Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint in the ASEAN Community

ASEAN community has recently experienced rapid economic, social and cultural changes resulting in emerging concerned issues to be handled in the past decades. In order to do this, researches in humanities and social sciences for knowledge and capacity building have been recently fostered and conducted. The primary focus of this paper is to explore the conditions fostering and strengthening research and integration in the areas of humanities and social sciences in ASEAN community. What are the factors influencing development of research in humanities and social sciences in ASEAN community? As shown in the official blueprint of ASEAN Community Blueprint, these factors are addressed in three broad areas – Socio-Cultural ASEAN Community Blueprint, ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint and ASEAN Political Community Blueprint. In this paper, the focus areas will be the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint (2009 – 2015). This paper will address the current issues, challenges and trends towards the integration of humanities and social sciences. The main points of this paper are: 1) social, cultural, (mainly cultural pluralism) factors influence the development of researches in humanities and social sciences in the ASEAN Community; 2) emerging social problems in the past decades, namely, disaster management, terrorism and more as stated in the Socio-Cultural ASEAN Community Blueprint are influential factors in humanities and social science researches; 3) two selecte