Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia (CRISEA)

In the current crisis of legitimacy for globalisation, SEA's competing regional integrations present challenges for its people and for ASEAN's framework-building project. Structured around five thematic Work Packages, CRISEA conducts interdisciplinary research on the following ‘arenas' where regional forces compete:
- WP 1 (The Environment: Securing the Commons) examines to what extent competition over the regional ‘commons' - in the milieus of sea, river, land, forest and air - is reaching a tipping point, with potentially wide-ranging consequences for national security.
- WP 2 (The Economy: Competing Models and Practices of Capitalism) studies whether the ‘uneven development trap', ensnaring the labour force in precarious circulatory migration and undermining social stability, can erode SEA states' models of developmental capitalism and the regional integration model of ASEAN.
- WP 3 (The State: Contesting the Liberal State) analyses the forces that nowadays contest the liberal State within and beyond the region, asking whether they herald a new era for SEA, where governance is openly legitimised by group interests that challenge the liberal values central to ASEAN's political model. The GIGA researchers involved in this Work Package specifically examine populist mobilization during local and national elections in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia (Andreas Ufen) and deal with protest and state reaction in an intra-regional comparison of Indonesia, Vietnam (Jörg Wischermann).
- WP 4 (Identity: Forging Regional Belonging) evaluates to what extent the embrace and celebration of difference - which CRISEA sees is at the heart of regional integration - is currently being undermined by the crisis of globalisation and risks being subsumed in nationally and culturally conferred legitimacy. In this context GIGA associate Janina Pawelz investigates youth identities in Timor-Leste through the lens of social identity theory.
- WP 5 (The Region: ASEAN's Contested Centrality) assesses ASEAN's capacity to rise to the challenges facing the region in a rapidly evolving global geopolitical environment and provide solutions to non-traditional security issues thus contributing to maintain its central role in ensuring a peaceful regional order.