Bridging the Divide: Security and Development Capacity‐Building in Southeast Asia
August 12, 2011
Introduction
Thirty years of globalization has brought widespread economic growth to Southeast Asia. For example, both the Philippines and Viet Nam have taken great strides to reduce poverty rates and burgeoning export oriented growth has enhanced foreign trade.[1] Today, the Strait of Malacca, a pivotal regional waterway wedged between the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, and Malaysia, facilitates the flow of about 30 percent of world products each year.[2]
Although these trends have contributed favorably to the greatest flight from poverty that the region has ever experienced, it has also been accompanied by a darker side of globalization, which today threatens to undercut the remarkable gains of the past quarter century. Piracy, human slavery, the growth of counterfeit products, the illicit trafficking in drugs and small arms, and even the proliferation of technologies of mass destruction not only threaten those most vulnerable, together they conspire to threaten international economic stability by weakening legitimate state structures, suborning democratic governments, and disrupting the licit flow of goods upon which our economies have come to depend.
As Southeast Asian countries attempt to ease the negative effects of these issues in their own communities and between neighboring states, resources that can comprehensively cover all of these concerns become more limited. Thus, there is a critical need for international, regional, national, and private sector actors to find innovative ways that recognizes the relationship between security challenges and development needs, and to subsequently adopt innovative programs addressing both areas in the most cost-effective way. By exploiting the synergies that exist between security threats and development needs, governments and private industry have the capacity to do well by doing good, directly promoting international security while reinforcing the global system upon which the economic benefits of globalization are derived.
[1] "The Millennium Development Goals: Progress in Asia and the Pacific 2007," Asia-Pacific MDG Study Series, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, October 2007, http://www.adb.org/documents/Reports/mdg-update-2007/mdg-update-2007.pdf
[2] Nazery Khalid, "With a Little Help from My Friends: Maritime Capacity-building Measures in the Straits of Malacca," Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2009:427
