Reconstructing Strategic Legal Autonomy in Southeast Asia: International Law amid Great Power Competition
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Abstract
This article aims to reconstruct the concept of strategic legal autonomy from the perspective of international law and formulate a normative framework applicable to Southeast Asian states amid intensifying great-power competition. The legal dimension of strategic autonomy remains insufficiently conceptualized because existing studies predominantly emphasize diplomatic flexibility, strategic hedging, and foreign-policy choices. This study employs normative/doctrinal legal research using conceptual, treaty-based, comparative, and case approaches. It examines international and regional legal instruments, selected judicial decisions, and scholarly literature concerning sovereignty, sovereign equality, international legal commitments, institutional participation, and strategic autonomy. The findings demonstrate that international law performs a dual function: it constrains state action through binding obligations while simultaneously providing legal rights, principles, procedures, and institutions that can preserve national and regional policy space. Accordingly, this article proposes a Strategic Legal Autonomy Framework comprising four interrelated dimensions: normative autonomy, regulatory autonomy, institutional autonomy, and strategic legal choice. These dimensions explain how Southeast Asian states can maintain meaningful legal agency despite asymmetric power relations and external pressures. The study concludes that strategic legal autonomy should not be understood as legal isolation, neutrality, or freedom from international obligations. Instead, it constitutes the capacity of Southeast Asian states to preserve their legal and policy choices while remaining actively engaged in international legal and institutional regimes. The proposed framework provides a legally grounded perspective for understanding how strategic autonomy can be maintained within, rather than outside, the international legal order.
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