What Do the Blind-sided See? Reapproaching Regionalism in Southeast Asia

The late Michael Leifer's association with an insecurity-focused realist approach to international affairs and his work on Southeast Asian regionalism inspire this question: How have the Asian financial crisis and the "war on terror" affected the plausibility of insecurity-concerned realism compared with other ways of approaching regionalism in Southeast Asia?

Five general approaches (and featured themes) are presented: realism (insecurity), culturalism (identity), rationalism (interests), liberalism (institutions) and constructivism (ideas). By and large this sequence runs ontologically from the most to the least foundationalist perspective, and chronologically from the earliest to the newest fashion in the American study of international relations since the Second World War.

The Asian financial crisis and the "war on terror" have, on balance, vindicated the extremes -- realism on the one hand, constructivism on the other -- while modestly enhancing the plausibility of culturalism and challenging the comparative intellectual advantages of rationalism and liberalism. But this result implies scholarly polarization less than it suggests a diverse repertoire of assumptions and priorities that are neither hermetically compartmentalized nor mutually exclusive.