Comment: Council for Security Cooperation in Asia Pacific. (1995, 20 Marks)
The Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP) is the region’s principal track-two security network: a non-governmental process in which scholars, research institutes and officials in their private capacities discuss security issues governments are not yet ready to negotiate. It shows how a transnational actor with no money, force or legal standing can still shape an intergovernmental agenda.
Origins
- Context: the end of the Cold War left the Asia-Pacific without a multilateral security framework, unlike Europe with its CSCE. Fear of a US drawdown, China’s rise and unresolved disputes in the Korean peninsula and the South China Sea created demand for dialogue.
- Founding: strategic studies centres from ten countries met in Seoul in November 1992; CSCAP was formally established by the Kuala Lumpur Statement of 8 June 1993.
- Track-one partner: the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), launched in 1994, became the official body CSCAP was designed to feed.
Structure and working
- Member committees, national bodies of research institutes, now number 21, including China, the United States, Russia, Japan, the EU and India.
- A Steering Committee meets twice a year under two co-chairs, one from an ASEAN and one from a non-ASEAN member committee. The secretariat sits at ISIS Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.
- Study groups produce memoranda for the ARF.
- The annual CSCAP Regional Security Outlook, launched in 2007, released its twentieth edition on 23 June 2026.
Agenda
Confidence-building measures, preventive diplomacy, maritime security, non-proliferation and export controls, transnational crime, and, more recently, cyber and digital security. Many ARF concepts, such as its stages of confidence-building, preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution, were first tested in track-two forums like CSCAP.
India and CSCAP
India became an associate member in December 1994 and a full member in June 2000, with its committee housed at the Indian Council of World Affairs. Membership was an early instrument of the Look East policy (1991) and complements India’s ARF membership (1996) and its present Act East and Indo-Pacific diplomacy.
Significance
- Constructivist: Amitav Acharya (Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, 2001) reads such forums as sites of socialisation where the ASEAN Way of consultation, consensus and non-interference spreads to great powers.
- Liberal: CSCAP is an epistemic community in Peter M. Haas’s sense, using expertise to frame problems under uncertainty and building habits of dialogue.
- Low-cost exploration: positions can be floated without committing governments, and ideas that originate there are easier for states to adopt.
Limitations
- Realists see a talking shop: it has not settled the South China Sea disputes, North Korea’s nuclear programme or Myanmar’s civil war, and great-power rivalry still sets the limits.
- Limited autonomy: many member committees sit close to their governments, so “track two” often works as track one-and-a-half, and some, China’s among them, are widely seen as voicing official positions.
- Its fate is tied to the ARF, which has itself stalled at the confidence-building stage. Desmond Ball’s review of its record (2000) placed relations with officialdom at the centre of its prospects.
Conclusion
CSCAP has not produced security cooperation in a binding sense, and was never meant to. Its achievement is quieter: three decades of habit-forming dialogue that gave the region a shared vocabulary of confidence-building and preventive diplomacy. It is a good example of transnational influence through ideas, not resources, and for India a lasting channel into Asia-Pacific security thinking.