It has become orthodoxy in terrorism studies that the survival or durability of the organization or network is central to the terrorist mission. From this perspective, its ideology or political religion is subordinated to the core purpose of the group, which is understood to be survival for its own sake. Through a case study that examines the evolution, development and degradation of the Southeast Asian jihadist organization Jemaah Islamiah, this paper tests such a hypothesis. It finds, in contrast to organizational and network theory, that the group mission is not particularly flexible and that the crucial explanatory variable that affecting both the recourse to violence and attempts to counter it, lies in the ideological agenda that the theory dismisses.

David Martin Jones and Michael Smith argue that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is only “making process, not progress.”1 In their view, ASEAN scholars and regional scholars who have faith in the development of an ASEAN community should nonetheless acknowledge that the association has not achieved much in three important areas: economic integration, antiterrorism cooperation, and relations with China. Jones and Smith’s critical article deserves credit for revisiting these issues; the authors, however, have an incomplete understanding of ASEAN. With regard to economic integration and antiterrorism cooperation, Jones and Smith are making issues out of nonissues. In other words, most ASEAN scholars and regional scholars would probably not object to the claim that ASEAN diplomacy has not borne fruit in these two areas, but this is not surprising given that they are new areas of cooperation for its members. Nor does this lack of progress necessarily lead to the conclusion that ASEAN is insigniacant. More likely, the scholars’ main focus is on the activities of the Southeast Asian countries in the security aeld, for example, intraregional conadence building and the management of ASEAN’s relations with external powers. In this respect, I have two main concerns regarding Jones and Smith’s claim that ASEAN’s attempt to promote its norms has been manipulated by China. First, the authors do not acknowledge ASEAN’s success in socializing Beijing into its cooperative security norm. Second, this oversight has profound implications for determining the most serious security threat in Southeast Asia—the human security threat—and for understanding the complexity of this threat.

Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will celebrate its fortieth anniversary as a regional security arrangement. Over this period it has enjoyed a somewhat checkered history. In its arst decade, its founding members rarely met. In its second, it played a diplomatic role in the resolution of the Indochina conoict. In its third decade, it widened its embrace to include the grouping’s former antagonist, Vietnam, as well as Burma-Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos; and it extended its diplomatic style into Northeast Asia via the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). The same decade also saw ASEAN encountering an unsettling anancial crisis, as well as political and economic uncertainty, which fueled religious and ethnic discord along with environmental and boundary disputes. Its fourth decade, nevertheless, witnessed ASEAN extending its institutional reach. After 1997 ASEAN held regular summits with China, Japan, and South Korea in an arrangement termed, unimaginatively, ASEAN Plus Three (APT). This mechanism, however, incubated the embryonic, and rhetorically more exciting, East Asian Community, whose fertilization occurred in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005. This incremental evolution earned plaudits from the region’s political leaders and from a wider scholarly community that had, in a variety of secondtrack forums, become increasingly involved in the emerging arrangement’s self-deanition. Reviewing the aeld, in 2004 Anthony Smith maintained that “the consensus on ASEAN through to the early 1990s amongst many scholars and journalists was that it was a body without parallel in the developing world.”1 In 1997 ASEAN was stirred, but not unduly shaken, by the Asian anancial crisis. The crisis apparently galvanized the association into deepening its integration and projecting its socialization and managerial processes into Northeast Asia. For Singapore’s enduring ambassador-at-large, Tommy Koh,

Since the Asian financial crisis of 1998, regional scholars and diplomats have maintained that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) represents an evolving economic and security community. In addition, many contend that what is known as the ASEAN process not only has transformed Southeast Asia's international relations, but has started to build a shared East Asian regional identity. ASEAN's deeper integration into a security, economic, and political community, as well as its extension into the ASEAN Plus Three processes that were begun after the 1997 financial crisis, offers a test case of the dominant assumptions in both ASEAN scholarship and liberal and idealist accounts of international relations theory. Three case studies of ASEAN operating as an economic and security community demonstrate, however, that the norms and practices that ASEAN promotes, rather than creating an integrated community, can only sustain a pattern of limited intergovernmental and bureaucratically rigid interaction.

The prevailing scholarly orthodoxy regarding recent diplomatic initiatives in the Asia-Pacific assumes that East Asia is evolving into a distinctive regional community. The orthodoxy attributes this development to the growing influence of the diplomatic practices espoused by the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) and its related institutions. However, a paradox remains, namely: despite the failure of ASEAN's distinctive practice to fulfil its rhetorical promise in Southeast Asia both immediately prior to and in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, it is nevertheless considered sufficient to validate the projection of ASEAN defined norms onto a wider Pacific canvas. This study analyses how an academic preference for constructivism has misinterpreted the growth in official rhetoric extolling East Asian regionalism since 1997 in a way that has helped produce and reinforce this paradox. By contrast, we contend that government declarations of a developing East Asian identity actually serve to obscure the continuation of traditional interstate relations and do not herald any wider, let alone inexorable, movement towards an integrated regional community.

This analysis addresses whether US strategy has escalated the ongoing conflict in Colombia. The study examines the ways in which US policy towards Colombia has been affected both by global circumstances after 9/11, and local events on the ground such as the involvement of private military firms which operate alongside multinational corporations in the country. The evidence suggests that US strategy has escalated the conflict, sometimes unintentionally, as the policy has evolved from an initial emphasis on countering the narcotics trade to one of counterterrorism. This has occurred, however, at the expense of other reforms, in particular by hindering the implementation of an effective pacification strategy. The analysis concludes that such an unbalanced strategy does not, as a consequence, provide for greater security and stability.

The aim of this study is to analyze the process by which Al Qaeda has sought to co-opt essentially localized struggles in Southeast Asia into an evolving network of worldwide jihad. The article illustrates how, long before it was appropriate to speak of an entity called Al Qaeda, Islamists have been thinking transnationally since the 1980s. The argument attempts to piece together available evidence to reveal a plausible explanation of the origins, growth and direction of the main Islamist grouping in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah, and its deepening relationship with Al Qaeda. The article suggests that the roots of a Southeast Asian terror network can be traced to two geographically separate ethno-religious struggles in the Philippines and Indonesia. The analysis demonstrates that these guerrilla groups orchestrating their distinct struggles were eventually combined through the auspices of Al Qaeda and the globalized franchising opportunities it exploited from the early 1990s.‐

The analysis examines the puzzle as to why the intelligence structures of South-East Asia largely failed to detect the evolving threat of violently inclined radical Islamic groups, despite the existence of elaborate and pervasive internal security arrangements within the states of the region. The article explores this issue by positing contending viewpoints about how authoritarianism in South-East Asia might have affected the awareness of such threats. Answers to these questions enable an assessment of the current ASEAN response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and to discern whether South-East Asia's elites will move either to improve the quality of their intelligence and threat analysis in the future, or whether they will, instead, extend the instruments of authoritarian rule, further curtailing civil and political space under the rubric of combating terrorism. The evidence so far suggests that the latter outcome is the more likely.