Indonesia’s cooperation in maritime security initiatives is vitally important because half of the world’s trading goods and oil pass through Indonesian waters including the Straits of Malacca, the Strait of Sunda and the Strait of Lombok. Consequently, Indonesia’s active engagement in maritime cooperation is a matter of some import for the international community. However, Indonesia’s varying participation across maritime cooperation arrangements is puzzling. Indonesia has joined some of these cooperation initiatives and opted out of others despite the presence of United States leadership. This thesis addresses this puzzle by carrying out a comparative analysis of 26 cooperation arrangements using government documents and elite interviews in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and New York. In addition to addressing an empirical puzzle, this thesis also contributes to the theoretical debate on international cooperation. The International Relations literature on cooperation tends to focus on great power bargaining. Whether, why and how middle powers decide to join international initiatives over which they have little influence has been overlooked. The implication of this study suggests that neither the calculation of relative gains as argued by neorealists, the constructivist expectation regarding the importance of shared identity, the neorealist or the neoliberal argument on the role of hegemonic leadership nor the bureaucratic politics approach emphasis on competing government actors’ preferences can explain the variation in Indonesia’s engagement with cooperation initiatives. I argue that Indonesia’s decision to cooperate is formed by the calculation of absolute gains. Indonesia cooperated as long as the benefits of cooperation exceeded the costs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:616467 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Febrica, Senia |
| Publisher | University of Glasgow |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5429/ |
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