Since the Cold War, South-East Asia has been marked by a period of relative calm and stability. Yet this peace belies ongoing tensions, mistrust and stress in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and among its member states. Within the scholarship on ASEAN, not enough attention is devoted to these underlying currents. How and…

T his study examines the pro-democracy protests of Hong Kong in 2014 and how the protests became sites for Beijing’s representations of Chinese national image(s). It argues that ‘defensive soft power’ can be used to understand the process through which Beijing made such representations and projections. ‘Defensive soft power’, extending on Nye’s soft power…

The ‘Chinese Dream’ (CD) and the ‘Belt Road Initiative’ (BRI) are signature programs of President Xi Jinping. Much of the scholarships on these two projects have concerned itself with either domestic propagandistic effects or external foreign policy impact. These concerns have underpinned the literature’s focus on material expressions of such projects, be it through infrastructural…

Sovereignty is the core concept of international relations. Almost without exception, approaches to sovereignty in IR have followed a binary framing where sovereignty is seen to consist of two components: ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ sovereignty, ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ sovereignty, and so on. These dichotomies stem from the prevailing understanding of sovereignty as the boundary between the…