Investing the ASEAN Way

Using a sociology-led approach, this book explores regional law and governance in ASEAN through its regulation of foreign investment.

This book offers scholars, practitioners, and policymakers a new way of understanding and evaluating the creation of rules on foreign investment in ASEAN. It goes beyond legal text and uses sociological theories to trace the development of a regime on foreign investment within ASEAN.In recent decades, South East Asia has become one of the world's most popular destinations for foreign investment. The member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have employed varying modalities to pursue first security and then economic cooperation. This book explores regional law and governance in ASEAN through the lens of its regulation of foreign investment. It adopts a new framework to identify the unique ontological autonomy of the ASEAN Investment Regime beyond a simple aggregation of its individual member states. It deploys a sociology-led approach (especially constructivism) and emphasizes ideational factors (such as culture and norms) that guide state actions from within. The book explores the manner in which ASEAN's history and culture have fundamentally shaped its foreign investment policies, leading to outcomes that often depart fundamentally from the external structure and script of Global Investment Law.