About the Conference

At a time of geopolitical uncertainty and with multilateralism under pressure, this conference brought together diverse actors to explore the evolving role of international law on critical security and economic issues in the Asia-Pacific. From trade agreements to deep-sea mining, cyberwarfare to territorial disputes, the breadth of the discussion illustrated the growing reach of international law in the region.

Hosted by the International Law Programme and the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House on 27 March 2019, the conference focused on three themes: trade and investment, maritime security and governance, and emerging security challenges. What trends are emerging in terms of engagement with international law in the region, and how can international standards play a greater role in encouraging collaboration and reducing tensions? And, with the eastward shift in geopolitical power, how will Asia-Pacific states shape the future of international law?

The ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) strategy, actively promoted by the United States with support from its allies and partners, is a significant geopolitical response to China's growing power and expanding influence in Asia and beyond. Beijing has adopted various new strategies to cope with the challenges related to FOIP. One of these strategies is to secure a robust relationship with south-east Asia in order to make these regional states either neutral to or less supportive of the Indo-Pacific vision. In addition to economic statecraft and soft power, Beijing believes that it can also tap into the domain of non-traditional security (NTS) to strengthen relations with this region to position itself better in the intensifying regional geopolitical competition. The article addresses the following question: what is the impact of China's NTS cooperation with south-east Asia on Beijing's geopolitical rivalry with other major powers in the Indo-Pacific region? The article argues that China's NTS cooperation with south-east Asian countries may help China maintain its geopolitical standing in the region, but it is unlikely to lead to any dramatic increase of China's strategic influence in the region. This essentially means that Beijing may be able to prevent ASEAN or most ASEAN member states from lending substantive and strong support to the Indo-Pacific construct, but it will not be able to stop ASEAN states from supporting some elements of the FOIP.

This article assesses how south-east Asian countries and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have responded to the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) strategies promoted by the United States and the other countries in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the ‘Quad’: US, Japan, Australia and India). Their nuanced ripostes imply a persistent commitment to hedging and shifting limited alignments in the face of growing great rivalry and the lack of a clear FOIP vision among Quad members. In the face of external pressure to take sides, the ASEAN states are likely to keep hedging through working selectively with China and the United States. Given the United States' apparent preference to balance China and Trump's disregard for multilateralism, ASEAN's ability to maintain its centrality in the evolving regional architecture is in doubt—despite the Quad countries' (belated) accommodation of ASEAN in their FOIP strategies. However, the success of the US strategy depends on Washington's ability to build and sustain the requisite coalition to balance Beijing. ASEAN has undertaken efforts to enhance bilateral security collaboration with China and the United States respectively. In doing so, ASEAN is arguably seeking to informally redefine its centrality in an era of Great Power discord and its ramifications for multilateralism.

This article adopts a constructive approach to examining the problem of the Indo-Pacific construct. Through reflection on the east Asian experience, it proposes an analytical framework of developmental peace as a constellation of international practices, which means that the more economic development is prioritized by states in regional processes, the more likely it is that a sustainable peace will be achieved. States participating in regional integration comprise a community of practice. On the basis of a shared understanding that development is of overriding importance and underpins security and state legitimacy, the community takes economic development as the anchoring practice; this practice embodies and enacts constitutive rules and fundamental norms for a broader set of practices in regional processes, such as peaceful coexistence and non-interference. The more economic development is prioritized on domestic and regional agendas, the more likely it is that conflicts in the security realm will be relaxed or even resolved to protect security interests. The author draws some useful implications from the developmental peace in east Asia for the Indo-Pacific construct, among which the most important include building shared understandings on the prioritization of economic development, taking advantage of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and using the code of conduct process as a vehicle and best practice to facilitate rule-making for the maritime order. Finally, the author briefly discusses the contributions of the study and limitations of the model.

