Sovereignty scripts and regional governance: ASEAN’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article seeks to advance our understanding of the role of sovereignty for regional governance, with a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). We argue that important insights into this issue can be gleaned by analyzing how ASEAN has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. Most existing research on ASEAN considers sovereignty an obstacle to effective regional governance without further interrogating it conceptually. Such a monolithic understanding fails to account for ASEAN’s variegated response to the pandemic. To develop a fuller account of the relation between sovereignty and regional governance, we engage with scholarship on sovereignty that emphasizes its performative and contextual character, and develop a framework that distinguishes four different sovereignty scripts. Drawing on expert interviews and document analysis, we show that ASEAN’s multifaceted Covid-19 response is a result of member states’ parallel enactment of diverging and overlapping sovereignty scripts, which engender competing modes of governance. Our study shows that typical governance problems – institutional proliferation and incoherence as well as implementation gaps – can be understood as emerging from diverging imperatives for practicing sovereignty and statehood. We suggest that our framework can be tested in other policy fields and regional organizations beyond ASEAN.