Abstract
The Asia-Pacific region has been undergoing significant changes that have increased both the complexity and uncertainty of the regional international politics. China’s rapid rise and the intensification in the China–USA and Russia–USA rivalries, the growing complexity of interactions between smaller and larger powers, as well as the move of non-traditional security issues, such as terrorism, environmental degradation, transnational crime and cybersecurity to the forefront of the regional geopolitics—all have increased the volatility of the region and posed new challenges for theoretical understanding of its security dynamics. Thomas S. Wilkins tackles these challenges by presenting a new approach to conceptualising security in the Asia-Pacific region through the perspective of alignment. Security in Asia Pacific: The Dynamics of Alignment revises the changing nature and purpose of alignments in the twenty-first century and attempts to offer an improved and systemic understanding of this understudied format of interstate strategic cooperation.
The book has two interrelated goals—one empirical and one theoretical. Empirically, it captures the changing security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region by providing insights into the workings of the key security groupings called by Wilkins ‘the key poles of security alignment in Asia Pacific’ (p. 5), which include the Trilateral Security Dialogue (TSD) involving the USA, Australia and Japan; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Security Community; and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Yet because there are no ready-made frameworks for assessing these or other alignments, this empirical goal requires first fulfilling a broader theoretical one: to develop theoretical foundations and corresponding analytical tools that can be applied to various cases of alignment. Thus, the book is based on synergy between empirical analysis and theory in that it not only draws on the existing theoretical knowledge about alliances, security communities and strategic partnerships, which Wilkins considers sub-types of a broader phenomenon called alignment, to understand the aforementioned cases of security cooperation but also uses the empirical data from these cases to inform generalisations regarding interstate alignment and thus enrich the existing theories. The main emphasis in this analytical endeavour is on the ‘reproducible dynamics rather than more immediate policy fluctuations’ (pp. 18–19).
The book has a straightforward eight-chapter structure. After the concise introduction (Chapter 1) that reveals the complexity of contemporary international politics in the Asia-Pacific region and that highlights the need for new theoretical tools, the analysis proceeds from reconceptualisation of different alignments to application of the revised theoretical tools to the empirical reality. Thus, while Chapter 2 reviews the existing theories of traditional alliances, pointing out their limitations and suggesting improvements, Chapter 3 applies the modified alliance framework to the case of TSD. Chapter 4, in turn, consolidates the existing approaches to security communities into a comprehensive analytical framework which is subsequently applied, in Chapter 5, to the case of what is believed to be an archetypal security community—ASEAN Security Community. Chapters 6 and 7 undertake a similar from-theory-to-empirics exercise by developing a strategic partnership framework (Chapter 6) and applying it to the corresponding case of SCO (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 draws together the strands of the analysis and reinstates the need for continuous efforts aimed at the reconceptualisation of ‘alignment’ with the goal of understanding the evolving interstate security relations in the Asia-Pacific region.
In its essence, the approach adopted by Wilkins involves extending the existing frameworks and amalgamating different theoretical perspectives on alliances, security communities and strategic partnerships under a broader umbrella of security-based ‘alignment’ that, however, does not ignore non-security dimensions of cooperation. As Wilkins himself emphasises, ‘we need to overcome conventional applications of understandings of alignment that often subsume it under the “alliance” label, which is but one (common) paradigm representing a wider phenomenon’ (p. 13). The outcome is a much broader and ‘analytically eclectic’ (p. 18) approach, and the corresponding notion of alignment that are based on a vast range of factors that include not only the traditional balance of power considerations but also liberal, constructivist and organisational lenses in the form of interest, ideology, domestic politics, norms, threat perceptions, the patterns of institutionalisation and other novel for the alignment theories factors, located along different stages of alignment formation and development. Wilkins argues that such a less parsimonious approach includes a necessarily ‘custom-designed and specifically calibrated analytical tools’ (p. 183) that help to more fully assess the evolving regional complexity and also obtain ‘a more composite picture of allied relations’ (p. 190).
At the same time, Wilkins admits that there are overlaps between the three alignment paradigms in terms of both theoretical foundations and corresponding analytical frameworks (p. 190). Indeed, the material and ideational factors that Wilkins utilises to explain alliance can also be applied to the cases of both security community and strategic partnership. Conversely, the characteristic of the security community, like coordination and mutual trust (p. 75), and strategic partnerships, such as the stages of formation, implementation and evaluation (pp. 129–136), equally reflect the alliance dimensions. Similarly, like alliances, security communities require the capability to use violence against potentially hostile external actors (p. 84), whereas strategic partnerships, in a similar vein, facilitate a joint response to security challenges that can be more effective than could be achieved by states acting alone (p. 136).
The analytical eclecticism adopted by Wilkins helps comprehend the complexity and unpredictability of the real-world events and generates a more comprehensive appreciation of the multi-layered alignment dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region. However, it can also invite criticism as the breadth inevitably comes at the costs of coherence and theoretical parsimony. For example, which one of the multiple factors that characterise and explain interstate alignments is the most important and, hence, needs to be emphasised? How do different characteristics and explanatory variables suggested in the book relate to each other? Without knowing the relative importance of the suggested variables, it is difficult to generate a coherent causal theory of alignment. In this light, the book would have benefited from a more explicit justification, especially from the standpoint of theory building, of how adding more variables to the alliance mix helps us make advances towards a more coherent alignment theory. The world is inevitably complex, but from the standpoint of theory building, this complexity requires frameworks that focus on the most important propelling causal forces and leave everything else out. But, perhaps, these unanswered questions are what the author intended to achieve in his book—to invite a debate aimed at revising and reconceptualising the existing alignment theories (p. 190).
Overall, this is an important book that presents the right balance of theory and empirical analysis and should become a valuable contribution to the understanding of security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. It deserves to serve as essential reading for a wide readership, ranging from security experts, policymakers and international relations scholars to students in courses related to international security and international relations in the Asia-Pacific region.
