The Maritime Security Environment in East Asia: The Need for Strengthening Maritime Regimes, Greater Cooperation, and Dialogues

Abstract

As East Asia shifts its focus to the maritime domain, existing regional maritime institutions, cooperation, and dialogues are insufficient and must be revamped to meet numerous traditional and non-traditional security challenges. This chapter emphasizes the need to build confidence in East Asia, mapping out maritime confidence-building measures (MCBMs), arguing for maritime cooperation through various means. It further examines the creation of multilateral maritime regimes such as dialogues and/or MCBMs. The principal argument of the chapter is that there is a severe shortage of maritime regimes, cooperation, and dialogues in East Asia and hence a lot more needs to be done in order to ameliorate the maritime security challenges in both the traditional and non-traditional sectors.