Introduction

The Southeast Asian region provides a good test bed to examine how non-traditional security (NTS) issues have been governed. Over the past two decades, the region had experienced a number of crises that have had significant impact on the security agenda of states and the nature of multilateral security and development cooperation that have evolved within and beyond Southeast Asia. Among the most consequential crises that have occurred were the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the health emergencies caused by SARS epidemic in 2003 and H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2005, the catastrophic devastations brought on by large-scale natural disasters like Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, the multi-faceted impact of the transboundary haze in 2015 and the escalation of the Rohingya refugee issue in 2017. While these security problems are typically non-military in nature, they are referred to as NTS issues since they are found to gravely threaten the survival and well-being of states and societies. There is increasing and disquieting evidence that the impact of NTS issues like climate change and its attendant threats, forced migration, and emerging infectious diseases, among others, threatens the lives of countless vulnerable communities and risks the future progress upon which societies across the world depend on. To be sure, these kinds of issues have seriously challenged regional stability, peace and security. More importantly, these concerns have raised questions on how security is governed from the national, regional and even to the global level, and consequently brought to scrutiny the kinds of policies and institutions that have been developed to address them.

The impact of NTS has led a number of scholars in Southeast Asia and other subregions in Asia to examine why and how certain issues should be securitized, and analyse how they pose a threat to state and human security. Many of these studies have also proposed measures on how governments and regional institutions like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could deal with NTS threats more effectively.