Analysis as ontology : reconstituting ASEAN scholarship

Abstract

Writing political analysis is an ontological act: such analysis is intrinsically related to politics - by the nature of analysis as a form of historical agency. This realization is mostly lacking in the field of International Relations and in the analysis of ASEAN politics, informed by the discipline at-large. It results in analysis, presuming itself autonomous from history, imposing its own ontologically arbitrary standards on political reality, thus making itself irrelevant to the unfolding of politics. By proposing a conceptualization of politics rooted in the holistic Hegelian understanding of sociality as the being of all of history, this work argues, first, that the analysis of ASEAN politics can be intrinsically relevant to the political practice if it is sufficiently aware of its inextricable ontological connection with this practice, and, second, by incorporating this awareness into its substance, analysis can take its place as an essential agent in the sociality of ASEAN - a place granted to it by the ontology of history.