ASEAN

This E-paper examines the longstanding tension between ASEAN’s creative vision and its limited concrete action in promoting social and environmental justice across Southeast Asia. While social justice has been foundational in the national constitutions of Southeast Asian countries since independence, inequalities persist.

Southeast Asia promotes peace through non-violent principles, yet its progress remains uneven. ASEAN’s norms, cooperation, and diplomacy have shaped a delicate culture of peace, but the principle of non-interference still limits collective action. This publication explores how ASEAN states navigate the balance between non-violence, national interests, and regional stability.

This paper proposes the following recommendations to address the adverse effects of climate change in the ASEAN: decarbonising the ASEAN by accelerating decarbonisation by 2030; promoting market reforms to enable fair and open competition for energy generation; committing to no more new coal and introducing comparable support for renewable energy; and ensuring a human-centered energy transition in the ASEAN toward a community-focused, equal sharing of benefits and risks and the empowerment of community-owned energy systems.

This paper attempts to investigate the issue of irregular migration in the ASEAN region. The space and attention given to a burgeoning reality of irregular migration is yet to be given its due space at national policy-level and regional discussions. The primary objective of the paper is to function as a baseline study for future advocacy on protection of the rights of undocumented migrants in the region. Primarily, it focuses on the governance of migration, or the lack thereof, by contextualising the current status of irregular migrants in major destination countries of the ASEAN region, being Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.