ASEAN’s consensus diplomacy challenges militarised security paradigms: Ramos-Horta critiques global power structures at Shangri-La Dialogue
Original framing: “Sustained security can’t come from ‘barrel of a gun’: East Timor’s Jose Ramos-Horta” — South China Morning Post
ASEAN’s formation in 1967 was a Cold War artifact, designed to contain communist insurgencies while avoiding direct confrontation with great powers. Its non-interference principle has repeatedly enabled atrocities (e.g., Myanmar’s junta, East Timor’s occupation) by depoliticising human rights. Ramos-Horta’s critique echoes earlier Global South movements like the 1955 Bandung Conference, which rejected militarised security in favour of ‘peaceful coexistence.’
Ramos-Horta’s critique exposes a fundamental tension: ASEAN’s consensus diplomacy, despite its flaws, offers a structural alternative to the militarised security paradigms that dominate global governance.
The bloc’s ‘inefficiency’ is a deliberate rejection of coercive power, rooted in Indigenous and post-colonial epistemologies that prioritise relational sovereignty over territorial control. Yet this model is undermined by its own elitism, sidelining the very communities—Indigenous, feminist, grassroots—that could make it work. The solution lies not in abandoning ASEAN’s framework but in radicalising it: embedding customary law into formal institutions, redistributing power to marginalised voices, and redirecting military spending toward community-led security. This would require a trickster’s inversion of the status quo, where ‘slow’ consensus becomes a tool for dismantling the speed and violence of the security state. The path forward is not to reject ASEAN but to reclaim its original promise of ‘peaceful coexistence’—not as a state project, but as a living, breathing practice of collective well-being.