Managing Great Power Politics: ASEAN, Institutional Strategy and the South China Sea

In his book, Managing Great Power Politics: ASEAN, Institutional Strategy and the South China Sea, Kei Koga examines the role of non-great powers in regional security institutions. He does so by exploring the ‘institutional strategies that ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have employed to manage great power politics in the South China Sea’ (SCS) (p.vii). The book’s core argument is that ‘since the 1990s, ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have individually devised and/or shifted their own institutional strategy to manage the great-power politics pertaining to the SCS disputes, and that each institutional strategy aims to constrain great-powers’ behaviour and avoid being entrapped by their strategic competition so as to ensure member states’ interests’ (p.7).