China has long claimed the ownership of a network of widely-scattered islands and their surrounding waters and resources in the South China Sea. These claims overlap in a substantial way with those of at least three ASEAN countries: Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. To this day, the South...

Progress on regional cooperation in Southeast Asia is often punctuated by decades rather than years. The exposure of the wider Asia-Pacific to natural hazards renders it the world’s most disaster prone. Since the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004, there have been three significant...