ASEAN's Engagement of Civil Society: Regulating Dissent. By Kelly Gerard. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hardback: 196pp. As ASEAN moves towards goal of an ASEAN Community by 2015, civil society engagement has become more important for organization, along with need to mobilize mass support to legitimate its initiatives. This has resulted in promotion of idea of a people-oriented ASEAN. Yet civil society remains skeptical of this idea and has called on ASEAN to transform itself into an organization that puts interests of Southeast Asians at heart of its decision-making processes. This tension has attracted attention of some scholars, though there has been no critical study examining unhappy marriage between ASEAN and civil society. Kelly Gerard's admirable book represents an attempt to fill this gap. The book explores why ASEAN's policy on civil society participation in its decision-making process has taken place and how ASEAN engages Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). More importantly, it is also an effort to provide an explanation of how underlying social conflicts have shaped boundaries of civil society participation in governance institutions, determined which CSOs contribute to policy-making and nature of their participation. The main strength of ASEAN's Engagement of Civil Society is author's theoretical framework which skillfully frames her analysis throughout book. The author deploys critical political economy to reveal how nature of civil society engagement with ASEAN has been shaped in context of larger conflicts over power and its distribution, and dominated by specific interests and alliances that have changed over time. More precisely, author employs political economy framework of Jayasuriya and Rodan (see Kanishka Jayasuriya and Garry Rodan, Beyond Hybrid Regime: More Participation, Less Contestation in Southeast Asia, Democratization 14, no. 5 (December 2007): 773-94, where modes of participation serve as unit of analysis. In this view, institutional structures and ideologies have important roles to play in determining inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups in political process. In other words, this approach addresses the question of who is represented, what forms of participation are deemed permissible, as well as what struggles have occurred to establish political spaces and whose interests are furthered by their creation. At same time, these modes of participation are employed to regulate conflicts by choosing which conflicts can be mediated or marginalized. Indeed, Gerard's book is an important resource for civil society activists, due to fact that it is very difficult to bring up sensitive issues such as human rights and fair trade within ASEAN because of their positioning beyond mainstream perspectives. …