THE LOGIC OF THE WEAK IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

International Relations (IR), as an academic discipline, has been dominated by a concern with the politics and interests of the Great Powers. There seems to be tacit consensus in the discipline that weaker and smaller states are irrelevant or not worthy of serious study. As a result, the discipline has been an experiment for presenting the “logic of the strong” in international affairs, while mostly neglecting or ignoring the “logic of the weak.” This book aims to correct the aforementioned tendency which is academically unbalanced and practically immoral. The author’s longstanding doubts of, and natural resistance to this conventional wisdom provided the impetus for writing this book. By using ASEAN’s external relations with major powers in the Asia-Pacific as an empirical analytical case, the book is to prove that the “logic of the weak” works in international relations and that they should be granted a commensurate attention.