A proposition Asean must scrutinise
CHINA’S Global Security Initiative enters South-East Asian diplomacy with an appealing premise: security should be common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable. Its official concept paper refers to sovereignty, the United Nations Charter, peaceful settlement of disputes, and dialogue rather than confrontation.
For Asean, this vocabulary is not unfamiliar. The region has long preferred consultation over confrontation, institutional restraint over strategic rupture, and incremental diplomacy over hard bloc politics.
However, maritime South-East Asia cannot be governed by reassurance alone. It is governed by treaty obligations, legal entitlement and state conduct measured against the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The question is not whether Asean should engage China, because such engagement is unavoidable. China remains a permanent geographical, economic and strategic presence in the region.
The more pressing question is whether Asean can engage China without allowing a political security framework to eclipse a juridical maritime order.
A security initiative unmoored from law may refine the language of diplomacy while unsettling the substance of maritime rights.
Law as the region’s maritime keel
A rigorous analysis of Asean’s maritime future necessarily begins with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), which regulates territorial seas, exclusive economic zones, continental shelves, maritime entitlements, navigation, marine scientific research, enforcement powers, and dispute settlement.
For coastal states, particularly smaller and middle powers, Unclos is not merely ceremonial law; it is the legal framework through which maritime rights are asserted, constrained, and defended.
Asean’s own instruments affirm the same direction. The Asean Outlook on the Indo-Pacific places the grouping’s centrality, openness, transparency, inclusivity and a rules-based framework at the centre of regional cooperation. It also identifies maritime cooperation as a core priority.
The 47th Asean Summit Chairman’s Statement in 2025 reaffirmed the importance of peace, security, stability, safety, freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, while underscoring the need for the full and effective implementation of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties.
This is why the Global Security Initiative should not be judged by idioms alone. It must be tested against the legal order that already exists: Unclos, the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in South-East Asia, the 2002 Declaration, and Asean’s commitment to peaceful settlement.
Cooperation with China is welcome, but it must be nested within law, not placed above it.
China’s dual role
China’s role in Asean’s maritime future is complex. It is a dialogue partner, trading power, diplomatic interlocutor and participant in Asean-led mechanisms.
At the same time, it is a claimant in the South China Sea whose maritime conduct continues to test regional restraint.
This duality requires Asean to practise engagement without inadvertent acquiescence.
There has been movement on the diplomatic track. The 28th Asean-China Summit in October last year welcomed progress in negotiations on the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, including completion of the third reading, the renaming of the Single Draft COC Negotiating Text to the “Draft COC”, and the start of discussion on milestones and related issues.
The same statement recorded the parties’ endeavour to conclude negotiations by the Asean Post-Ministerial Conference Plus One Session with China this year.
That progress is meaningful, but it is not finality. This distinction matters. A Code that merely manages incidents without preserving maritime entitlements may reduce immediate friction while entrenching long-term ambiguity.
The arbitral award cannot be ignored
The decisive legal marker remains the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration, brought by the Philippines against China under Annex VII of Unclos.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration recorded that the case concerned historic rights, maritime entitlements, the legal status of maritime features, and alleged violations of Unclos. It also records that China adopted a position of non-acceptance and non-participation in the proceedings.
The tribunal did not decide sovereignty over every disputed feature. It did, however, address the legal limits of maritime entitlement under Unclos. Its significance is plain: maritime claims cannot be enlarged by historical assertion beyond what the Convention permits.
A regional security architecture that invokes order while bracketing binding adjudication would create an unstable dualism: law in principle, exception in practice.
For Asean, that is not a technical concern. It goes to the survival of a rules-based maritime order. Smaller and middle powers depend on law because law restrains hierarchy. If binding legal determinations are treated as disposable, maritime order becomes vulnerable to power, pressure and selective compliance.
Recent friction, legal stakes
Recent developments explain why Asean cannot indulge diplomatic vagueness. On April 30, Reuters reported Chinese naval and air combat-readiness patrols near Scarborough Shoal during Balikatan exercises involving the Philippines, the United States and other partners.
Beijing framed the patrols as sovereignty protection; Manila rejected that account as unlawful control.
Earlier in April, Reuters also reported Chinese ships and a floating barrier at the shoal’s entrance.
These incidents do not prove imminent war, but they expose a maritime order where law, narrative and power remain in contest.
A law-centred Asean course
Asean need not repudiate China’s Global Security Initiative merely because it originates from Beijing. Equally, it should not receive the initiative without scrutiny simply because it is clothed in the language of cooperation. The sounder path is disciplined engagement anchored in law.
Any future Code of Conduct must remain expressly consonant with Unclos and must not attenuate existing maritime entitlements. Asean should prioritise cooperation that builds confidence without prejudicing sovereignty, including search and rescue, marine environmental protection, anti-piracy coordination, fisheries governance, humanitarian response, and technical exchange.
It must also guard against bilateral asymmetry being recast as regional stability.
Asean’s maritime future will not be secured by rhetorical invocations of shared destiny. It will depend on cooperation made answerable to legal obligation, dialogue that preserves entitlement, and rules that restrain power before power begins to refashion principle.
Al Hanisham Bin Mohd Khalid is a Senior Lecturer at School of Law, University Utara Malaysia. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
The SEARCH Scholar Series is a social responsibility programme jointly organised by the South-East Asia Research Centre for Humanities (SEARCH) and Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology (TAR UMT).
