Why, When, and How Do Weaker States Hedge? Explaining Southeast Asia’s Responses to China’s Rise

Tuesday, March 31, 2015
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)

Philippines Conference Room

Encina Hall 3rd Floor Central

616 Serra Street,

Stanford, CA 94305

Speaker: 
  • Cheng-Chwee Kuik

Increasingly in scholarly descriptions of state responses to power ascendancy, the classic distinction between “balancing” and “bandwagoning” has been superseded by the less dichotomous term “hedging” as a name for what is really going on. Few, however, have tried to clarify what distinguishes hedging from other strategies, what causes weaker states to hedge, and why they hedge in different ways.

Prof. Kuik will focus on Southeast Asian states’ responses to China.  Hedging occurs, he will argue, when one country pursues contradictory policies toward two or more competing powers in order to prepare a fallback position should circumstances change.  Hedging is likely when two conditions are present:  when threats are neither immediate nor straightforward, and when sources of vital support are uncertain.  At the domestic level, hedging is often the most viable approach because its contradictory attributes allow ruling elites to optimize multiple policy tradeoffs and thereby to enhance their legitimacy at home.  The hedging behaviors of ruling elites are a function of their respective strategies of legitimation.  

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Cheng-Chwee Kuik is a co-convener of the East Asia and International Relations Forum at the National University of Malaysia and an associate member of the Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya.  From September 2013 until July 2014, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University.  His writings in English and Chinese have appeared in The Asan Forum (2014), Asian Security (2013), the Chinese Journal of International Politics (2013), Asian Politics and Policy (2012), Contemporary Southeast Asia (2008 & 2005), Shijie Jingji yu Zhengzhi (2004), and various edited books.  His essay “The Essence of Hedging:  Malaysia and Singapore's Response to a Rising China” was awarded the biennial 2009 Michael Leifer Memorial Prize by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for the best article published in any of its three journals.