Development and Security in Southeast Asia

Volume I: The Environment

Carolina G. Hernandez, David B. Dewitt

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138725836
• eBook ISBN: 9781351752879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2003. This three-volume set examines the relationship between government and civil society in their efforts to define and pursue security. Including the results of an extensive research program, each volume is organized around one of the three principal themes - environment, people and globalization, supplying compelling evidence of the tension between economic change and human well-being. Challenging the conventional wisdom about the beneficial results of economically induced change, this first volume suggests that too often the mismanagement of development jeopardizes the security of individuals, families, communities, and possibly the state, by harming the very environment which is required to sustain both people and their economic existence. Bringing together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, this volume is particularly relevant for academic and general research communities in the areas of social, economic, political and security matters of Southeast Asia.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Defining the Problem and Managing the Uncertainty

David B. Dewitt and Carolina G. Hernandez

Introduction

Development and Security in Southeast Asia (DSSEA) has as its core the question of the relationship between government and civil society in their efforts to define and to pursue security, broadly defined. Thus, the DSSEA research program at the outset posits a tension between how government and its instruments understand and pursue security and how people and the communities that they comprise understand and seek their own particular security interests. It is based on the premise that the process of development is, essentially, a partnership between official agencies, the private sector, and people, and that the issue of security is found across levels of social, economic, and political organization and is intimately entwined with the challenges posed by the dynamics of (mis)managing development. Moreover, our approach to development and security explicitly acknowledges the potential importance of the tensions between local and external factors across levels of authority, production, and distribution.

Governance, whether in terms of an explicit ‘social contract’ or implicitly as the control, management, and allocation of public resources (including goods and services) and, in some cases, intruding into and distorting the relationship between the public and the private, is at the heart of the overarching challenges linking development with security in SEA. A subset of this focus is the underlying realization of the importance of human resource development. Consequently, the concept of social capital runs throughout all the specific projects pursued within this research program and reported in these three volumes.

The DSSEA program is concerned with the attainment of three goals: (1) identifying and understanding the linkages between security and development through conducting case studies across levels of state-society relations, as well as comparatively within the region; (2) developing enhanced theoretical and conceptual understanding of these complex linkages both to further our knowledge and to improve our abilities to develop practical instruments in support of improved human well being; and (3) using the acquired knowledge and information for empowerment and change. This volume, along with the accompanying other two, reports the results of empirical research conducted primarily in Indonesia and the Philippines by scholars from these two countries and Canada.

The three volumes represent research organized around the complementary themes of environment and resources, globalization, and people and communities, with each connected through the common concern on the linkages between the dynamics of development and the challenges to security.¹ The approach is based on two underlying assumptions: (1) that the model of development on which the rapid economic expansion of SEA has been articulated is not sustainable because it involves dynamics of social and political inequality bound to cause its demise over the long term; and (2) that the language of security provides the best vocabulary through which these problems can be delineated, debated, and resolved. Supporting these two assumptions are the ideas of human security and social capital, the former, while acknowledging the primacy of the state, focuses on the well being of the individual and her community, and the latter referring to the extent to which community-based organizations and civil society more generally are engaged participants in forms of local and national political and economic decision-making.²

Defining the Problem

In the post-cold war era, the concepts of both development and security have been transformed to meet new strategic realities. Development has long been recognized as a non-linear process often accompanied by unintended consequences; it also is no longer presumed to be either benign or necessarily a public good. On the other hand, development is increasingly argued to be inherently linked with freedom, as ‘a process of expanding the real freedoms that people [ought to] enjoy’.³ Within this broader understanding, the economic, social, and political are entwined into a composite which provides the foundation for such personal and community freedom and, hence, also enhanced security.

Security no longer is defined simply as defense of one’s national territory by armed forces against military threat. Neither threat nor risk to the state or its people come only from military forces or groups prepared to engage in violence but also from many other factors which cross boundaries, penetrate society, and challenge the capacity of the state to regulate entry and exit. Further, security is more than protecting the state or even the governing regime as important as both of those may be. Today, security also is viewed as a descriptor of community and individual life; that the authorities have a responsibility to ensure personal safety and well being, just as the integrity of communities and their sense of their own future needs confirmation. The question of agency – the instruments responsible for the security of people and institutions – therefore, likely involves more than only the military and the police, and as such also becomes entwined with the concerns about the agents for development.⁴

Neither development nor security as policies can be achieved through unilateral means. Both are dependent on a mix of short-, medium-, and long-term factors located in the interstices between the individual, the society, the state, and the inter-state systems. Yet relatively little is understood about the linkages, never mind casual relations, which bind these two core components of national expression. The DSSEA program addresses aspects of these linkages. Most concretely, our interest is to locate the strong and weak links between some of the complex dynamics of development and the challenges of security. We situate this effort initially within the paradigm of the nation-state, but explicitly acknowledge that many non-state and sub-state actors, as well as the attendant social forces, may turn out to be the defining variables in this exercise. Indeed, as it turns out almost all of the case studies in this project explore the linkages between government, the private sector, and civil society.

