1.1 Zone of Collaboration? Southeast Asian Area Studies and Political Science
The case of Southeast Asia is a curious one. While the various social science disciplines have produced many studies about other regions in the last two decades, Southeast Asia has interestingly not been studied as extensively. Although, since the start of the twenty-first century, the region has politically and economically all in all developed in a stable way, Southeast Asia still appears to be far away from the centers where global images are primarily shaped (Europe/North America). It is an essential task for scholars of Southeast Asia to bring the region a little bit closer to the Western political consciousness (Kuhonta et al. 2008: 2, 5, 24). Southeast Asia only emerged as a political region of its own after the Cold War, in the two decades since the end of the 1990s, due to its growing economic potential. Before, even during the Vietnam War, the region was never a primary focus of the global major powers or of major global research (Kang 2003: 58). It is thus true that political science is a much more established and older branch that features a standard toolkit and is more firmly rooted in merited theory, while Southeast Asian area studies are not. As a result, on the one hand, the latter are more open to neighboring disciplines such as the humanities, providing more opportunities for innovative cooperation, while, on the other, they may lack the rigor and precision of long-established approaches (Emmerson 2008: 309). Ideally, the dialectic conversation between the overlapping bodies of theory and region should be the foundation of good Southeast Asian political studies that are âguided by theory yet grounded in empiricsâ (Kuhonta et al. 2008: 331). A âvigorous dialogue between theory and evidenceâ can both enrich all major international relations (IR) paradigms and contribute to a deeper scholarly understanding of Southeast Asia (Kang 2003: 85). For area studies, a deeper engagement with theory is thus advisable, while for political science, reorientation toward contextual knowledge is called for (Fukuyama 2004; Diamond 2002; Kuhonta et al. 2008: 238). Proponents of both camps have been at odds for a long time. The former criticized the latter for not having enough deep knowledge about an area, while the latter criticized the former for not adhering to standard methodology and not addressing wider theoretical debates. Between Southeast Asian area studies and political science, there has thus developed a âpolemicized divideâ (Emmerson 2008) that leads most discussions into an unproductive direction, neglecting the fact that both spheres actually overlap. This overlap should be a âzone of healthy and productive collaborationâ in which both the respective shortcomings as well as the positive elements of the other are respected. This debate between area studies specialists and political science proponents is closely connected to the problems accompanying the exclusivity of Western international relations theories (IRTs). The dominance of Western worldviews in IR, in particular realism, is widely acknowledged, but the simple call to incorporate non-Western IRTs into the Western academic discourse will not help to make the discipline more democratic because it only reproduces âthe very hegemonic logic of dominanceâ (Chen 2011: 4). As of yet, IR scholarship outside the West has turned into a source of information of the Western center only. Thus, in order to avoid ever reinforcing the rules of center vs. periphery, Southeast Asia scholars need to raise awareness at the center about non-Western ways of thinking and perceptions, by creating non-hegemonic spaces that allow different ideas and interpretations to co-exist and benefit from each other (Chen 2011: 3), an approach that this study follows.
1.2 Interpretivist Social Constructivism as a Research Perspective
Mainstream IR theories such as realism that dominated the discipline until the 1990s treat world politics as an integrated whole that is undifferentiated by either time or territory (Hopf 1998: 199). True to its core argument, the emergence of constructivism needs to be seen with the sociohistorical background in mind. In the aftermath of the Cold War, there was a need for alternative explanations because the existing IR theories had been unable to foresee or explain the developments that followed, as some issues in the empirical world had simply been neglected. It was in this context that constructivism drew attention to ideas, norms and identities (Barnett 2005: 258). In arguing that the world is socially constructed, social constructivism gives the social more weight than the material in world politics. Material factors are ascribed meaning âthrough a process of interaction between agents (individuals, states, non-state actors) and the structures of their broader environmentâ. This âidea that states and the international environment are mutually constituted is inherent in the constructivist approachâ (Hurd 2006: 305). In the case of Southeast Asia, constructivism allows the researcher to focus on the historical production of identities in the various colonial and post-colonial contexts (Davidson 2008). It is with this background in mind that constructivists criticized realism for its Eurocentric approach that is undeniable largely based on European historical experiences (Acharya and Stubbs 2006). In looking at other non-European regions mainly through the lens of realism, in the past, Western scholars tended to disregard many of the respective areaâs specific characteristics, a phenomenon that Edward Said called âOrientalismâ (2003).
