About the Workshop

At the 34th ASEAN Summit in Bangkok, the regional bloc filled a void in the ongoing international Indo-Pacific debate. ASEAN, as the traditional organisational fulcrum of Asian regionalism, added to the various Indo-Pacific visions adopted by some regional powers and produced its own ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP).

With increasing great power competition, ASEAN centrality has come under stress and by producing the AOIP, ASEAN reasserted its voice on geopolitical shifts in the wider region. However, many questions and ambiguities remain: How does ASEAN’s vision of an inclusive and cooperative – rather than binary and confrontational – Indo-Pacific translate into practice? How can cooperative Indo-Pacific regionalism be organised and deliver tangible results, especially considering consensus requirements?

This workshop will investigate the role ASEAN foresees for its various cooperative mechanisms, and which one of those can realistically function as the institutional fulcrum for the AOIP. By doing so, the distinguished experts will discuss the nexus between individual ASEAN-led mechanisms and the wider geopolitical context, and by doing so, ultimately evaluate the prospects for ASEAN centrality in the Indo-Pacific.