East Asian (security) intellectual networks: their emergence, significance and contribution to regional security (the ASEAN-ISIS and its Japanese counterparts as a case study)

This project aims at illuminating that agents’ ideas/perceptions on their (social)surrounding affect their deliberative actions to improve their regional security. The engaging/networking agents’ main attempt is to enlarge the scope of traditional security to accommodate more comprehensive aspects by using regional economic concerns as a spearhead before extending to other fields. Familiarity and socialising process through conferences and workshops are both positive outcomes and structure for agents’ ideas/perceptions on engaging/networking activities. Yet, agents’(socially) collective identity has not commonly perceived as expected by a set-up framework. This project is conducted in a circular style which is open for revising a set-up framework employed here for narrating the results in a chronological fashion. The framework is constructed from related concepts and theories. Main concepts are ‘active agents’, ‘intellectuals’, and ‘networks’. Main sources of theories are drawn mainly from constructivism, epistemic community, advocacy coalition framework, and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action (TCA). The TCA provides a useful path to fill in the gap left by the earlier theories whose concerns are grounded on agents’ outward-looking aspects of cooperation. Trust is a presupposition from all theories. Although there is a trend towards it, the research result can not apparently express it