New Threats, Ad-hoc Networks, and Strategic Flexibility: Security Insights from Southeast Asia

On March 26 and 27, 2025, the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and Center for Asia Globalization (CAG) hosted the “Workshop on Multi-actor Security Networks and Global Order: Southeast Asia” at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. The workshop was part of the Security Programs in Disordered States project, which is a multi-site effort to investigate security dynamics in world politics, funded by the Carnegie Corporation. In this post, workshop organizers and principal investigators Naazneen Barma, Jonathan Chang, Jonathan Chu, Susanna Campbell, Selina Ho, and Aila Matanock provide key takeaways from the meeting.

Southeast Asia experiences a wide range of internal and external security challenges. The nine countries discussed at our workshop—Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—together exemplify how geopolitical competition shapes and is shaped by multi-actor security networks. The allocation of foreign assistance, including development and security aid, and broader partnerships on training and stabilization efforts with outside states, intergovernmental organizations, non-profits, and other actors that compose security networks, can have significant effects: at the domestic, regional, and global levels, these decisions can shape political, economic, and social outcomes. Choosing a particular network, and restructuring those relationships over time, changes the influence of stakeholders and potentially shifts the balance of power among them. 

Through presentations from country experts and discussions with regional partners, several themes emerged from the workshop:

1. Traditional security threats remain critical but the increasing presence of non-traditional threats elevates the role of multi-actor security networks. Many countries in the region face traditional security dynamics, and they leverage their security alliances to combat them, focusing on military-to-military partnerships to bolster their security. For example, the Philippines uses its ties with the United States to contest territorial claims in the South China Sea. Similarly, countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore continue to focus on bilateral or multilateral military exercises, arms sales, and interoperability to deal with traditional threats.

In contrast, non-traditional security threats such as criminal networks, scam centers, and human and drug trafficking in weakly governed territories, particularly in continental Southeast Asia, are increasingly concerning and have given rise to more complex security networks. The growth of non-traditional security threats has facilitated the entry of new actors into the region’s security networks, including different dimensions of the Chinese state such as the police, paramilitary groups from a variety of actors, and private security companies. The form of these security networks are often more varied than traditional partnerships, differing between countries, and depending on local needs and which actor is willing to supply what is needed.

2. In part due to variation in security challenges across the region, ad-hoc and minilateral cooperation often seems to overshadow formal regional cooperation. While all countries emphasize the enduring importance of ASEAN centrality, in practice, they all rely heavily on ad hoc and minilateral cooperation arrangements to address their diverse set of security concerns. Minilaterals are small groups of actors convened to address a specific security challenge more agilely than a larger multilateral; examples include the Quad (Australia, Japan, India and the United States) and AUKUS (Australia-UK-US). Some of these forms of coordination move beyond military and diplomatic cooperation; e.g., party-to-party coordination between Laos and Vietnam. While these ad hoc institutions could produce more effective results in the short run and for a given issue (for example, in generating dialogue with the Myanmar Junta), they potentially undermine the development of broader multilateral cooperation through ASEAN. This tradeoff poses a persistent challenge for the region.

3. The domestic politics of these varied states, including their regime type, demographics, and history with conflict, are critical for understanding how each country seeks security and builds its security apparatuses – the result is very different security networks in different places. The Southeast Asian region has one of the most diverse ranges of domestic political systems in the world (including single party states, military governments, democracies, hybrid civilian-military-monarchy regimes, and more). The countries in the region also hold a range of demographics in terms of ethnic, religious, and other identity compositions. Moreover, many states have experienced varying degrees of conflict, with some conflicts ongoing. These differences are reflected in how each country builds its security bureaucracy domestically and security networks internationally. 

For example, the historical counterinsurgency imperative in Malaysia has led to an ethnicization of the state and military apparatus. Another example is the unique Royal Gendarmerie of Cambodia, a branch of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces responsible for the maintenance of public order and internal security in Cambodia. It supports the faction aligned with the Prime Minister, while its role overlaps and complements the role of the National Police, which is part of the Interior Ministry-aligned faction. Domestic politics, in the form of factional rivalry and the tussle between internal and external security actors, led to the production of this unique internal security structure. These structures, and competition between them, may also shape interactions with multi-actor security networks.

4. Countries in ASEAN tend not to “pick sides” in the U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry and instead cooperate based on specific issues that benefit their national interest. Rather than playing to tropes of all-or-nothing choice between one superpower or another, Southeast Asian countries have for decades made strategic choices based on specific issue areas, often relying on neither superpower. Some countries lean more to China (e.g., Cambodia) or the U.S. (e.g., The Philippines), but even in these cases, cooperation is multilayered and dependent on the range of traditional and non-traditional security domains. 

As multi-actor security networks change and the assistance that they provide shifts, new security arrangements emerge, with potentially far-reaching impact on global and regional orders. As we see across regions, it is also apparent in Southeast Asia that countries are not simply “order-takers” but rather are proactive in shaping and reshaping the regional and global security orders.

This workshop was part of a series of events building on similar themes. The first workshop focused on the Pacific region, hosted in Hawaii in February 2025. The final workshop will focus on West Africa and will be held in Ghana in May 2025. For researchers interested in contributing to this body of work and joining this emerging network, CEGA will open a request for proposals in Summer 2025 and convene a final conference in Washington D.C. in 2026.