This chapter provides an outline analysis of the evolving governance framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the island city-state of Singapore. In broad terms, Singapore’s signature approach to AI Governance reflects its governance culture more broadly, which harnesses the productive energy of free-market capitalism contained within clear guardrails, as well as the dual nature (as a regulator and development authority) of Singapore’s lead public agency in AI policy formulation. Singapore’s approach is interesting for other jurisdictions in the region and around the world and it can already be observed to have influenced the recent Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Guide on AI Governance and Ethics which was promulgated in early 2024.

National narcotics agencies are a feature of law enforcement for drug crimes worldwide. They exist in most Southeast Asian nations that retain the death penalty for drug offences, including in Indonesia (Badan Narkotika Nasional); Singapore (Central Narcotics Board); Thailand (Narcotics Control Board); and Malaysia (Agensi Antidadah Kebangsaan). This chapter undertakes a comparative study of national narcotics agencies in Southeast Asia. Each of the aforementioned four agencies plays an outsize role in shaping both public opinion and government policy on the death penalty for drugs and on punitive responses to non-capital drug crimes more generally. Previous NGO reports and academic studies on Southeast Asian drug policy have failed to consider the institutional dimensions of drug control: this chapter aims to rectify this particular gap in the literature. Comparing relevant institutions across the region, this chapter accounts for organisational similarities and differences, explores the relationship between anti-drugs and other state institutions, and suggests modest policy recommendations.

This chapter offers a summary of our research findings on the upside of the US-China competition within the security, economic, and political suborders in the Asia Pacific region. In addition, we emphasize two primary challenges to achieving institutional peace in the region: the escalating power rivalry between the US and China, which can lead to proxy wars/conflicts, and the inclination toward irrational and risk-taking decisions by leaders in both nations, often influenced by domestic politics. While it remains the responsibility of the United States and China to prudently manage their strategic competition, we contend that the involvement of secondary states within the region can play a crucial and independent role in mitigating tensions between these two superpowers over critical issues, such as the Taiwan issue and the South China Sea disputes. Their active engagement is indispensable for fostering institutional peace within the Asia-Pacific.

Diplomatic images are not mere visual archives of past encounters; they are complicit in how the past is framed, memorialized, and reproduced in the service of contemporary raison d’état. This chapter is about one such instance of complicity. It tracks the afterlife of an image of five ministers from Cold War Southeast Asia – all male, in Western business suits, and bespectacled – signing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into existence in Bangkok in 1967. More than any other, this image has been reproduced and disseminated to symbolize ASEAN: from book covers and commemorative stamps to television reports and even a commissioned painting. This image gives contemporary ASEAN a satisfying origin myth – of five ‘founding fathers’ forging diplomatic reconciliation in the aftermath of militarized inter-state conflict in a region marked as exceptionally diverse along racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic registers. But the image – and the props and performance it captures – contains within it the seeds of an alternative reading that puts this origin myth to lie. The chapter argues that far from embodying such exceptional and heroic diversity, the image tells us what was profoundly (and problematically) similar among these diplomatic performers than what the contemporary discourse on ASEAN reveals.

This chapter introduces readers to the origins, conduct, and termination of the Third Indochina War. Marshaling old and new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Soviet, American, and ASEAN sources, as well as the most recent secondary literature, the chapter takes an international history perspective, focusing on the simultaneous decision-making of all sides directly or indirectly involved in the conflict. It adopts a chronological approach following the life-cycle of the conflict by first locating the origins of both wars from the inter-connected perspectives of the three main protagonists – Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Following that, the chapter describes the conduct of both wars and their eventual resolution. This involved, apart from the three main protagonists, the Soviet Union, the United States (and its allies). Although these countries were not directly involved in the fighting, they played a significant role in both prolonging the war and bringing about its end.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Member States are increasingly focusing on alternatives to electrolysis for the production of ‘green’ hydrogen, such as steam reforming of biofuels and biomass gasification. This chapter analyses the possibility of effectively achieving that under the existing general regulatory framework on energy production, namely the laws on the establishment and operation of factories, as well as environmental protection laws in ASEAN countries that regulate hydrogen production, with special attention on biomass gasification and steam reforming of biofuels. It finds that, despite falling outside of energy regulatory frameworks, hydrogen production from biomass/biofuels is regulated under general legal frameworks on manufacturing activities, occupational health and safety, as well as environmental protection laws. This is demonstrated in more detail by referring to a case study on Thailand. The chapter argues that, in the absence of robust criteria on hydrogen classification, it is possible for an electricity producer that generates electricity from grey hydrogen to gain financial benefits that were formerly thought to be reserved for the promotion of ‘green’ electricity production from blue or green hydrogen, in the case of re-electrification of hydrogen after storage.

