Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs

ASEAN's response to the 2025 Myanmar earthquake (M7.7, over 5400 deaths) produced a compliance-harm paradox: rapid political coordination, record DELSA deployment, and procedural compliance coexisted with 74 per cent of the worst-affected townships lacking shelter assistance seven weeks later, continuing airstrikes, and politically directed aid. This article develops an embedded normative tension framework, bridging constructivist and practice-attentive institutional analysis, to explain why institutional success and humanitarian failure were structurally co-produced. AADMER incorporates sovereignty-procedural and humanitarian-needs-based norms that coexist compatibly under stable conditions but become irreconcilable under compound emergencies—when the affected state is itself a source of humanitarian harm. Three practice-mediated mechanisms locked in sovereignty-procedural dominance: institutional channelling via the National Focal Point, the post-Nargis depoliticisation constraint, and the consensus veto compounded by intra-ASEAN fragmentation. The ASEAN Chair's resort to bilateral improvisation outside AADMER confirms the architecture's structural inadequacy, revealing this paradox as an enduring feature of sovereignty-centric disaster governance.

The article traces five centuries of Thai maritime security practice to argue that recent reforms mark a partial return to preventing bad order at sea. It shows how Siamese polities initially conceived maritime security in negative terms, prioritising stability in riverine and coastal systems by merely managing or outright initiating rather than eliminating non-polity maritime violence. Only with the rise of a fiscal-state navy in the Interwar years did a positive good order at sea agenda begin to emerge in Thailand, later deepening through environmental stewardship and regionalisation efforts during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. Drawing on primary sources, the article argues that Thailand has renewed its preventive orientation in response to climate-related risks, a striated maritime domain, and proliferating transnational threats. It advances the concept of deep pluralist maritime security as a more appropriate framework than multipolarity for understanding the choices facing small navies in the contemporary strategic environment.