ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on several interrelated bodies of literature and areas of scholarship within International Relations and security studies that seek to explain and understand questions of “security,” both generally and within the specific regional context of East and Southeast Asia. It argues that a post-structurally inclined critical security studies does not require a wholesale rejection of making foundational claims, nor does it necessitate a paralytic disjuncture from the “real world” or the real people who reside there. The chapter examines how the concept of “security” in East and Southeast Asia is broadly defined within the existing scholarly literature. In the constructivist image of security, it is the social relationships between state actors that allow them to develop sedimented norms like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations norm of non-interference. This, in turn moderates the otherwise unequal and potentially destabilizing power dynamics between state actors that a realist might predict.