China’s growing power and assertiveness in Asia has led the United States and other liberal partners to move toward an Indo-Pacific strategy. While Japan embraces this, South Korea remains noticeably reticent. Moreover, tensions between the two countries have escalated into crisis with the reinvigoration of historical disputes. This roundtable will explore the root causes of current animosity between Seoul and Tokyo, and the potential ways it can be overcome.

This event is co-hosted with Dartmouth College. 

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Asia’s political class learnt many lessons on digital governance in 2019, not all of them positive.

The prolonged protests in Hong Kong and India, led by disaffected young citizenry and enabled by social media tools, powerfully demonstrated how things could spiral out of control when the virtual and the real streets come together.

Not surprisingly, governments across the region are taking a step back. Instead of placing the citizen at the heart of digital public policy – with privacy, trust, security and inclusion as drivers of digital governance – Asian governments are focusing instead on surveillance and command and control, which contradicts the spirit of a decentralized Internet and undermines citizen’s rights.

Asia’s digital governance is fragmenting from the global norm and morphing into two platforms with remarkably similar characteristics.

One is a China-driven model aptly called the Great Firewall where surveillance of citizens is an explicit objective and any external material deemed to be subversive is kept out. A complementary model has also emerged more recently, which can best be described as China-light, which seeks to emulate the control aspects of the Great Firewall.

There are of course overlaps between emulators of the China model (this list includes Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos) and those pursuing China-light (Singapore, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia). A common thread running through these two approaches, which differ only in intensity and scope, is the belief that the state is best positioned to police social media and protect the rights of citizens.

This was not how it was supposed to be. A decade ago, Asian political leaders spoke about the virtues of an open internet. Such talk has faded, and a narrowing of Asia’s digital space is taking place against a backdrop of an intensifying trade war between America and China, where regional supply chains run the risk of a decoupling into distinct Sino and American spheres, upending Asia’s durable economic model of the past few decades.

Digital fragmentation in the world’s fastest growing region, with five G20 members, will complicate efforts to build global governance and standards.

Asia’s digital landscape

Asian governments, including democratic ones, have developed an unhealthy obsession with what their citizens are up to on a daily basis. Their solution is round-the-clock monitoring in cities and towns, powered by new surveillance technologies.

Name tagging and facial recognition to track movement of citizens has become pervasive across the region, with China emerging as the preferred source of technology, knowledge, and techniques. While India’s Supreme Court has ruled that privacy is a fundamental right, translating this into concrete citizen’s protections will be difficult with the Modi government eager to emulate China’s approach.

Asian governments are also following China in requiring that their citizen’s data be housed within national borders and are rebelling against the established practice of data offshoring.

In the post-Snowden era and amidst increasing cyber risks, there are rational national security reasons for why governments may want to ring-fence customer data within national boundaries. However, Asian governments are paying little or no attention to how companies are using customer data within national boundaries, with widespread abuses going unchecked.

Global standards are still evolving and there is a strong case here for a uniform regional approach, perhaps via ASEAN or APEC, on standards governing customer privacy, payments, data collection and handling. Big tech companies and platforms operate across much of Asia and a regional approach will curb their current instinct of conducting regulatory arbitrage.

There is a genuine problem in Asia, as elsewhere in the world, with the proliferation of fake news and extremism. But instead of addressing the source of this problem, governments are clamping down by generously expanding the definition of fake news (Singapore) or by shutting down the internet altogether (India, Sri Lanka, and China being serial offenders).

As disseminators of news of all stripes, including the fake variant, the big tech firms have a primary responsibility in policing their platforms. However, the regulatory capacity of many Asian governments to monitor this is weak and in crisis situations, governments prefer to shut the pipes altogether.

Digitalization of course is not all about surveillance and holds the promise of driving inclusion. There is considerable hype within Asia on the promise of fintech as an enabler of this inclusion.

