Designing Resilience: Middle Power Institutional Adaptation and the Politics of Minilateralism in the Indo–Pacific

This article examines how Indo–Pacific middle powers employ institutional design to navigate great-power rivalry, manage asymmetric dependence, and sustain limited but meaningful forms of regional order amid fragmentation and uncertainty. Rather than treating middle powers as autonomous order-builders, the article defines them as states with sufficient material, diplomatic, and institutional capacity to shape outcomes, but without the structural power to determine regional order independently. Drawing on the framework of strategic institutional innovation, the article argues that middle powers do not supplant great powers as primary architects of order. Instead, under specific conditions, they function as adaptive institutional brokers whose initiatives are tolerated, accommodated, or incorporated by major powers. Their contributions to minilateral arrangements such as the CPTPP, AUKUS, DEPA, and the Quad sustain functional cooperation, reduce governance gaps, and expand bounded yet consequential institutional space. Although these initiatives do not resolve fragmentation, or displace great powers as the primary architects of order, they show that regional resilience can be institutionally cultivated efforts to preserve cooperative frameworks, sustain functional stability, and secure selective accommodation amid persistent strategic uncertainty.