Democratization: A Threat to Peace and Stability in Southeast Asia?

This chapter examines the question of how beneficial the democratization of some Southeast Asian states has been for the region as a whole. It will do so by comparing the implications of democratization for inter-state peace, which are currently being discussed in the literature with actual developments in the Southeast Asian sub-region. I particularly ask whether the democratization of key member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) such as the Philippines, Thailand and most recently Indonesia has improved the prospects for regional stability in Southeast Asia. The reason for such an evaluation is twofold. First, it connects with the ‘democratic peace’ hypothesis, which essentially contends that democracies are unlikely to fight each other. While this might provide some positive signs for ASEAN in the sense that Southeast Asia might see an incipient zone of democratic peace, there is also cause for concern. Since not all ASEAN member states have experienced a transition to democracy, this leaves Southeast Asia as a zone of ‘mixed state’ dyads (i.e. democracies and non-democracies), which are more likely to fight wars than either ‘democratic state’ dyads or ‘autocratic state’ dyads. Moreover, statistical evidence suggests that it is states in transition to democracy that are the most likely to wage war. Second, there is a host of social constructivist analyses on ASEAN that have focused on the organization’s specific culture of security to explain the long peace of ASEAN.