ABSTRACT
ASEAN and the ARF may be considered as regional attempts to provide for security by moving beyond conventional balance of power politics. Through their underlying premises and functions as well as their focus on long-term cooperation, both associative arrangements exclude the balance of power in principle. Nonetheless, this book argues that the institutional experience of ASEAN and the ARF was informed with some reference to the balance of power. The purpose of this chapter is to further discuss this traditional concept and to examine how it could be relevant to such inter-state arrangements, which have been conceived primarily as alternatives to its core assumptions. To that end, it addresses the balance of power factor within the study of regional regimes for cooperative security.
