The critical role of peoples and the idea of civil society in ASEAN

There are two ways to tell the story of ASEAN: from the perspective or the logic of the state and its elites, a traditional “Westphalian” narrative against a critical “post-Westphalian” narrative. The latter is yet untold, a regional tradition that this chapter refers to as “the paradigm of encounters”. This chapter examines the appropriateness of the notion of civil society, not only because it requires the political agency of the state but more importantly because Southeast Asia is an evolving region of various political forms that requires an indigenous vocabulary, beginning from the idea of peoples whose destinies are intertwined because they are oriented, not fixed in time. It is perhaps here that ASEAN as a political project can be sustained, and where it can stand as an alternative world order, one that deserves to be taken, however, only seriously insofar as it can be considered a realm of peoples.