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Abstract

Discussions about the Indo-Pacific contestation between China and the United States often focus on both superpowers’ geopolitical strategies and economic and military might. The experiences of small and less powerful Indo-Pacific states navigating these tensions are relatively overlooked or even discounted. Yet, they are not passive bystanders in their longstanding neighborhood drama— they often seek strength in unity via their regional organizations and produce regional law to safeguard their collective interests. In short, they exercise legal agency. Using the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (“ASEAN”) experience of regional law cooperation to navigate challenges (including, but not limited to, the U.S.-China contestation), this cross-disciplinary article conceptualizes how small Indo-Pacific states have exercised legal agency amid geopolitical pressures to safeguard common security and economic interests. This has resulted in the exercise of legal agency corresponding to three distinct geopolitical environments: via realist rhetoric laws in the Cold War, constructivist cooperation laws amid globalization, and rules-based ordering in the contemporary Indo-Pacific. Through the intensification of legal agency over fifty-seven years, ASEAN has transformed from a diplomatic grouping with a basic aim of preventing inter-member aggression to promote national economic development, to a rules-based integrationist community that pursues ASEAN centrality in foreign power engagement to safeguard members’ intraregional and external security and economic interests. ASEAN’s experience may have generalizable lessons for how other Indo-Pacific or Global South regimes facing geopolitical pressures exercise their legal agency. As the former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it: “Small states [have] little buffer against shocks. But [we] are by no means without agency . . . we can make up . . . through . . . cooperation . . . and upholding the multilateral rules-based system.”

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