Problems of negotiating peace and development in conflict-affected societies in Southeast Asia Speaker: Professor Brendan Howe, Graduate School of International Studies

This event is open to academic staff and MLitt students only.

Southeast Asia is deeply affected by conflict and conflictual legacies, whether colonial, Cold War, territorial, ideological, religious or related to resources. A premium is placed on national economic development, security, political sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Despite dramatic progress in economic development and governance, however, major challenges to human security endure. In some cases, these have been exacerbated by national security and development policymaking. At the same time human insecurity and distributive injustices threaten to undermine peace.

This presentation will address Southeast Asian exceptionalism towards global governance, the successes of regional governance initiatives, but also whether they can deal with contemporary challenges. It will further deconstruct the negative and counter-productive impact of state-centric security and development foci while also broadening the analysis of human security contributions to include conflict drivers from the arena of human development. In other words, analysis of the spillover between traditional and non-traditional security perspectives is expanded along both the vertical and horizontal axes.

The problems will be illustrated by case study analysis of two of the most developmentally-challenged countries in the region, Lao PDR and Timor-Leste.