ABSTRACT
Michael Leifer was a prolific and wide-ranging scholar. Michael's focus on security reflected his understanding of its importance in the eyes of Southeast Asian states whose leaders were obliged time and again to deal with the insecurity of their region. Farthest right, at the foundationalist end of the spectrum, realism is deeply axiomatic about the presence and significance of insecurity among sovereign states that necessarily respond to international anarchy and temporal uncertainty by maximizing their power or balancing or bandwagoning the power of other states. In pursuit of resilience, ASEAN might also have promoted economic and judicial reforms, including transparency, accountability, and probity, which could have reduced the extent to which “crony capitalism” had by 1997 weakened the immunity of local financial-legal systems to external shock.
