This Open Access book explains ASEAN's strategic role in managing great power politics in East
Asia. Constructing a theory of institutional strategy this book argues that the regional
security institutions in Southeast Asia ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have devised their
own institutional strategies vis-à-vis the South China Sea and navigated the great-power
politics since the 1990s. ASEAN proliferated new security institutions in the 1990s and 2000s
that assumed a different functionality a different geopolitical scope and thus a different
institutional strategy. In so doing ASEAN formed a strategic institutional web that nurtured a
quasi-division of labor among the institutions to maintain relative stability in the South
China Sea. Unlike the conventional analysis on ASEAN this study disaggregates ASEAN as a
collective regional actor into specific individual institutions-ASEAN Foreign Ministers'
Meeting ASEAN Summit ASEAN-China dialogues ASEAN Regional Forum East Asia Summit and ASEAN
Defense Ministers Meeting and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus-and explains how each of
these institutions has devised and or shifted its institutional strategy to curb great powers'
ambition in dominating the South China Sea while navigating great power competition. The book
sheds light on the strategic potential and limitations of ASEAN and ASEAN-led security
institutions offers implications for the future role of ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific region and
provides an alternative understanding of the strategic utilities of regional security
institutions.
