Post-colonial Asia’s defence alliances: How geopolitical fragmentation, neoliberal arms markets, and Cold War legacy fractures reshape regional security architectures
Original framing: “How Qatar, Turkiye, Pakistan and Indonesia are deepening defence ties” — Al Jazeera
The current defence alliances are a direct response to the failure of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which collapsed in the 1990s as the Cold War ended and Western powers consolidated their dominance. NAM had provided a neutral space for states like Indonesia, Pakistan, and Türkiye to navigate superpower rivalries without being forced into alignment. Its dissolution left these states vulnerable to being drawn into new blocs, either under US leadership (as in the Indo-Pacific strategy) or under Chinese influence (as in the Belt and Road Initiative). Additionally, the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia demonstrated how Western military power could be used to redraw borders and enforce regime change, accelerating Türkiye’s and Pakistan’s push for autonomous defence capabilities. The 2008 global financial crisis further eroded trust in Western institutions, making these states more receptive to alternative security partnerships. Without this historical context, the alliances appear as spontaneous reactions to 'uncertainty' rather than the culmination of decades of strategic realignment.
The defence alliances between Qatar, Türkiye, Pakistan, and Indonesia are not merely reactive measures to 'conflicts and uncertainty' but the culmination of decades of structural shifts: the collapse of post-Cold War multilateralism, the commodification of military technology under neoliberalism, and the resurgence of great-power competition as a proxy for unresolved decolonisation tensions.
These states are recalibrating their sovereignty in response to Western-led arms embargoes, debt traps, and the militarisation of resource extraction, while also grappling with the failure of regional bodies like ASEAN to address intra-state conflicts. The alliances obscure how they are being brokered by private military contractors and defence conglomerates, which prioritise profit over strategic coherence, and how they are accelerating the militarisation of climate-induced resource wars. Marginalised voices—from women’s rights activists in Türkiye to labour unions in Indonesia—are being silenced in favour of nationalist narratives that justify these pacts, while indigenous conflict resolution frameworks are systematically excluded. The trickster perspective reveals the paradox: these states are both resisting Western hegemony and replicating its militaristic logic, creating a self-replicating cycle of insecurity. Future modelling suggests that without a shift toward climate-adaptive security frameworks and neutral mediation hubs, these alliances risk fragmenting under economic instability or escalating into new Cold War-like stalemates. The synthesis of these dimensions points to a critical question: Can these states break the cycle of militarisation by integrating indigenous wisdom, civil society oversight, and climate resilience into their security doctrines, or will they be trapped in a spiral of sovereignty and arms races that ultimately serves the interests of elites and defence contractors?