAN member states from the time of its conception to the present day and, in doing so, establishes the historical trajectory of the three specific interpretations of insecurity, which are tackled in Part Two. Beginning the second part, Chapter 4 outlines the role of “non-traditional security” as a primary focus for ASEAN's drive to engender security cooperation among member states and with external partners. The “transnational dimension” (p. 103) of non-traditional security allows ASEAN to focus the origin of insecurity on non-state actors and avoid diminishing the norm of non-interference or placing blame on the state as the cause, whilst positioning itself as the “only possible vehicle” (p. 95) for regional security cooperation.
Chapter 5 focuses on the traditional security domain and how ASEAN has reckoned with interstate conflict management in light of growing major power rivalry and the South China Sea disputes with China. It also covers the reaction to recent developments in Asia-Pacific security architecture, such as the Quad and the rise of the “Indo-Pacific” as a regional framing. The more recent development of the human security lens within ASEAN is detailed in Chapter 6, noting that, while caution toward the concept's potential to be “intrusive on [member state's] domestic affairs” (p. 142) has meant it has not been fully adopted, elements have begun to be implicitly incorporated into internal discourse. Nonetheless, it has enabled civil society and NGOs to apply pressure on ASEAN and shape responses to issues such as trafficking in persons and the plight of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar.
In conclusion, Chapter 7 differentiates aspects of the three visions of security laid out in the previous three chapters to bolster the argument that security community-building is polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested. The discourse surrounding their constitution inside ASEAN from its foundation worked to secure its identity as a security community, despite seemingly unworkable contradictions between them and the constraints in aligning them with the principles of non-interference and consensus-building.
The strength of the framework Martel has created is evident through the ease with which it guides the reader through the distinct versions of ASEAN as a security community. For the most part, Martel navigates the reader clearly without getting lost in overlapping issues. Martel draws out several compelling findings from this approach, including the “constructive ambiguity” (p. 168) of non-traditional security that allows member states to adopt it, as a kind of regional security agenda, despite otherwise irreconcilable views. Having set out to provide one explanation for why ASEAN has sustained its relevance as a security community despite pressure from external actors over a lack of meaningful results, the book is successful in identifying discursive practice as a function which allows it to formulate multiple working visions of insecurity with which it can engender latent consensus among member states. In the process, it can also convey itself as the indisputable central player in resolving these threats within the community, both to external actors and to their domestic audiences.
While Martel is careful in defining the book's scope to focus squarely on discourse without delving into “underlying causes playing out in the background” (p. 171), some analysis to further the causal evidence of ASEAN's discursive power would have been welcomed. For example, one claim regarding ASEAN's ability to centre itself “as the unavoidable kingmaker of Asia-Pacific regionalism” (p. 124) in the traditional security domain is weakened by the absence of comparison to credible material factors. ASEAN may instead have benefited from the rise of Indo-Pacific strategies, placing South-East Asia and bilateral alliance networks – not ASEAN, per se – in a prime role in the regional order (Koga Reference Koga2022). Martel outlines the slow, haphazard response from ASEAN to the development of the Indo-Pacific concept, also noting that dialogue partners often appear to pay only “lip service” (p. 123) to the notion of ‘ASEAN centrality’. Additional consideration of these factors would have made the work more robust. That said, Martel could reasonably argue that the focus is on how ASEAN members have established the “we-feeling” of their security community, and so focusing on the perceptions of dialogue partners, beyond the contribution to fears around external interference or pressure that she ably covers, is outside the scope of the study.
Overall, the book is an insightful contribution to the literature on ASEAN's security governance and the discursive aspects of security community-building. While academics and graduate students will benefit from the entire contents, including the sections on theory and methodology, it would also be an enriching read for practitioners and those with professional interests in the social construction of regional security communities.