Social constructivism in IR can be separated into various strands. Two of these emerged as the dominant ones, usually referred to as conventional or positivist and interpretative or post-positivist. They agree that the world is made and remade through human action, for which ideas are central. These ideas âdefine and transform the organization of world politics, shape the identity and interests of states, and determine what counts as legitimate actionâ (Barnett 2005: 252). The conventional strand, however, concerns itself with constructivism as a philosophical, metatheoretical enterprise and is more âinterested in uncovering top-down/deductive mechanisms and causal relationshipsâ (Checkel 2008: 72; Hurd 2006: 299), while the interpretivist strand âmoved away from abstract philosophical argument toward the study of human discourse and practice beyond the narrow confines of IRTâ (Reus-Smit 2006: 215). The interpretative strand assumes that causal relationships do not matter that much in the mediation and construction of social reality, but rather that language plays a central role and thus a respective situationâs background and linguistic constructions (social discourses). This strand asks âhowâ questions and is not so much interested in generalizing but in the respective content. In contrast to the conventional strand, the methods with which interpretivists proceed can be deeply inductive (bottom-up), and textual and narrative (Checkel 2008: 73). It is hence that the epistemological divide between positivists and post-positivists runs deep (Hurd 2006: 307). There are in fact many divisive points among constructivists. A central one is the notion of state centrism or, rather, the unit of analysis (Hurd 2006: 306). Traditionally there are three levels of analysis in IR, as Kenneth Waltz famously outlined in 1959, referring to them as the âthree imagesâ, by which phenomena of international politics could be explained. These are the individual, the group and the intergroup levels. Most constructivist scholars favor the view that the arena of politics equals the interplay of actors at various levels (Checkel 2008: 78). Alexander Wendt is the most notable exception because he focuses solely on the systemic level and hence treats states as unitary actors, while methodologically proclaiming a âscientific realismâ (Reus-Smit 2006: 222). The interpretivist strand of constructivism sees âno impetus for a zero-sum debate over which level provides the most leverage over puzzlesâ. In other words, as constructivism acknowledges that states as well as actors below state level can have an impact on politics, it makes no sense to argue whether the domestic level is important to IR or not (Hurd 2006: 306). That is why a study of media perception is of interest for the IR scholar.
For proponents of area studies, the interpretative approach has clear advantages because it allows for a heightened cultural sensitivity that matters more than formal replicability. Here hypothesis-testing is but one step in a long process of research that encompasses several levels. Causality still matters but not as a means by itself; rather as an inseparable part of social phenomena in general. Interpretivist work is thus a highly descriptive task, but the work can nonetheless be analytically ambitious (Kuhonta et al. 2008: 8â9). Cliffort Geertz called this attempt to develop an approach that describes the social phenomenon in a theoretically grounded way âthick descriptionâ. In his opinion, researchers should know a lot about a smaller number of cases and generalize within them, instead of attempting to vainly extrapolate to other cases (1973). Thus the interpretivist method accumulates knowledge not primarily through hypothesis-testing but rather by accumulating general insights into patterns of individual behavior in similar but not identical social settings. These insights then lead to a more precise and better understanding of the behavior under study and of the variations of the behavior across different contexts (Geertz 1973). Thus, when understanding qualitative social inquiry as a means by itself, which allows the researcher to analyze a selected few cases in greater depth rather than to generalize about a broader population, interpretivist social constructivism offers an appropriate lens through which empirical settings can be observed, while bearing in mind the respective sociohistorical background.
1.3 Power and Social Constructivism
In constructivism, power incorporates both material and non-material factors (Hurd 2006: 299). It is a concept that is constructed out of both material power and ideological structures (Checkel 2008). âPower can be understood not only as the ability of one actor to get another actor to do what they would not do otherwise but also as the production of identities and interests that limit the ability to control their fateâ (Barnett 2005: 264). It can be âanything that institutes or sustains controlâ (Novotny 2010) and hence comprises the following components: economy, military and prestige. Following this logic, power is not only an entityâs aggregated material might; it is also about how it is perceived. 1 Power can thus be a very subjective entity. As with other social concepts, constructivists see power as contextually constructed, getting its relevance from how it is perceived â its interpretation depending on the contextual conditions. Hence the understanding of power is different from case to case. Perceptions in turn derive from the way in which a group or an individual understand and respond to a set of intersubjective ideas, identities and norms (Novotny 2010: 31). 2 Accordingly, this study acknowledges the power that derives from material might, but also stresses the acute relevance of social context for the understanding of power relations. Similar to the concept of power is the social construction of threats. A threat is never a primordial constant because it is always dependent on the social construction of an âOtherâ and not just there already (Hopf 1998: 199). This means that how states perceive each other has an influence on their interests and thus on their behavior (Hopf 1998: 199). Constructivism is therefore interested in change, since it assumes that relationships and perceptions are not stable because they develop over time depending on the ongoing interaction between the parties and their social context (Hurd 2006: 303). The process of identity and interest formation is then closely interconnected. As identities are fundamentally social and always shaped in relationship to others, they are not fixed but changeable, and again they shape interests: âKnowledge shapes how actors interpret and construct social realityâ (Barnett 2005: 263, 267). This means that ideas in international politics are intersubjective and institutionalized. They are shared among people and expressed in practices and identities (Hurd 2006: 301). âNew foreign policy ideas are shaped by preexisting dominant ideas and their relationship to experienced eventsâ (Legro 2005: 4). Threat then, for instance, is not self-evident. The one who perceives some material factor has to understand it in a specific way. For this...