Chapter 27 - The ASEAN Regional Forum §

Class: IS308 Created Time: August 3, 2021 8:50 PM Database: Class Notes Database Last Edited Time: September 6, 2021 8:39 PM Type: Lecture, Reading Notes

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF ARF

• Confidence Building Measures (CBMs)?
  • Confidence-building measure, in international relations, an action that reflects goodwill toward or a willingness to exchange information with an adversary.
  • The purpose of such measures is to decrease misunderstanding, tension, fear, anxiety, and conflict between two or more parties by emphasizing trust and limiting conflict escalation as a form of preventive diplomacy.
• Preventive Diplomacy (PD)?
  • refers specifically to diplomatic action taken, at the earliest possible stage, “to prevent disputes from arising between parties, to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflicts and to limit the spread of the latter when they occur”
• Conflict Resolution?

ROLES OF ARF IN REGIONAL SECURITY

• Traditional security issues?
• Non-traditional security issues?

RELEVANCY OF ARF TO REGIONAL SECURITY (STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES)

What are the prospects of ARF? As many ARF officials have already realized, the ARF can only afford to remain as a mere forum for multilateral security dialogue, given the emergence of new security frameworks established in part with mounting frustration about the stagnation of its major agenda. Indeed, realizing the limitation of promoting practical security cooperation within the ARF, in recent years an increasing number of regional countries have pursued such cooperation on the basis of a ‘minilateral’ or a ‘coalition of the willing’. This is epitomized by a variety of cooperative frameworks and arrangements created in recent years, such as the ‘Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia’ (ReCAAP) and so on. It is clear that the emergence of these new frameworks and arrangements will not lead to the demise of the ARF any time soon. However, they have certainly made it more difficult for the ARF to sustain its momentum and genuine commitments from key regional states, given that some of those new frameworks have begun to promote concrete cooperation in addressing regional security challenges, which the ARF has so far failed to do. In this regard, the future prospects of the ARF would in part depend on whether or not it can successfully fulfil the current priority task of promoting practical cooperation in the non-traditional security area and, over the long term, extending cooperation to the enduring traditional security problems of the region.