This chapter describes the immediate aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion. Apart from the ongoing war in Cambodia, the immediate, violent response to the Vietnamese invasion was the February 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war.

This chapter revisits the efforts mostly spearheaded by ASEAN to bring the Third Indochina War to an end. As ASEAN is the sum of its parts, the chapter describes the perspectives of the various ASEAN member states as well as how they arrived at a collective decision.

This chapter explores Australia’s engagement with South-East Asia during the period under review by focusing on its partnership with Singapore. In the period under review, what former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull termed a ‘natural’ partnership showed signs of becoming an increasingly important conduit for Canberra’s engagement with the region, hitherto an under-realised one. With Australia looking to deepen its ties with South-East Asia and ASEAN more broadly, Canberra’s partnership with Singapore went some way towards realising this goal.

International Relations theory has dealt extensively with norms and agency in normative environments, including the impact of norms on state behaviour; their diffusion and localisation; and their evolution, contestation, and change. Yet, to date the issue of norm conflict has remained theoretically and empirically understudied in International Relations. We still have little understanding of the judgements that governments or institutions make regarding compliance when the directives inherent in the norms to which they have committed appear to be mutually exclusive. The objective of this chapter is to conceptualise norm conflict as a challenge to decision-making in normative international environments and to outline a theoretical framework for studying and understanding norm conflict, including – most importantly – the ways in which states and international institutions seek to resolve it. In so doing, we draw from International Law and Sociology, two disciplines that have extensively dealt with norm conflict.

There were significant changes in the quality and direction of Australia’s relations with Southeast Asia between 1990 and 1995. These changes were symbolised by the new directions set out in Foreign Minister Gareth Evans’s statement on Australia’s Regional Security of December 19891 and at the end of the period by the signing of the Australia–Indonesia Security Agreement in December 1995. The signing of this agreement signalled a historic change in Australia’s relations with Indonesia and Southeast Asia, surprising observers in both countries. Yet the seeds of that agreement lie in the groundwork of the new approach to regional security set out by Evans in 1989, and in its antecedents in earlier ’moves to Asia’ of the 1970s and 1980s.

With the electoral defeat of the Howard government in November 2007, the incoming Rudd government attempted to revive active middle power diplomacy and extend Labor foreign policy traditions of global and regional multilateralism. The centrepiece of the latter was Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Asia–Pacific Community (APC), initially proposed as an ambitious European Union-style body additional to existing regional structures, none of which were considered adequate to a comprehensive and coordinated address of strategic dynamics. China’s rising economic and geopolitical significance and the growing importance of transnational security and environmental challenges were the chief items offered as the rationale for the APC.

Energy intersects with the environment at every stage of its life cycle. The energy supply chain can have adverse effects on nature and public health, including GHG emissions, air, land and water pollution as well the generation of harmful waste, among others. In order to reduce our dependence on high-carbon energy, more needs to be done to increase renewable energy generation and improve energy efficiency. As energy is involved in trade and investment projects, it is covered by the trade and investment branches of international economic law and regulated in these fields mainly by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), regional trade agreements (RTAs) and international investment agreements (IIAs). This book aims to contribute to the existing scholarship by providing a comprehensive analysis of the energy–environment nexus under trade law and investment law, showing, where relevant, their similarities, differences or even (potential) conflicts at the energy–environment interface. It examines the legal foundations of the energy–environment nexus and associated issues regarding trade control, subsidies, technical standards, investment protection and technology policies.

This chapter focuses initially on the context within which Ratu Mara first articulated his notion of the Pacific Way, including his congenial relationship with the British colonial administration in Fiji. The next section examines another important articulation of the Pacific Way by an expatriate commentator, reflecting a much more critical approach to colonialism. But there is also a judicious appraisal of the Pacific Way’s Polynesian associations, something that compromised its ability to function as a pan-Pacific identity. Polynesian elite values are also implicated in an aversion to the adversarial nature of Western democratic politics. In (apparent) contrast, the Pacific Way is claimed to be based primarily on traditional modes of ‘consensus politics’. This issue is explored partly in comparative perspective, noting that the positing of consensus politics as an alternative to adversarial (Western) democracy has often been deployed in other post-colonial settings as a culturally more authentic expression of local political values.

Qin Yaqing, China’s foremost theorist of international relations, concentrates on the complexities of the new multinodal world order. He argues against centrality, pointing out that international relationships are now complex and flat rather than binary and hierarchical. The nodes of the international multinodal complex are internally as well as externally complex. Moreover, the successful regional initiatives of ASEAN demonstrate the capacity of smaller nodes to play leading roles in configuring order.

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.