Hong Kong and Singapore are licensing new digital banks, India’s UPI (unified payments interface) is reducing friction in domestic payments and China’s BAT companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) are disrupting traditional commerce and payments, and seeking to expand in the region.

However, there is an elite focus in many of these initiatives, with the target market being the region’s rising middle class rather than those at the bottom of the income ladder. Making fintech work for all will require micro-initiatives with the support of NGOs, local governments and small enterprises, with the objective of digitalizing microfinance.

Here developing Asia will again benefit from learning from each other and in building regional approaches. India’s Aadhar for example, with appropriate security safeguards, is a model for Asia in terms of building digital identity.

Given differing regional and national objectives, it is difficult to imagine a global accord for digital governance any time soon. However, by signing on to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP, the successor to the TPP), Asia has consistently demonstrated its leadership in trade and regional governance.

This is why the region needs to come together to ensure that the promise and potential of digitalization flows evenly and equitably to the region, with the region’s 3.8 billion citizens at the heart, rather than at the margins of sensible public policy.

The Asia-Pacific region continues to increase in geopolitical and geoeconomic importance. The rise of China and tensions with the US are affecting bilateral relationships and traditional alliances in the region. Whether seen from the perspective of the Quad – Australia, India, Japan and the US – or the Indo-Pacific concept embraced by a wide range of countries but with no shared consensus on scope and objectives or with ASEAN who insists on the importance of its own centrality, the region is redefining and reconceptualising itself.

With a diverse range of initiatives – including the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) – there are a plethora of regional agreements and institutional groupings that add further complexity.

As the Bretton Woods architecture continues to be dominated by Western powers, China is also spearheading parallel governance initiatives such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Belt and Road Initiative and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a means of enhancing its geopolitical and geoeconomic influence.

This one-day conference will focus on how such networks and alliances have been built, and sustained, in the Asia-Pacific region. In order to understand how new regional initiatives might open up opportunities for new forms of international cooperation, the conference will focus on the themes of cyber-technology and innovation, sustainable development and mitigating the impacts of climate change and new infrastructure initiatives. It will assess whether there is a zero-sum conflict between competing networks and agendas or whether a common approach can be developed.

Internet shutdowns in Asia have become frequent and persistent, an ominous sign of shrinking public space for debate and discourse. The shutdowns have become an irresistible option for governments of all stripes and ideological affiliations. Democratic India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines are prodigious offenders. So are Asia’s more repressive regimes, notably China.

In their defence, governments have offered real and imagined threats to national security as reasons for shutting down the pipes. It is useful to examine these claims as well as to objectively frame the issue. Are internet shutdowns in Asia legitimate and can be defended and explained as threats to national security? Or should we take a broader approach where international law, norms, values, rights and indeed economic stability could be invoked to curb this invidious practice?

Let’s start with the shutdown in Kashmir, where Indian authorities clamped down on internet access for a straight 165 days, described by rights group Access Now as the ‘longest shutdown ever in a democracy’. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates that the shutdown had huge economic costs, estimated at over £1.9 billion.

The economic cost of the continuing surveillance and shutdown in China’s Xinjiang province is likely to be higher. But India is a democracy and could be a role model, which is why the recent assertion of Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravishankar Prasad is worrying. He asserted in Parliament that the Indian citizen’s right to the internet was not a fundamental right. ‘While right of internet is important, security of the country is equally important…Can we deny (that) the internet is abused by terrorists…?’.

The minister’s primary defence of the shutdown – that the internet was being abused by terrorists and others to foment unrest – has some merit. Our starting point therefore is that big tech platforms should be doing a significantly better job in monitoring content and in removing material designed to provoke violence and hatred. This is the original sin and Asian governments are right to worry about messaging platforms, for example, becoming preferred channels for venom and hate speech.

To date, the big tech firms have made the right noises about monitoring and moderating content, but they have not gone far enough, providing governments with the excuse to routinely shut down access. To be blunt, self-regulation of the platforms is not working and tougher global regulation, enforcement and sanctions, possibly via the G20, would help.

