Collective identity and conflict management in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Introduction: security communities and Non-Atlantic Areas When Karl Deutsch and his associates first proposed the idea of security community they were seeking to explain the emergence of cooperation among the developed states of the north Atlantic region. Neither they, nor most of the other scholars who have used the concept since, have taken serious note of the possibility of security communities in the developing world. This is hardly surprising as the Third World is a rather disappointing arena for investigators looking for “a group that has become integrated, where integration is defined as the attainment of a sense of community, accompanied by formal or informal institutions or practices, sufficiently strong and widespread to assure peaceful change among members of a group with ‘reasonable’ certainty over a ‘long’ period of time.” If anything, conditions in much of the Third World have been exactly the reverse. As several studies establish, this is where the overwhelming majority of conflict and violence in the post-Second World War period has taken place. There is another reason why the idea of security community may not seem particularly applicable to the Third World, especially from the perspective of the more recent, and largely liberal, interpretation of the Deutschian notion. According to this school, security communities require a liberal-democratic milieu featuring significant economic interdependence and political pluralism.

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