ASEAN has gradually built, on the basis of both shared interests and common principles and norms, various practices and mechanisms that helped prevent conflict among its members and allowed it to play an autonomous role in shaping the regional security architecture. Overcoming the member states' preoccupation with their own national concerns to give way to advocacy of collective interests has remained difficult, but progress is being made. Part A of this volume looks at the processes and dynamics, challenges, and opportunities of ASEAN ...

This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and ...