Governing Non-Traditional Security, Rescaling the State in Southeast Asia

Much of the world today is preoccupied with threats to non-traditional security (NTS): border-spanning challenges such as terrorism, pandemic disease, and environmental damage that defy traditional approaches to security focused on military conflicts between states. Despite their arguable gravity, NTS threats elicit a baffling array of policy responses, ranging from full-scale securitization and institutionalized management to no response at all. Despite their scope, NTS problems are rarely managed holistically through regional organizations. Instead they are addressed mainly by efforts to alter and enlarge—“rescale”—the authority of the apparatus of the national state to cover specific NTS issues in a variety of locations. The resulting process of state expansion if not transformation is promoted and resisted by domestically competing coalitions of socioeconomic and political forces. Regionalist theory and rhetoric notwithstanding, it is the intra-national struggles among such groups that dictate how these nascent modes of NTS-focused governance operate in practice.  Prof. Jones will illustrate his argument with particular reference to Southeast Asia.

Lee Jones is a senior lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary, University of London, and a research associate at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. His work features the interaction between social conflict, state transformation, and international relations, with a focus on Southeast Asia. His many publications include Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (co-authored) and Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (both forthcoming in 2015). Earlier work includes ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia (2012). He has advised governmental and non-governmental agencies in Europe and Asia and regularly appears in British and international media. His DPhil and MPhil are from Oxford. His website is www.leejones.tk and he tweets @DrLeeJones.