How Malaysia can boost Asean agency and centrality amid global challenges

December 2, 2024

On October 11, Laos handed the baton of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) chairmanship to Malaysia during the closing ceremony of the 44th and 45th Asean Summits and Related Summits. Malaysia will officially assume the chair on January 1 next year with the theme “Inclusivity and Sustainability”.

In 2015, when Malaysia last held the Asean chairmanship, the world was in the throes of violence. From Bamako to Beirut, Paris to the Sinai desert, communities mourned hostages taken, wounded, or killed – sometimes in the hundreds – in various extremist attacks. A few days before Kuala Lumpur welcomed delegates to the 27th Asean Summit, Malaysian Bernard Then’s severed head was found in southern Philippines, months after he had been abducted from the Malaysian state of Sabah by Abu Sayyaf militants.

Ten years on, the strategic landscape looks decidedly different in Southeast Asia.
Myanmar remains locked in intractable civil strife since the junta’s 2021 coup, and clashes in the South China Sea threaten to metastasize into a wider regional conflict. With Asean paralysed on both fronts, dialogue partners’ preference for minilateral arrangements such as Aukus and the Quad, and an unpredictable US president back in the White House, Asean centrality remains in question despite years of formal community-building since Malaysia presided over the 2015 launch of the Asean Community in Kuala Lumpur.

While the cessation of hostilities in Myanmar and in the South China Sea will no doubt remain key priorities for Asean, any expectations of material success on these fronts in 2025 have to be tempered. The rotational, one-year term of the Asean chairmanship means that chairs can only add on to their predecessors’ efforts and organisational foundations established in previous years.

Still, Asean faces other contemporary challenges, many of which it has identified in the Asean Community Vision 2045. Malaysia’s theme of “Inclusivity and Sustainability” is a timely reminder to reprioritise a “people-oriented, people-centred” community. There is gathering momentum to do so. The catastrophic annihilation of Gaza and the brazen impunity of the powerful have once again laid bare what previous social, economic and political inflection points such as the 1998 Asian financial crisis, 2008 global financial crisis, and Covid-19 pandemic had already made clear: the international order needs reordering because it no longer responds to the needs of the majority. The established powers that thumped their chests as architects of multilateralism and international law are themselves actively undermining those very institutions.

Asean members have begun to diversify their strategic portfolios in tentative but telling ways. The expansion of cross-border local currency transactions and regional payment connectivity among member states to ensure financial resilience is one example. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam becoming partner countries of Brics is another. Others include the expected upgrade of the Asean-China Free Trade Agreement in 2025 and last year’s establishment of the Asean-Gulf Cooperation Council summit.

Malaysia’s list of initiatives may already be filling up as the countdown begins for the start of its chairmanship. But beyond economic integration, which Asean already excels at relative to political-security and socio-cultural matters, Malaysia could build on Asean centrality and agency in the following mix of incremental and bold ways beginning next year.

First, while Asean should respond to great power contestation, it should not be distracted or debilitated by it. The return of US president-elect Donald Trump to the world scene may reanimate an awkward mix of disquiet, indifference, even sanguinity, among policy watchers about how the United States will engage with the rest of the world.

But while Asean should certainly prepare for the probability of volatility, it should not be consumed by it. What this means in practice is doing more of what it has been doing – actively seeking partnerships with other parts of the world while holding on to established ties. Malaysia’s proposal to convene an Asean-GCC-China meeting next year exemplifies the former. It could also follow up on the Asean-Pacific Islands Forum memorandum of understanding signed during Indonesia’s Asean chairmanship in 2023 by initiating substantive discussions on topics of common concern, including the climate emergency and critical digital infrastructure like subsea communication cables.

Second, Asean needs a genuinely cross-sectoral forum to deliberate the impact and implications of technology. The bloc has been focusing on tech policy from an economic lens, having bet on digital transformation to propel growth. But tech will have a great impact on all three pillars of the Asean Community now that the US-China race for tech dominance has led to the securitisation of the entire tech value chain, from raw minerals and component parts to infrastructure and platforms.

As Asean is a critical node in global supply chains and subsea cable routes, as well as a burgeoning consumer market, it is critical that the region’s stakeholders weigh in on the diverse implications of tech, including on national or regional security, commerce and trade, energy and ecology, and social equity. Establishing a standing forum or an advisory council akin to the Asean Eminent Persons Group that convenes expert stakeholders from different backgrounds can support the region in responding holistically and strategically to developments in the tech landscape.

Third, and relatedly, the region’s current preoccupations with the digital and green revolutions offer an opportunity for Malaysia to meaningfully apply “inclusivity and sustainability” in both areas. This will require going beyond the region’s overwhelming tech optimism and critically assessing how data-driven tech entrenches or exacerbates social inequities through environmental costs, algorithmic bias and labour exploitation; how the concentration of computational infrastructure affects accessibility, inclusivity and accountability; and how the datafication of everything affects society in the long run.

Examining these questions will demand taking a cross-disciplinary approach rather than a primarily economic one to tech. It will require, for example, considering alternative data governance frameworks that adequately protect community data, understanding the historical arc of tech and its relationship to power, and consulting on technical standards that regulate the entire life cycle of AI systems and their impact on the environment. The Malaysian government and/or policy institutions could initiate Track 1.5 meetings on these under-discussed issues, and the outcomes of these meetings could then be fed to the Asean Digital Ministers Meeting. Additionally, the private sector and philanthropic foundations in Malaysia and around the region could help fund research on these topics as they specifically relate to Southeast Asia.

Malaysia’s leadership of Asean in 2025 will afford the country occasion to build on the efforts of past chairs. However, in order to realise the centrality, community and agency the region aspires to, the incoming chair should dare to do things differently, if only because the world is no longer the same.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.