Security and Identity Converge? How Asian regional security is constructed?
During the last couple of years, the discourses of security and insecurity, the rhetoric of
securitization/de-securitization processes and the role of threat assessments in the
construction of the self and the other have become some of the central tenets in International
Ironically, security is now even viewed as an ambiguous concept by IR scholars.
This ambiguity comes directly from the nature of this concept. On the one hand – as Arendth
points out – security is a prerequisite of any meaningful political action.
security also denotes a situation which is the immediate result of this rational political
practice. However, the situation created by the security act usually indicates stable insecurity,
in the form of both deterrence and balancing, as was the case during the Cold war years, or
via hegemony, which is assumed by hegemonic stability scholars to be the prevailing norm
today.
Today’s global security environment, however, seems far removed from the stability under
hegemony/deterrence provided by MAD capabilities; the fragile relationship between
stability and insecurity/security has been broken since the end of the Cold War. This indicates
that the soft meaning of security (the feeling of being secure under the insecurities – under the
threat of traditional military challenges)
has withered. Accordingly, global actors of
international politics have adopted new security strategies recognizing not only the
disappearance of the soft meaning of security, but also the emergence of new ‘soft’
challenges, such as economic inequalities and crises, ethnic and political unrests, social
upheavals related to illegal migration, human smuggling, rising xenophobia and anti-
integrationists policies and terrorism. As a result, the scope of the security understanding has
broadened and deepened in order to cover these new soft challenges as well as to find a new
soft meaning for security. This search actually highlights a space for new political and
strategic praxis, such as regional (security) community building etc. Identity is one of the key
concepts in this new search.
Indeed, since the 1980s, “identity” as a key concept of constructivist vision has been part of
the debate regarding the definition of security.
However, within the vernacular security
approach, the identity-security nexus is apparently used in the dual practice of “community
making” and “scale making”.
This dual practice reveals that the political actor is
simultaneously exposed under different kinds of strategic uncertainties on different scales (on
the global, national or regional level), and is thus prone to reconstructing different collective
1
Page 1 of 9 
Convention