Security Studies (2009).

Abstract: The Asian “supercomplex ” has taken shape: this is evident within the crossmembership model to Asian intergovernmental organizations and through the appearance of political counterweights to China, particularly in India. The United States ’ engagements in East and South Asia are also part of this supercomplex. The hardening of Beijing since 2008 has helped maintain US influence in Asia, despite Washington’s decline on the international stage. Almost one decade ago Ole Wæver and I wrote Regions and Powers (RaP). Its core concept was the regional security complex (RSC), defined as a set of units whose major processes of securitization, desecuritization, or both are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed or resolved apart from one another. Securitization is understood as the discursive process through which an understanding is constructed within a political community to treat something as an existential threat, and to enable a call for urgent and exceptional measures to deal with the threat. At the time we treated East Asia and South Asia as separate RSCs with distinct histories and dynamics. We saw Southeast and Northeast Asia as having merged during the 1990s to make a singl