I hold an enduring interest in the norms and practices of ASEAN integration. This is largely shaped by my work experience at RSIS where I was a research analyst. This interest in ASEAN is almost-always examined through the lens of the ASEAN-China relation.
In that way, my 2015 article ‘ASEAN’s norm adherence and its unintended consequences in HADR and SAR operations‘ published in the Pacific Review, suggests that a strict adherence to the norms and practices of ‘respect for sovereignty’ and ‘consensus decision-making’ inhibited closer ASEAN cooperation during disaster events, specifically during Typhoon Haiyan disaster and in the search for missing flight MH370.
Also focusing on norms and practices of ASEAN integration, my 2018 article (The disturbance and endurance of norms in ASEAN: peaceful but stressful) in the Australian Journal of International Affairs interrogates how norms of ‘ASEAN way’ are increasingly put under pressure from extra-mural force by a more muscular Chinese foreign policy that disrupts but does not yet break the fundamental norms of ASEAN but also through internal contestation over ASEAN norms that challenges (and potentially alters) the meaning of these norms.