Conflict Management and Dispute Settlement in East Asia.

• Author: Smith, Anthony L.
• Position: Book review

Conflict Management and Dispute Settlement in East Asia. Edited by Ramses Amer and Keyuan Zou. Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey, 2011. Hardcover: 228pp.

This volume is largely based on a conference entitled "Dispute Settlement and Conflict Management in Pacific Asia" organized by Stockholm University in 2009. Some of the substantive chapters are worth highlighting to get a sense of the book itself. Hari Singh's "Conflict Management in East Asia" is a comprehensive and thoughtful overview of Cold War and post-Cold War security issues, with the post-Cold War period being marked by the decline of ideological drivers and the challenge to Realist conceptions of state-based threats (although all of these non-state threats, terrorism, refugees, piracy, natural disasters and environmental problems occurred to a degree during the Cold War too). Singh begins with the proposition that conflict, broadly defined, is inherent in international relationships, but that it can be moderated in a variety of ways.

Ramses Amer offers a good overview of recent and anticipated developments in ASEAN, including the ASEAN Concord II, the ASEAN Charter and the ASEAN Political Security Community (by 2015). Amer judges ASEAN's record to be "impressive", with no interstate armed conflict between the "original" member states (an important qualifier given the occasional shooting matches between Thailand and its neighbours Myanmar and Cambodia) (p. 52). Other chapters include: Johan Saravanamuttu on the Southern Philippines conflict; Malin Akebo on Aceh, Sri Lanka and (also) the Southern Philippines; Gabriel Jonsson on the 1968 Pubelo Incident; Jenny Clegg on Korean "Denuclearization"; and three chapters on the South China Sea by Keyuan Zou, Nguyen Hong Thao, and Kang Baijing and Li Jianwei.

Singh raises the idea that totalitarian regimes are more prone to conflict than democratic governments, declaring that this does not hold water in Asia (p. 25). What about the various shades of authoritarian regimes? It is clear that Singh is treating "totalitarian" as a synonym for communist regime and therefore "democratic" for noncommunist. In noting Indonesian President Sukarno's "confrontation" with Malaysia, it has to be acknowledged that Sukarno could not be considered a democratic leader at that time. Modern democratic Indonesia on the other hand has managed to resolve situations in East Timor and Aceh, and is more generally not the threat to its neighbours that Sukarno represented.

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