Writing Southeast Asian Security. The “War On Terror” As A Hegemonic Security Narrative And Its Effects In Southeast Asia: A (Critical) Security Analysis

Abstract

<p>This dissertation examines the (critical) security effects that US Foreign Policy, and in particular the War on Terror (WOT), has had on East and Southeast Asia. This dissertation also articulates an innovative critical security approach that requires a post-structuralism based in Stephen K. White’s notion of “weak ontology,” and further demands a historically and geographically contingent method of immanent critique that allows us to grapple with the politics and ethics of actually occurring security logics. <em>As</em> a form of immanent critique rooted in a weak ontological understanding of critical security, this dissertation asks- and answers- the following question(s): What can a critical security analysis tell us about security/insecurity that a more conventional realist-based security analysis cannot? And more specifically, what can a critical security analysis tell us about the impact that the WOT has had on both state and non-state actors in East and Southeast Asia? In other words, <em>operating as an immanent critique</em> in the context of empirical examples in East and Southeast Asia, this dissertation demonstrates that forms of insecurity were constructed and/or abetted by the WOT itself, understood as a hegemonic security narrative, and that these forms of insecurity occurred in concert with the practice of traditional forms of state-centric security.</p> <p>This dissertation contributes to scholarship in two significant ways. First, it seeks to remedy the relative paucity of <em>critical</em> security analyses focused on East Asia and Southeast Asia. Second, this dissertation demonstrates- using the weak ontological immanent critique approach that it outlines- that a deconstructive critical security analysis based in post-structuralist commitments need not be anathema to engagements with pragmatic problems and security issues, nor should it have to preclude the possibility of enacting the politics and ethics that are required to theorize alternative security logics.</p>