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This chapter examines three examples of nontraditional security problems and how individual Southeast Asian countries have attempted to address them. The chapter also looks at the role that the United States and China are playing in the region, and asks what the prospects might be for greater cooperation in coordinating policies and responses to these common threats so as to better ensure reliable access to food, mitigate the effects of climate change, and protect citizens in the region from deadly pathogens. There have been some regional attempts to create more cooperative frameworks for addressing these needs, but these efforts have not yet played a significant role in reshaping policies. One explanation for why cooperation is weak is that there is a lack of leadership within regional organizations in spurring greater action to tackle these issues. The leadership vacuum stems from countries’ domestic politics. Weak cooperation on these issues signals poor chances for regional coordination on other issues such as uniting against Chinese maritime claims around the nine-dash line, and has bearing on partnerships for the United States should the “pivot” become more than rhetoric.

Asks the question “When is China?” to show how Chinese people produce and consume national identity on special days like National Humiliation Day. Comparing the differing practices of the holiday as it was celebrated in the early twentieth century and the early twenty‐first century, the chapter argues that in the early twentieth century the political performances aimed to produce a proper Chinese nation that was worthy of being saved. When National Humiliation Day was revived at the turn of the twenty‐first century, its activities focused on containing nationalism through a commemoration of the crises of the early twentieth century. Because national humiliation discourse has now spread beyond official control, the chapter concludes that we need to appreciate how Chinese people consume nationalism to produce a particular form of identity – and a particular type of security.

India has come a long way in making itself a key player in Southeast Asian security and economic equilibrium through the Look East Policy that launched in the early 1990s. For most Southeast Asian countries India is a potential counterweight to China and an economic option. Besides establishing strong institutional linkages with ASEAN and ASEAN-led regional multilateral frameworks, India has steadily intensified economic interactions through free trade agreements with ASEAN and with several member countries bilaterally with a focus on building strong connectivity to the region. Simultaneously, New Delhi has also forged numerous defense and security cooperation arrangements with most countries in the region. Given Southeast Asia’s centrality to East Asia and due to its rapidly rising strategic and economic stakes, India is likely to step up its engagement.

This introductory chapter presents the aims and architecture of the book. It introduces an emerging ethic of responsible sovereignty in Southeast Asia, which it calls the ‘responsibility to provide’ (or R2Provide), and seeks an ethical explanation for it. The chapter provides synopses of the eight chapters that follow, which collectively accomplish the book’s three objectives. Firstly, it identifies and assesses a number of regional developments in defence, security, diplomatic and economic cooperation in which Southeast Asian countries, individually as well as institutionally through ASEAN and its various functional manifestations and modalities, have sought to assist one another in collective response to challenging situations. Secondly, it discusses how the R2Provide has taken root in Southeast Asia, albeit more deeply so in some countries than others, as well as within ASEAN and its various functional subsidiaries and spinoffs, such as the ADMM, the ADMM-Plus, the AHA Centre and the like. Thirdly, contra communitarian and liberal perspectives on ethics, it introduces and critically applies the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, specifically his notion of responsibility for the other, to the R2Provide and more broadly to the quest for responsible interstate conduct in Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia has strong ties with China in the areas of economics, diplomacy, and culture. China also has a security interest in the South China Sea, which has become a major source of conflict between China and the United States, due to American fears that China’s military buildup in the South China Sea may threaten American “freedom of navigation” in the sea and the entire Western Pacific. China’s main interest in Southeast Asia is defending its sovereignty and security in the South China Sea.