Non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia: "civil society" or "civil service"?: An article from: Contemporary Southeast Asia

This digital document is an article from Contemporary Southeast Asia, published by Thomson Gale on December 1, 2005. The length of the article is 7342 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: Non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia has been viewed by some as emblematic of a growing and thriving civil society throughout the region, but by others as a sort of shadow "civil service" in support of regional governments and their policies. A closer reading of non-official diplomacy proffers a more complex picture that calls into question the supposed coherence of that distinction. This article traces the evolution of this diplomatic form in Southeast Asia in the post-Cold War era, paying close attention to its processes. More specifically, it seeks to unpack the practices in which regional non-official diplomatic agents engage that make them not only civil society participants who potentially if only inadvertently challenge extant conventions of interstate diplomacy based on raison d'etat, but by the same token "civil servants" (or statesmen) who promote and protect state interests, and, in so doing, paradoxically reconstitute those very conventions.

Citation Details
Title: Non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia: "civil society" or "civil service"?
Author: See Seng Tan
Publication:Contemporary Southeast Asia (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 27 Issue: 3 Page: 370(18)

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