ASEAN and the Korean Peninsula: discursive incompatibility and institutional limits

This article argues that ASEAN’s limited role in the Korean peace process stems from a discursive incompatibility between the Koreas’ reunification-premised peace discourse and ASEAN’s coexistence-oriented framework. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, it conceptualizes discursive incompatibility as a causal condition and discursive incompleteness as its institutional outcome, alongside discursive minimalism and rupture. Analysing the SEANWFZ, ARF, and inter-Korean declarations, it shows how ASEAN’s security rationality produces a grammar of engagement without a syntax of commitment, generating stable incompleteness, competitive signalling, and sequencing divergence. Distinguishing stable from unstable incompleteness, it argues that institutional durability depends on discursive conditions rather than formal design. North Korea’s 2024 designation of South Korea as a ‘hostile state’ constitutes a discursive rupture that forecloses ASEAN’s managed coexistence.