ABSTRACT
Efforts aimed at addressing various established and emerging security challenges have been key drivers behind important and dynamic developments in East Asia’s regional affairs, regional organisations and regional frameworks since the 1990s. Moreover, security challenges have in many ways fundamentally determined the raison d’être of East Asia-centred regional organisations and frameworks and defined their core agendas. For example, the establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 was principally devised as both a conflict resolution mechanism to address antagonistic relations amongst newly independent Southeast Asian nation-states and as a bulwark of United States-aligned countries to resist the further advance of communism in the region. Later, the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) group (including China, Japan and South Korea) created at the height of East Asia’s 1997/8 financial crisis coalesced as a regional framework with the common aim of strengthening regional financial security. However, the combination of issue-linkage effects, broadening conceptions of ‘security’ and a changing geostrategic environment led to evolving and expanding ‘new security’ conceptions and practices within ASEAN, APT and other regional arrangements. Map of membership of East Asian regional organisations. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203422496/84b35142-f16a-4630-bee6-7fa0ac57f848/content/map6_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