Non-military threats to security seem to be crowding the policy agenda of nations throughout the world. Particularly after the attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001, the rise of terrorism, whether domestic or international, has hugged the headlines of national and international media and assumed the status of a major security concern in countries the world over. The alarming global spread of the devastating disease acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) threatens the security of individuals as well as entire nations. The rate of ecological damage rapid economic development creates is wreaking havoc of immense proportions with devastating consequences for our collective fixtures whether in terms of biodiversity or simply making less land either habitable or productive. Non-renewable resources have been exploited to the point of making them a focal point of international competition and even war, while individuals and their communities become increasingly vulnerable and insecure to the globalized forces of extraction, production, and distribution. Access to and management of ‘strategic resources’ including water continues to command bilateral and multilateral attention. Disputes over fish stocks have brought allies and partners to the point of diplomatic brinkmanship, while communities at home suffer from resulting massive unemployment and its consequent social dislocation.

Markedly different from the Western concept of security based essentially and primarily on the state’s military and defense capability, East Asian concepts view security in a comprehensive, multidimensional, and holistic manner. The five non-communist states of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand which together formed the original core of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have viewed security in these terms since the Association’s founding in August 1967.⁵ Believing that a nation’s security begins from within, Indonesia stressed the primacy of domestic security by solving internal sources of security threats such as communist insurgency, ethnic tensions, economic malaise, and social divisions within its far-flung archipelago, creating in the process a condition of national resilience.⁶ According to the Indonesian view, one subsequently and implicitly supported by the rest in ASEAN, when all the states in the region achieve national resilience, there would be no security problems they could export to their neighbors. The result would be a community of confident and secure nation-states, resilient to extra-regional threats, and hence, better able to promote and to sustain regional stability and security.⁷

The Malaysian concept of comprehensive security emphasized non-military sources of security threats. It was seen as ‘inseparable from political stability, economic success, and social harmony’.⁸ As with national resilience, security threats were seen as originating primarily from within the state. This conception was in large measure due to the presence of domestic insurgencies and the problems engendered by the task of nation building in multiethnic societies with great disparities in wealth and income among their constituent ethnic communities. While the inter-ethnic violence of 30 years ago has not reappeared, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the controversy surrounding Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed’s continuing efforts to retain political dominance have introduced a level of domestic tension and unease not witnessed for a number of decades. The vulnerability of developing states and their governments to the fortunes of ‘performance legitimacy’ can be seen throughout the region, though Malaysia, as well as Thailand and Singapore, has been sufficiently resilient to withstand the havoc experienced in Indonesia.

Singapore developed a similar notion of security. Viewed in terms of ‘total defense’, it is also multidimensional, holistic, comprehensive, and begins from within. The Philippines and Thailand also adopted similar conceptions of security making for an ASEAN-wide acceptance of comprehensive security in SEA by the 1980s, though this is now under severe strain since the expansion to the ASEAN-10 coming almost simultaneously with the shock of the 1997–98 Asian financial meltdown.

While security in the cold war era focused an external threats to states and relied primarily on military means, including the establishment of a network of bilateral and multilateral military alliances focused on nuclear deterrence, a new concept of security mechanism launched by former Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, Joe Clark, emphasized an evolving inclusive regionalism and multilateralism as a complement to bilateralism, mutual reassurance instead of nuclear deterrence, and the use of both military and non-military means to promote security in recognition of the multifaceted nature of threats to security. Cooperative security as the notion came to be known, is a complementary mechanism to comprehensive security in dealing with a post-cold war environment increasingly challenged by non-military threats to the security of individuals, communities, societies, and nation-states as well as the international system.⁹

This Canadian contribution has been complemented by the more recent articulation of human security. Initially given wide attention as a result of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Report on Human Development,¹⁰ i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Map
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Map Showing Location of Study Areas
• VOLUME II
• Bibliography
• Index