Why are South China Sea disputes hard to resolve? Power ‘asymmetry’, Malaysian expert says
Chinese analysts say Beijing supports Asean’s ‘quiet diplomacy’ too, so long as sovereignty claims are resolved bilaterally
Ruhanas Harun, an international relations professor at the National Defence University of Malaysia, said that Asean member states had turned to “quiet diplomacy” to resolve their maritime disputes.
“We’d rather talk quietly and find consensus because there are issues that you cannot publicly openly tell the world,” she told a maritime symposium in China’s southern Hainan province on Wednesday. “We try to negotiate first and reconcile what the country should present to the world.”
According to Harun, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations prefer to engage in dialogue at different negotiation levels – bilateral, multilateral and even minilateral – though she did not specify which disputes the mechanism had failed to address.
As an example, Harun cited the territorial dispute between Malaysia and Indonesia over the islands of Sipadan and Ligitan. The two countries agreed to bring the matter to the International Court of Justice and secured a resolution in 2002, which went in Malaysia’s favour.