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View all search resultsASEAN’s multilateral dilemma: Continuity and change from NAM to BRICS
The NAM failed not because its premise was wrong, but because it lacked economic integration, technological depth and institutional discipline.
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An Indonesian Military (TNI) honor guard leads the parade with various flags of participating countries during ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, West Java on April 24, 2015. (AFP/Pool/Achmad Ibrahim)
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SEAN’s enduring strength has never been its ability to project power, but its capacity to manage diversity through restraint, process and dialogue. In an increasingly polarized strategic environment, pressures to align more explicitly with emerging blocs such as BRICS risk diluting ASEAN’s long-standing emphasis on autonomy and consensus.
For Southeast Asia, security is less about joining alternative power centers than about preserving decision-making space amid intensifying great-power rivalry. A revitalized non-aligned approach, adapted to contemporary challenges such as economic fragmentation, digital governance and maritime security, offers ASEAN greater flexibility to engage all major actors without becoming dependent on any. In this sense, nonalignment is not a rejection of cooperation, but a pragmatic strategy to sustain ASEAN centrality in a multipolar, yet deeply contested, regional order.
But why does ASEAN’s security lie in nonalignment, not bloc membership?
For more than two decades, the “Asian Century” has been treated as an inevitability rather than a hypothesis. Yet inevitability is not strategy, and Asia’s economic rise has not produced commensurate strategic autonomy.
Growth without agency is not power; it is exposure. Nowhere is this clearer than in ASEAN’s strategic predicament.
The region is richer, more connected and more central to global supply chains than ever. It is also more militarized, more contested and more instrumentalized by external powers. This is not ascent; it is crowded relevance.
Consequentially, ASEAN is increasingly urged to anchor itself more firmly in BRICS, or, alternatively, to revive the logic of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The choice is often framed as outdated idealism versus modern multipolar pragmatism. This framing is false.
