If ASEAN is to take the lead on climate, it must break a paradox not through compromise but through change. By Mehmet Enes Beşer There is a stunning paradox at the core of the Southeast Asian model of development, a paradox more desperate with each climate summit, energy crisis, and investment diversion. The ASEAN bloc has subscribed formally to world ...
Needed summit outcome so that the chair’s slogan—Inclusivity and Sustainability—will be more than a theme. By Mehmet Enes Beşer The year has conspired to make ASEAN’s end-October Leaders’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur unusually consequential. Malaysia, chairing under the banner of “Inclusivity and Sustainability,” must navigate a denser-than-usual thicket: renewed tariff salvos from Washington, the still-bleeding crisis in Myanmar, the slow-moving ...
The most crucial innovations will be those which enhance ecosystems, livelihoods, and peoples on the gray fringes of urban life. By Mehmet Enes Beşer Southeast Asian urbanization is a demographic tendency—it is additionally a political, economic, and ecological milestone. As urban masses swell with countryside-to-city migration, increased incomes, and urban infrastructure expansion, the region grapples with a query squarely at ...
ASEAN can establish a “Green Coastal Shipping Corridor” project. By Mehmet Enes Beşer Short-sea shipping has been the backbone of maritime Southeast Asia for centuries. From Singapore and Manila ports to Indonesia’s sea lines of the archipelago and the inland water transport network of the Mekong Delta, short-sea shipping is an economic driver and a logistics imperative. Yet even as ...
Charting a New Course in a Polarized World By Mehmet Enes Beşer The promise of a “New Malaysia” first captured global attention in 2018, when a surprise electoral upset ended sixty-two unbroken years of Barisan Nasional coalition government. Pakatan Harapan coalition win—and return to politics of veteran politician Mahathir Mohamad—was welcomed as a democratic victory, a harbinger that Malaysia was ...
For ASEAN, the question is not whether to participate or not in global finance and trade—it does so already. The question is how to use that role for people and planet’s benefit, and not just profits. By Mehmet Enes Beşer ASEAN’s transformation into one of the globe’s most dynamic economic blocks has been spurred as much by domestic reform as ...
From Landfills to Living Labs By Mehmet Enes Beşer While nearly 110 million people worldwide remain undernourished, and more than 30% of all food produced is lost or wasted, the irony of food deficiency as well as over-consumption in ASEAN is both an ethical and a strategic issue. Not only is food loss a terms-of-art contradiction of fundamental equity—it’s also ...
Fueling Transition or Feeding Controversy? By Mehmet Enes Beşer As ASEAN countries race along their pursuit of cleaner, diversified energy systems, biofuels are a politically appealing, domestically sourced answer to rampant fossil fuel prices and greenhouse gas emissions. From Indonesia’s massive palm oil plantations to Thailand’s cassava fields that churn out ethanol, the region is blessed with biomass resources theoretically ...
The future depends on commitments. By Mehmet Enes Beşer Southeast Asia stands at the intersection of two compelling forces: the world’s rapidly accelerating demand for strategic minerals and increasingly integrated regional economies through trade agreements. Bauxite and nickel, copper and rare earth elements – ASEAN’s mineral resources are more strategically valuable than ever before. As the world shifts to low-carbon ...
The Strategic Case for Engaging Kazakhstan By Meymet Enes Beşer In the wake of the changing framework of international geopolitics and economic restructuring, the physical space between Central Asia and Southeast Asia—hitherto geographically circumscribed—is narrowing extremely quickly. As Central Asia’s economic and transport center, Kazakhstan is a strategically crucial gateway into the heartland of Eurasia. To ASEAN, to which decades ...