ASEAN’s constructed dichotomies: the ongoing need for complexity-sensitive research agendas

How best to assess ASEAN as a collective enterprise are longstanding. Producing often polar assessments of the organization and its activities, the question has been a recurrent one in the scholarship on ASEAN and any retrospective on the organization. Stubbs’ (2019 Stubbs, R. (2019). ASEAN sceptics versus ASEAN proponents: Evaluating regional institutions. The Pacific Review , 1. online 21 May 2019. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/09512748.2019.1611627 [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) article does not resolve the question, but it does offer ways to make sense of the debate. It also identifies ways forward with its identification of analytic criteria by which ASEAN’s performance as an international organization has been assessed. How well his two-camp categorization of the literature captures the state of play, however, can be debated. It is also not without potential costs.