ASEAN’s crisis management architecture is drawn up. Now to add the plumbing

In the first half of 2025, ship robberies in the Singapore Strait reached the highest rate in over a decade (Opens in new window). The response that reversed the trend didn’t come from a ministerial meeting or new regional agreement. Video footage shared through the Information Fusion Centre (IFC) (Opens in new window) reached Indonesian authorities. Riau Islands police then arrested a gang operating from Pulau Cula in the Philip Channel. For months afterward, the channel was quiet.

Trust, built through years of operational interaction, moved information across a boundary that formal mechanisms alone could not.

ASEAN’s crisis architecture is not missing institutions. It is missing the coordination infrastructure that makes institutions function under pressure.

After every major maritime incident, the region produces another framework, centre, or set of principles. The AHA Centre (Opens in new window), ASEAN-ERAT, the ASEAN Militaries Ready Group, the Malacca Straits Patrol, ReCAAP (Opens in new window), and the IFC (Opens in new window) – the organisational chart is now impressively dense.

Yet the same coordination failures recur.

The problem is best understood as the difference between architecture and plumbing. Architecture is visible: summits, agreements, and organisational charts. Plumbing is less visible: the channels through which information, authority, and decisions actually move across institutions and borders during a crisis. Southeast Asia has invested heavily in the former. The latter remains underdeveloped.

The three mechanisms most commonly cited as ASEAN’s crisis response backbone all encounter the same limitation: the handoff between coordination and authority.

The AHA Centre (Opens in new window) can coordinate but cannot command. ASEAN-ERAT (Opens in new window) can assess needs but was not designed to sustain large-scale operational responses. The ASEAN Militaries Ready Group (Opens in new window) can assemble capabilities, but lacks unified command authority. Military assets remain under national authority.

These are design constraints, not resourcing failures – baked into the original architecture at inception. More funding, more personnel or more exercises will not close a structural authority gap.

ASEAN’s coordination failures are routinely attributed to a lack of political will. A more useful framing is incentives. Member states are balancing domestic constraints, sovereignty sensitivities, economic dependencies, and relationships with external powers. Fragmentation is not insufficient resolve. It is the predictable outcome of rational actors responding to different incentives.

The distinction matters because the remedies differ. A will problem is solved by leadership. An incentive problem is solved by changing the costs of participation – making non-coordination more expensive, or collective action less threatening. ASEAN has attempted the former repeatedly. It has barely attempted the latter.

The pattern (Opens in new window) confirms it – coordination holds when crises are uncontested but fractures when sovereignty, great-power relationships, or attribution enter the frame.

ASEAN is often criticised for failing to do what it was never designed to do.

ASEAN was not created to command regional crisis response. The more useful question is whether it can provide sufficient coordination infrastructure for member states, minilateral arrangements (Opens in new window), and external partners to act coherently. That is a role ASEAN can perform.

Its legitimacy remains an underappreciated asset. A coalition of countries acting within an ASEAN framework is less likely to be read as a violation of sovereignty or part of a geopolitical alignment than the same coalition acting alone. An 80% solution among willing partners is often more achievable than a consensus that never arrives.

Three priorities follow.

First, invest in networks, not new institutions. The region does not need another centre. It needs sustained professional exchanges, repeated interaction, and practical cooperation that builds trust before a crisis occurs. The Philip Channel response demonstrated how accumulated practitioner trust enables existing institutions to function effectively under pressure.

Second, exercise decision-making as much as operations. Regional exercises often focus on interoperability and asset deployment. Fewer stress-tests who calls whom, under what authority, and through which channels when political pressure compresses decision timelines. That is where real coordination fails, and what exercises should practise.

Third, explore whether ASEAN’s existing flexibility mechanisms (Opens in new window), sometimes described as “ASEAN Minus X”, can be adapted in crisis contexts, and under what conditions it would strengthen rather than fragment regional coordination.

Maritime Southeast Asia has spent two decades improving awareness and building institutions. The institutional architecture is now dense. The bottleneck is not detection. It is the handoff between detection, authority, and action – where information loses momentum, responsibility diffuses, and the tempo of crisis outpaces the speed of consensus.

Crises are not managed by institutions alone. They are managed through networks of trust, authority, and information built long before they are needed.

Trust cannot be surged in a crisis. It must be built in peace.

This article is part of a series on ASEAN’s crisis coordination and response mechanisms following a private workshop hosted by the Lowy Institute in June 2026. The project was jointly led by Abdul Rahman Yaacob and Hunter Marston, Director of the Lowy Institute's Southeast Asia Program, with the support of the Department of Defence's Strategic Policy Grants Program.