Written from the perspective of critical theory, ASEAN as an International Organization: International Law and Region-Building in Southeast Asia analyzes the transformation of ASEAN into an international legal entity. The book presents a critical survey of recent legal scholarship and calls for an interdisciplinary study of ASEAN. It explores the concept of “people” and provides a people’s reading of the ASEAN Charter. It describes ASEAN as a wayang kulit of Member States and critiques the constitutional, extra-constitutional, and practical fetters of the international organization. Finally, it demystifies the fictions of community in ASEAN discourses and interrogates ASEAN’s project of subject-formation. The book cuts across the boundaries of international law, politics, and culture. Written in lucid prose, it will be an invigorating reading for lawyers, academics, and students of law and ASEAN.

To contemplate ASEAN as a regional organization is to imagine a future where there is not a monolithic ASEAN identity but a proliferation of Aseaness. It is one that seeks compatibility in difference by cutting across borders, ideologies, and politico-economic systems. ASEAN as an International Organization is the first attempt to capture Aseaness as an inclusive identity.
—Melissa Loja, PhD
Author, International Agreements of Non-State Actors as a Source of International Law
(Hart-Bloomsbury, 2022)

José Duke Bagulaya’s ASEAN as an International Organization reflects on the “fictions” of community that the ASEAN Charter imagines for the peoples of the region. He critiques international law-making in the region for being statist and economistic, in need of a more expansive and critical imagination. This book opens our political imagination by exploring the notion of “the people” in international law.
—Romel Regalado Bagares
Professorial Lecturer in International Law, Lyceum of the Philippines University
Trustee, Philippine Society of International Law