ABSTRACT
The notion of progress in the international relations of Southeast Asia tends to be the distinctive import of a Western modernization. When one searches for the traces of non-Western theorizing, it is most unlikely to be found in a scholarship that explicitly aims to reach a practical political science audience of university students, fellow academics, businessmen, political leaders and civil society activists. As pointed out in Acharya and Buzan’s introduction to this volume, the nation-state in much of the world, including Southeast Asia, is complicit in Western ideas of developing modes of systematic and permanent territoriality vested in centralized Weberian administrations. If one accepts this as the default mode of studying the international relations of the ten Southeast Asian states (Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam2) the schools of international relations – an essentially Atlanticist heritage – ought to define the limits of theorizing.
