Enacting the Security Community: ASEAN’s Never-Ending Story by Stéphanie Martel provides a poststructural, discourse-focused rendition of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN’s) community-building project. Its core argument is that the textual discourses that ASEAN elites and nonstate actors engaging in this community-building project employ are polysemic, omnidirectional, and contested. That is, the discourses highlight different elements (types of threats, different referent objects) of what the community is concerned with depending on the audience (intra-ASEAN states, extraregional Asia-Pacific states, nonstate actors). As such, the discourses are not linear in building a community step-by-step, but rather are disjointed and incoherent, and consequently they are incongruous, leading to persistent contestation. It is precisely this multiplicity of discourses, revealing contested meanings, that makes plotting a road map for ASEAN’s successful conclusion of its project meaningless. It is a never-ending story because ASEAN’s project has no end; indeed, given the attempts to fasten ASEAN’s explicit reference to community in the early 2000s to its origins in the late 1960s, it arguably has no uncontested beginning.

Whereas most accounts of ASEAN as a security community focus on the core criteria for security communities—that their membership enjoys dependable expectations of peaceful change thus making war inconceivable within the community—and then deliberating whether ASEAN’s community-building project contains the means to achieve this ambition, Martel’s account has a different objective. The never-ending story reveals that the discourse of making a security community for the ASEAN member states, for the wider Asia-Pacific, and for the people of Southeast Asia requires different understandings of what constitutes security, and this has two implications. First, because these understandings are treated separately they can be incompatible, hence the process being “messy.” Second, and more implied, is the argument that security is unattainable. No matter how close one gets to being secure, there is always insecurity present. The final creation of a security governance framework that produces true security is thus always in the making.

There is much to like in this book. Given the focus on discourse, I particularly appreciate the literary references to storytelling that structure the book. The literature review is a “cautionary tale,” and ASEAN’s community-building ambition is a “heroic quest” bedeviled with monsters, bogeyman, dragons, sirens, and ghosts. With the focus on the multiplicity of discourses (polysemic) it would be too good an opportunity to not join in and conclude that in this there-and-back-again narrative and counternarrative—in the book it is called “to Hell and Back”—there is no one discourse that can in the darkness bind them.

Empirically, the book provides, through text and occasionally pictures, coupled to an impressive breadth of interviews, a detailed exploration of the contestation that operates within ASEAN (chap. 4), with Asia-Pacific partners (chap. 5), and with nonstate actors (chap. 6). It provides the detail to show that ASEAN is not the harmonious, face-saving, consensual association often portrayed by ASEAN. ASEAN is instead a deeply contested institution by practitioners (state and nonstate elite alike) where texts, and their meaning-in-use, is subject to persistent reinterpretations. The book alludes to, but does not examine, the prospect of ASEAN being an agonistic institution in which competing interpretations of community building co-exist and prosper, not with the goal of achieving a consensual outcome but instead giving voice to different, and potentially contradictory, understandings of what a community means in a particular context.

I would have liked the never-ending aspect of the narrative to have dealt more with why this is. The explanation provided is that the discourses have no single driver to move the project through stages—the Adler/Barnett nascent, ascendant, mature approach, for example—and given the diversity of the membership and different constituencies receiving the community message this is to be expected. We are not shown the cut and thrust of debate between the member states nor why we have different contested meanings among members. As Martel writes, “My discourse-based approach is less interested in assessing the underlying causes playing out in the background of the enactment of meaning-in-use in text and context than in looking into how it happens and to what effect” (p. 171). But do not the underlying causes frame the meaning-in-use? For instance, is this community in the making part of a never-ending story of how states are nation building and state making in a global context in which international intervention is commonplace? Whether that intervention is criticism of their domestic policies or their region is center ground for the next great superpower confrontation (the Indo-Pacific). Is the never-ending story how they try to insulate their world from these interventions? This might not be the underlying cause, but context is critical in interpreting meaning-in-use. Although Martel is reluctant to provide a specific reason, beyond the cacophony of multiple discourses lurching from one direction to another in a sea of contestation, the unachievable goal of acquiring security seems to be key. Adopting the term “security” is thus done not only to grab attention (to securitize something is to make it a matter of grave concern) but also to make it unachievable because insecurity is always present. Thus, ASEAN’s quest is deliberately never-ending to retain its importance. While Martel does more than hint at this as an explanation (see p. 178), the examination of the critical literature problematizing security is undertheorized.

For those interested in ASEAN, the book provides a compelling argument over the less than persuasive attempts to connect the community discourse of the early 2000s to earlier ASEAN documentation, particularly problematizing the conflating of comprehensive security with nontraditional security (NTS). For those interested in ASEAN’s embracing of transnational crime as a NTS problem, there is much here to show how this has been adopted and its contradictions depending on the referent object of security. I was less persuaded of the significance of the contradiction of presenting transnational crime as being both an old and new threat. This is not unique to ASEAN, but rather reflective of the argument that globalization has enabled a greater flow of licit and illicit trade, both in quantity and type. Hence its increasing prevalence in Southeast Asia as a precursor to securitization.

For those looking for a forensic examination of how discourses wax and wane as agents invoke tactics and strategies to gain traction for specific phrases and their meaning-in-use—from Janice Bially Mattern’s “Representational Force” and its tactics of terror and exile to how social movements identify grievances and translate them into claims against others—there is little here. NTS is presented as significant, as indeed it is given that ASEAN’s security community is constituted by the realization of all three pillars, but the focus is on how it is used differently in different contexts and the inconsistency this creates.

Finally, the book is not about whether ASEAN is a security community. Martel is explicit, “the security community, as any social fact, is not presumed here to have any objective ‘existence’ outside of social agents talking and acting as if it exists. The security community, in other words, is very much what social agents who are involved in its construction say it is, from various positions of discursive authority” (p. 15). This may sit uneasily with some. First, a world in which an invasion of Ukraine can be called a special military operation, and territory can become Russian, just because that is what Putin the protagonist says it is, reminds us that agency is part of the intellectual enquiry because we do not accept that things are what people in positions of discursive authority say they are. Second, security communities are special in international relations; they are safe havens in which members enjoy dependable expectations that change in their community is peaceful. In an anarchic world, that is something to cherish. To conclude that ASEAN’s security community can be whatever its protagonists say it is (p. 178) means losing sight of this criterion.

Of course, Martel’s focus on discourse shifts the questions usually addressed in the literature on ASEAN as a security community from whether it is one or on the path to becoming one, to how ASEAN uses the language of security community making and the inconsistencies in this discourse. This is what I appreciate the most about the book, and why this is such an important contribution to the literature. The value in using the term “security” is that it makes the community unachievable. ASEAN will always matter because it seeks an unattainable goal (hence why ASEAN documents are “aspirational”; note the example of a drug-free ASEAN [p. 85]) and its main goal is not to achieve a security community of dependable expectations of peaceful change. Its goal instead is to be seen as important—to dragons and sirens alike—and nothing is more important than being a source of security.