The contested meaning-making of diplomatic norms: competence in practice in Southeast Asian multilateralism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The supposedly fixed set of norms within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), commonly referred to as the “ASEAN way,” is both celebrated and maligned as a key element of Southeast Asian diplomacy. In this article, we contest this orthodoxy through a practitioner-near account of ASEAN diplomatic norms in practice. We find that the “ASEAN way” is best understood as a rhetorical commonplace, a well-established topological resource that social agents use to advance and contest claims of competent diplomatic practice in the ASEAN community of practice. We build on and bridge insights from norm contestation, practice theory, and discourse literatures to develop an original framework for the study of contestation in communities of practice. Drawing from documentary evidence and 61 interviews with practitioners of ASEAN diplomacy, we illustrate our argument by examining contestation in practice in the context of the organization’s response to the Rohingya crisis and the South China Sea disputes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".