At the same time, better policing of the platforms will not resolve the issue entirely because governments regard internet shutdowns as a useful way to restrict human rights and to consolidate political control and surveillance over citizens. The international community – including nation-states, NGOs and the private sector – needs to come together and embrace two overarching principles:

First, digital access is a fundamental human right and integrated into global declarations and norms.

Second, to protect fragmentation and Balkanization of the internet, the digital pipes which carry data across national boundaries should be embedded into international law as being part of the global commons (just like oceans are under maritime law). This would raise the bar on countries which frequently restrict digital access to their citizens.

Sensible though these recommendations might seem, it is obvious that many Asian governments would be loath to sign up to global declarations which would limit their policy options at home. There is an economic dimension to internet shutdowns, as the Kashmir case makes clear, which could be addressed by naming and shaming, just as the OECD’s Financial Action Task Force does for countries falling foul of money laundering regulations. Recommendations include:

• Digital access should be included in the UN’s Human Development Index.
• The World Bank’s closely followed Doing Business Index (DBI) should score countries favourably based on their commitment to offering unimpeded access to the internet. China and India watch the DBI rankings very closely and will be forced to pursue a more liberal approach if their rankings fall precipitously.
• Since internet shutdowns have a clear economic cost, particularly in payments and financial services, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should make an annual determination of member countries (as part of its surveillance mandate) of the impact of shutdowns on economic activity and financial stability.

Finally, all Asian governments have declared a public commitment to drive financial inclusion by providing digital access and identity to the poor and vulnerable. This mandate is at odds with frequent internet disruptions. A small vendor in Kashmir, Xinjiang or elsewhere in the region has limited or no recourse when the pipes are shut down. Central banks in the region need to step in by offering some level of protection, just like deposit insurance coverage.

It is clear that many of these recommendations would be rejected outright by many Asian governments. They regard internet shutdowns as part of their policy toolkit to deal with external and internal threats to national security. In pursuing such a rigid approach, governments are wilfully curbing their citizens’ space for debate and ignoring a much broader issue of rights to digital access.

Armed with a hammer, it is tempting for governments to regard the internet as a nail. The international community and citizens’ groups have an obligation to make such hammering very expensive.

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have a damaging economic impact on Asia, potentially the most serious since the financial crisis two decades ago. While early estimates suggest that a recession is inevitable, differing countries in Asia are generally deploying modest fiscal and monetary measures. This is true even in China, compared with the ‘whatever it takes’ approach pursued by Europe and America. 

How effective will these measures be in reviving growth and in easing the pain, particularly on the poor in developing countries in Asia? Is Asia witnessing a sudden but temporary halt in economic activity rather than a prolonged slowdown? At this virtual roundtable, the speakers will consider the likelihood of a recovery for trade in the region and will explore what lessons can be learned from countries like Singapore, who seem to be successfully managing the health and economic aspects of COVID-19. 

This event is online only. After registering, you will receive a follow-up confirmation email with details of how to join the webinar.

It has been nearly six years since the West imposed sanctions on Russia, targeting Russia's energy, defence and financial sectors. The sanctions exposed Russia's key vulnerabilities - dependence on Western capital and advanced technology, with knock-on effects in other sectors.

In an effort to offset the impact of sanctions, Russia has attempted a diversification strategy to non-Western states. The Asia-Pacific has emerged as a new export market for hydrocarbons and weapons, and as the main alternative to Western capital. Russia's self-proclaimed 'turn to the East' is intended to alleviate the sanctions burden and buy valuable time to come up with long-term solutions; but it has come at a high cost. 

In this discussion, Maria Shagina will examine the ways in which Asian states have helped mitigate the impact of Western sanctions and the pitfalls associated with it, while assessing the implications of Russia's pivot to Asia on its import substitution policy, and the effectiveness of sanctions overall.